IBM, Sony, and Toshiba worked together to develop STI, the architecture behind the Cell and PS3. What was really unique about the Cell was two things: it was the first dual-core processor machine, and it had 8 specialized streamlined cores as well: the SPEs (Synergistic Processing Elements).
Michael Van de Luur of Gorilla Games said in an interview [1] “Even desktop chips nowadays, the fastest Intel stuff you can buy, is not by far as powerful as the Cell CPU, but it’s very difficult to get power out of the Cell. I think it was ahead of its age, because it was a little bit more like how GPUs work nowadays, but it was maybe not balanced nicely and it was too hard to use. It overshot a little bit in power and undershot in usability, but it was definitely visionary.”
Comments
IBM, Sony, and Toshiba worked together to develop STI, the architecture behind the Cell and PS3. What was really unique about the Cell was two things: it was the first dual-core processor machine, and it had 8 specialized streamlined cores as well: the SPEs (Synergistic Processing Elements).
Michael Van de Luur of Gorilla Games said in an interview [1] “Even desktop chips nowadays, the fastest Intel stuff you can buy, is not by far as powerful as the Cell CPU, but it’s very difficult to get power out of the Cell. I think it was ahead of its age, because it was a little bit more like how GPUs work nowadays, but it was maybe not balanced nicely and it was too hard to use. It overshot a little bit in power and undershot in usability, but it was definitely visionary.”
[1] https://www.gtplanet.net/playstation-3-cell-more-powerful-mo...