Look at the date, this was the previous article, if you actually read and registered the information in the 2nd article (the one that is pulled) they confirmed that it was the follow up to the first one which is still up (because it doesn't out right put down the CPUs)
Look at the date, this was the previous article, if you actually read and registered the information in the 2nd article (the one that is pulled) they confirmed that it was the follow up to the first one which is still up (because it doesn't out right put down the CPUs)
Yeah his contacts are more than likely lazy PC developers who don't know who to optimize for console gaming.
The 1st article is rehashing what we already heard from marketing spin gurus with a bit of technical edge....the 2nd article was more of an opinion on the performance and may have or may not have been based on a source with facts....
I tend to think it was...case I have respect for Anand tech as being a good review site....Yeah ppl can get it wron g form time to time but not at this level the console fanboys would have you believe...
They must be huddling in a corner at home with a game pad crying or something....Pick your worthless bodies up and get a life!!!
By the way I am currently working (at home, great to be a boss!!)...In between phone calls and emails.... Heck I read and type responses as I am on the phone..I am a multitasker!!!
I plan on it here shortly to play baseball with my son......
I have seen this pattern before...right as the Intel trolls (dothan and porkster) came in to fight the threads about great X2 performance and THG's problems with the XE 840 in stability test....
I know what these guys are up to....
I have seen this pattern before...right as the Intel trolls (dothan and porkster) came in to fight the threads about great X2 performance and THG's problems with the XE 840 in stability test....
I know what these guys are up to....
1. How do you know it's only twice?
2. The triple cores I believe are almost the same size as a modern intel processor, so why not just use a modern intel processor in x360?
3. I've been wondering how they would emulate xbox games when the capabilities of the xcpu in some areas are far beyond what the x360's triple core can do.
4. I believe PowerPC cpus have much higher theoretical performance than x86 cpus, yet lower real world performance, and they actually do have branch prediction of some sort.
5. The PS3 processors are called streaming processors, maybe the memory bus is fast enough to keep them busy?
BTW, Pentium M would probably be a good choice for a console(maybe the future ones, Yonah? but only nintendo has a launch time frame that could use that). I'd say athlon 64s are out due to AMD's more limited fabrication capacity, the fact that AMD doesn't want to sell low priced chips anymore, and due to the integrated memory controller...the IMC isn't quite as needed in a console(look at gamecube, gets memory latency as good as an athlon 64 with low latency pc3200, though xbox and ps2 have much higher latency) plus it would really limit what the companies could do with their systems.(it would force them to use a PC architecture almost exactly)
Oh, and sort of off topic, but does anyone know why the Ps2 was able to have a 2Mbit memory bus and PCs only have a 128bit memory bus still? And videos cards only like 256bit?
blckgrffn
Diamond Member
Perhaps because all of them sux big time AND expensive AND consumes a lot?
The worst possible choice today is an Intel (except P-M for mobile).
This sounds pretty funny, don't you think? I'd say no.
WE're talking about the next 4-5 years console...
Originally posted by: hasanahmad
Originally posted by: Stoneburner
article is back up
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2453
Think before you bark child.
thats not even the same article bozo
But it still sates basically the same
"Remember that consoles must have a lifespan of around 5 years, so even if the multithreaded transition isn?t going to happen with games for another 2 years, it is necessary for these consoles to be built around multi-core processors to support the ecosystem when that transition occurs. , (By that time the PC CPUs will be even more powerfull and GPUs will be much more powerfull than ones from consoles)
The problem is that today, all games are single threaded, meaning that in the case of the Xbox 360, only one out of its three cores would be utilized when running present day game engines. The PlayStation 3 would fair no better, as the Cell CPU has a very similar general purpose execution core to one of the Xbox 360 cores. The reason this is a problem is because these general purpose cores that make up the Xbox 360?s Xenon CPU or the single general purpose PPE in Cell are extremely weak cores, far slower than a Pentium 4 or Athlon 64, even running at much lower clock speeds. "
On the other hand, looking at all of the early demos we?ve seen of Xbox 360 and PS3 games, not a single one appears to offer better physics or AI than the best single threaded games on the PC today. At best, we?ve seen examples of ragdoll physics similar to that of Half Life 2, but nothing that is particularly amazing, earth shattering or shocking. Definitely nothing that appears to be leveraging the power of a multicore processor.
And here is other article from arstechnica
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/xbox360-2.ars/2
The aricle agrees with AT in the fact that each core of the XBOX 360 CPU is weak due to iin-order execution to reduce complexity and transistor count. The multiple threads capability won't be used in the next 1.5 or 2 years. By that time the PC will offer even more powerfull multicore CPUs and much more powerfull GPUs.
What I meant was that the xcpu has powerful out of order execution and it's likely games take advantage of that, how is that code supposed to be emulated by an in order cpu?
And I think a G5's theoretical performance is like 50 GFlops, an athlon 64 is much lower than yet, but 90% of the time an athlon 64 will put out more flops than a G5.
biostud
Lifer
- Feb 27, 2003
- 19,509
- 6,564
- 136
This is the first page I Think
Xenon vs. Cell
The first public game demo on the PlayStation 3 was Epic Games? Unreal Engine 3 at Sony?s PS3 press conference. Tim Sweeney, the founder and UE3 father of Epic, performed the demo and helped shed some light on how multi-threading can work on the PlayStation 3.
According to Tim, a lot of things aren?t appropriate for SPE acceleration in UE3, mainly high-level game logic, artificial intelligence and scripting. But he adds that ?Fortunately these comprise a small percentage of total CPU time on a traditional single-threaded architecture, so dedicating the CPU to those tasks is appropriate, while the SPE's and GPU do their thing."
So what does Tim Sweeney see the SPEs being used for in UE3? "With UE3, our focus on SPE acceleration is on physics, animation updates, particle systems, sound; a few other areas are possible but require more experimentation."
Tim?s view on the PPE/SPE split in Cell is far more balanced than most we?ve encountered. There are many who see the SPEs as utterly useless for executing anything (we?ll get to why in a moment), while there are others who have been talking about doing far too much on SPEs where the general purpose PPE would do much better.
For the most part, the areas that UE3 uses the Cell?s SPEs for are fairly believable. For example, sound processing makes a lot of sense for the SPEs given their rather specialized architecture aimed at streaming tasks. But the one curious item is the focus on using SPEs to accelerate physics calculations, especially given how branch heavy physics calculations generally are.
Collision detection is a big part of what is commonly referred to as ?game physics.? As the name implies, collision detection simply refers to the game engine determining when two objects collide. Without collision detection, bullets would never hit your opponents and your character would be able to walk through walls, cars, etc... among other things.
One method of implementing collision detection in a game is through the use of a Binary Search Partitioning (BSP) tree. BSP trees are created by organizing lists of polygons into a binary tree. The structure of the tree itself doesn?t matter to this discussion, but the important thing to keep in mind is that to traverse a BSP tree in order to test for a collision between some object and a polygon in the tree you have to perform a lot of comparisons. You first traverse the tree finding to find the polygon you want to test for a collision against. Then you have to perform a number of checks to see whether a collision has occurred between the object you?re comparing and the polygon itself. This process involves a lot of conditional branching, code which likes to be run on a high performance OoO core with a very good branch predictor.
Unfortunately, the SPEs have no branch prediction, so BSP tree traversal will tie up an SPE for quite a bit of time while not performing very well as each branch condition has to be evaluated before execution can continue. However it is possible to structure collision detection for execution on the SPEs, but it would require a different approach to the collision detection algorithms than what would be normally implemented on a PC or Xbox 360.
We?re still working on providing examples of how it is actually done, but it?s tough getting access to detailed information at this stage given that a number of NDAs are still in place involving Cell development for the PS3. Regardless of how it is done, obviously the Epic team found the SPEs to be a good match for their physics code, if structured properly, meaning that the Cell processor isn?t just one general purpose core with 7 others that go unused.
In fact, if properly structured and coded for SPE acceleration, physics code could very well run faster on the PlayStation 3 than on the Xbox 360 thanks to the more specialized nature of the SPE hardware. Not to mention that physics acceleration is particularly parallelizable, making it a perfect match for an array of 7 SPEs.
Microsoft has referred to the Cell?s array of SPEs as a bunch of DSPs useless to game developers. The fact that the next installment of the Unreal engine will be using the Cell?s SPEs for physics, animation updates, particle systems as well as audio processing means that Microsoft?s definition is a bit off. While not all developers will follow in Epic?s footsteps, those that wish to remain competitive and get good performance out of the PS3 will have to.
The bottom line is that Sony would not foolishly spend over 75% of their CPU die budget on SPEs to use them for nothing more than fancy DSPs. Architecting a game engine around Cell and optimizing for SPE acceleration will take more effort than developing for the Xbox 360 or PC, but it can be done. The question then becomes, will developers do it?
In Johan?s Quest for More Processing Power series he looked at the developmental limitations of multi-threading, especially as they applied to games. The end result is that multi-threaded game development takes between 2 and 3 times longer than conventional single-threaded game development, to add additional time in order to restructure elements of your engine to get better performance on the PS3 isn?t going to make the transition any easier on developers.
Xenon vs. Cell
The first public game demo on the PlayStation 3 was Epic Games? Unreal Engine 3 at Sony?s PS3 press conference. Tim Sweeney, the founder and UE3 father of Epic, performed the demo and helped shed some light on how multi-threading can work on the PlayStation 3.
According to Tim, a lot of things aren?t appropriate for SPE acceleration in UE3, mainly high-level game logic, artificial intelligence and scripting. But he adds that ?Fortunately these comprise a small percentage of total CPU time on a traditional single-threaded architecture, so dedicating the CPU to those tasks is appropriate, while the SPE's and GPU do their thing."
So what does Tim Sweeney see the SPEs being used for in UE3? "With UE3, our focus on SPE acceleration is on physics, animation updates, particle systems, sound; a few other areas are possible but require more experimentation."
Tim?s view on the PPE/SPE split in Cell is far more balanced than most we?ve encountered. There are many who see the SPEs as utterly useless for executing anything (we?ll get to why in a moment), while there are others who have been talking about doing far too much on SPEs where the general purpose PPE would do much better.
For the most part, the areas that UE3 uses the Cell?s SPEs for are fairly believable. For example, sound processing makes a lot of sense for the SPEs given their rather specialized architecture aimed at streaming tasks. But the one curious item is the focus on using SPEs to accelerate physics calculations, especially given how branch heavy physics calculations generally are.
Collision detection is a big part of what is commonly referred to as ?game physics.? As the name implies, collision detection simply refers to the game engine determining when two objects collide. Without collision detection, bullets would never hit your opponents and your character would be able to walk through walls, cars, etc... among other things.
One method of implementing collision detection in a game is through the use of a Binary Search Partitioning (BSP) tree. BSP trees are created by organizing lists of polygons into a binary tree. The structure of the tree itself doesn?t matter to this discussion, but the important thing to keep in mind is that to traverse a BSP tree in order to test for a collision between some object and a polygon in the tree you have to perform a lot of comparisons. You first traverse the tree finding to find the polygon you want to test for a collision against. Then you have to perform a number of checks to see whether a collision has occurred between the object you?re comparing and the polygon itself. This process involves a lot of conditional branching, code which likes to be run on a high performance OoO core with a very good branch predictor.
Unfortunately, the SPEs have no branch prediction, so BSP tree traversal will tie up an SPE for quite a bit of time while not performing very well as each branch condition has to be evaluated before execution can continue. However it is possible to structure collision detection for execution on the SPEs, but it would require a different approach to the collision detection algorithms than what would be normally implemented on a PC or Xbox 360.
We?re still working on providing examples of how it is actually done, but it?s tough getting access to detailed information at this stage given that a number of NDAs are still in place involving Cell development for the PS3. Regardless of how it is done, obviously the Epic team found the SPEs to be a good match for their physics code, if structured properly, meaning that the Cell processor isn?t just one general purpose core with 7 others that go unused.
In fact, if properly structured and coded for SPE acceleration, physics code could very well run faster on the PlayStation 3 than on the Xbox 360 thanks to the more specialized nature of the SPE hardware. Not to mention that physics acceleration is particularly parallelizable, making it a perfect match for an array of 7 SPEs.
Microsoft has referred to the Cell?s array of SPEs as a bunch of DSPs useless to game developers. The fact that the next installment of the Unreal engine will be using the Cell?s SPEs for physics, animation updates, particle systems as well as audio processing means that Microsoft?s definition is a bit off. While not all developers will follow in Epic?s footsteps, those that wish to remain competitive and get good performance out of the PS3 will have to.
The bottom line is that Sony would not foolishly spend over 75% of their CPU die budget on SPEs to use them for nothing more than fancy DSPs. Architecting a game engine around Cell and optimizing for SPE acceleration will take more effort than developing for the Xbox 360 or PC, but it can be done. The question then becomes, will developers do it?
In Johan?s Quest for More Processing Power series he looked at the developmental limitations of multi-threading, especially as they applied to games. The end result is that multi-threaded game development takes between 2 and 3 times longer than conventional single-threaded game development, to add additional time in order to restructure elements of your engine to get better performance on the PS3 isn?t going to make the transition any easier on developers.
I dunno, I think it'd be easier to waste power than that.
Seperate thread for sound, seperate thread for physics, seperate thread for graphics related operations, seperate thread for AI, seperate thread for general game code, seperate thread for netcode. Presumebly the threads can communicate with each other, right? On the other hand, it's likely to be hard to make full use of the system's capabilities, as each thread will not require as much power as the others.
Might be an easy solution to that, do much more intensive code that completely escapes any branching. That might cancel out all the extra power you have though, but I think constantly calculating every possible thing that could happen to an object would be possible.
TRENDING THREADS
-
Discussion Zen 5 Speculation (EPYC Turin and Strix Point/Granite Ridge - Ryzen 9000)- Started by DisEnchantment
- Replies: 24K
-
Discussion Intel Meteor, Arrow, Lunar & Panther Lakes Discussion Threads
- Started by Tigerick
- Replies: 20K
-
-
-
Facebook
Twitter