Does PS3 really have hidden "cell" power?

Cell does have hidden power and when he unleashes it everyone will be shocked. But he will still be no match for Gohan. :P

Apparently it does, and I'd wish to know so. Also, I've heard John Carmack say the X-box 360 is superior, can someone quote this exactly for me. UDrake

[QUOTE="ferret-gamer"]Yes, the cell has hidden power. Once it is unlocked humanity will transcend into a higher plane of existence. Iantheone

[QUOTE="WilliamRLBaker"]

[QUOTE="monkeysmoke"] Crysis 2 on the 360 as well runs at sub HD and disgusting Framrate dont forget the pop ups, and the poor AA which is like 1XMSAA. While Killzone 3 on the the ps3 looks beter and still runs full glorious 720p HD, solid Framrate, no pop ups and fantastic MLAA which = 8XMSAA. And you think DVD is beter than Blueray? :lol: well let me let you know 360 is pulling multiplate games back from utilizing full ps3 hardware e.g MLAA on the ps3's dev kit. And guess what? Cell + Bluray allows ps3 exclusives to have ZERO load times(Killzone 3, Uncharted 2, God of War3) no install REQUIRED :D , now tell if 360 can do that :Pmonkeysmoke

Its Possible. Dual Layer blu rays have not been used for games yet.

specialzed

[QUOTE="specialzed"]

Its Possible. Dual Layer blu rays have not been used for games yet.

charizard1605

more space = petentially better game

of course not always the case but on of the factor

[QUOTE="charizard1605"][QUOTE="specialzed"]

Its Possible. Dual Layer blu rays have not been used for games yet.

r12qi

more space = petentially better game

of course not always the case but on of the factor

[QUOTE="monkeysmoke"][QUOTE="WilliamRLBaker"] so much disinformation and opinion. Tip: all ps3 exclusives that don't require an install require a comprehensive gig+ size cache on the hard drive which is why they take about a minute for the initial load time.

dotWithShoes

There is nothing hidden about it.

That is not to say that the Cell isn't better than whats in the 360 as it is, or at least it's more powerful. The architecture was detailed months and years before the PS3 was ever released, which I know because I read one of the white-papers on it, although I won't pretend I understood all of it.

The problem is that by virtue of the unconventional architecture and certain limitations of the SPEs-which is really where the benefits of the Cell BE are realized-it is more difficult to code for effectively. This is also hindered by the fact that the 360 enjoys superior GPU performance and a more flexible memory architecture (PS3 can use system memory [XDR DRAM] on the GPU, but using the XDR is too slow for many if not most purposes).

That does not mean that the PS3 is massively more powerful as it isn't. Most at this point in the know agree that the PS3 is more powerful, but the margin is small and as it isn't easy to get the best results out of it, frequently unrealized. The impressive things you've been seeing out of it from 1st parties Naughty Dog, Guerilla Games, and others has more to do with the technical excellence of the developers, the sharing of tools and expertise between Sony's 1st and 2nd party developers, and simple time. Since they're exclusive they can spend more time getting the best performance.

Microsoft has not made similar investments in its developers, at least not of late so you aren't seeing the same kind of results there.

It actually does. We aren't very good at optimizing for multiple cores yet.

as we can see the ps3 is at cell 2 transfer, it's only a matter of time until teh perfect cell

I'm pretty much positive that the "hidden power" of the Cell has been tapped by now.

Uh..Yes :|

You think the 120 fps and 4d was just pr bull?:?

[QUOTE="ferret-gamer"]Yes, the cell has hidden power. Once it is unlocked humanity will transcend into a higher plane of existence. Iantheone

[QUOTE="loosingENDS"]

It does, you need many cells though, like 100 PS3 combined, then you can have that power unlocked and PS3 can actually run Crysis 2 in true HD like xbox 360 and not sub HD and blurry

Hopefully next gen Sony wotn promote their hardware, like the not needed Blu ray and cell and provide a great GPU like 360 does, than have the customer pay for Sony hardware research and market break

monkeysmoke

Both are outdated.

Yes, in fact we have barely tapped into its amazing power. Teh cell is just waiting for a game worthy to use all of its power, and that game will be da grafix king forevah.

[QUOTE="ferret-gamer"]Yes, the cell has hidden power. Once it is unlocked humanity will transcend into a higher plane of existence. Iantheone

it definantly cant compare to an i5 or i7

The Cell is the best GPU/CPU ever created. Sony really out did themselves surpassing every gamers wildest dreams in terms of graphics and immersion. Not only was the Cell worth Sony almost going bankrupt but gaming would have not survived without it.

Signed,

Sony Marketing

"Next Gen Starts When We Say It Does"

kuu2

I was like wtf.... then I saw what you signed with.

[QUOTE="Iantheone"][QUOTE="YoYo278"]

Well the disks can hold 5x times as much data as the 360 so technically it's atleast 5x as powerful.

YoYo278

Well, I can guarantee that they dont run with bluray.

[QUOTE="ferret-gamer"][QUOTE="22kristian"]Lol who cares what John Carmack has to say, he's far from an honest voice(money talks) All you have to do is take a look at the exclusives. They speak louder then Carmack ever could and render his opinions irrelevant And what the.exclusive do tell us is that the ps3 has superior graphics22kristian

Its possible, we do not fully understand it yet. Being reversed engineered from the spacecraft crash in Nevada. Some of its untapped power might be seen in the next playstation. This being a better reproduction of the alian orginal...

[QUOTE="specialzed"]

Its Possible. Dual Layer blu rays have not been used for games yet.

xsatyr86

lol - that's the first thing I thought when I read this... that has to be a very subtle, cleverlydelivered joke...

[QUOTE="Martin_G_N"]

Uncharted 2 was first to use 100% of the Cell CPU, I don't think most games pushes it more than 60%.

ocstew

sadly many people in sw are delusional. ps3 is the same as the 360, both are now outdated hardware. the cell is not Pandora's box :roll:

[QUOTE="ocstew"][QUOTE="Martin_G_N"]

Uncharted 2 was first to use 100% of the Cell CPU, I don't think most games pushes it more than 60%.

pc-ps360

sadly many people in sw are delusional. ps3 is the same as the 360, both are now outdated hardware. the cell is not Pandora's box :roll:

Sony was full of it when they released the PS3. Uncharted games are the best thing to come from the cell, I can even live without those.

PC's use general purpose processors, so when you compare the Cell to that ofcourse it'll be slower. What differentiates the Cell from most processors is that it can render graphics on its own without a GPU at playable framerates. Try that on a general purpose CPU and it won't do it nearly as well.

That said, I don't that Cell has any 'hidden power' or is beastly like some fanboys make it out to be. But games like KZ3 and UC3 show what it can do because the PS3 has a weaker GPU compared to the 360.

anotherone10

Running Quake 3 OpenGL at playable framerates on pure software Intel Core 2 Duo P8700 CPU.

With Quake 3, using Intel Core 2 Duo P8700 as a GPU is about on par with PowerVR 535/540 Mobile GPU.

Running Crysis 1 on Intel Core 2 Duo P8700.

Both Xbox 360 Slim's XCGPU and AMD "Fusion" APUs fused CPU and GPU together.

Cell = 1 PPE and 6 (game specific) SPUs. The difference between a general purpose processor and a GPU is that the former consists of a broader instruction set and more cache space in the chip, among other differences. The GPU consists of dozens or even hundreds of mini-cores with many threads that can perform fewer instructions than a general CPU but since it's hard-wired, it's much faster than on the CPU for those few instructions that it supports (Matrix operations is one of those). GPUs also have higher bandwidth once the data is inside the chip's memory. So the CPU can do more but slower? not exactly. The CPU is better at sequential code, those programs that rely on one state before to the next. Graphics are done by drawing pixels to the screen, think of pixels as a matrix of points with color properties (shading). In this case, a GPU will do this much faster than a CPU because the GPU has hundreds of workers working on hundreds of pixels at a time whereas a CPU would do one pixel then another then another and so on, so it'd much slower. Now think of similar problems that can be solved by dividing the problem into smaller sub-tasks that can be done at the same time and you've basically found the advantage to using GPU or Cell. The 360 CPU has 6 threads however so it too has some parallel capabilities although it's not as fast as the SPUs for these specifc tasks.

Programs consits of instructions, at the most basic level it's just branching and number crunching. The Cell is not so good at branching, but it's great at number crunching. Branching is necessary (usually) for taking different paths in programs, imagine choices. When you program for the Cell you want to have a bunch of little problems that can be worked on independently of each other and at the same time, then you'll be outdoing most general purpose CPUs. Unfortunately games are complex creatures that make use of more than number crunching and due to PS3's memory hierarchy, when the parallel model breaks and the system has to fetch memory from the system and coordinate tasks, it takes longer than a normal CPU. That's because the SPUs are slaves, and depend on instructions from the PPE. This coordination takes time.

So in some cases CPUs are considerably faster than GPUs. Why is knowing about CPU and GPUs important in discussing the Cell? Because the Cell is a design in between a GPU and CPU. It doesn't have the parallel power of a GPU nor does it have the broad general-purpose power of a CPU but it's better at parallel tasks than CPUs and better at sequential programs than GPUs.

So is there hidden power? not really, there's just parallel power for clever programmers. We've seen most of what it can do and there's more that we haven't and will probably never see but it's marginal at this point. This applies to the 360 architecture as well. So to have a better view/opinion, read the following books: ProgrammingMassively Parallel Processors and The Art of Multiprocessor Programming. They are really great books and will shed more light on the subject than these boards ever could. You'll also learn why saying x is better than y is an incorrect statement with most of today's hardware.

Cell = 1 PPE and 6 SPUs. The difference between a general purpose processor and a GPU is that the former consists of a broader instruction set and more cache space in the chip among others. The GPU consists of dozens or evne hundreds of mini-cores with many threads that can perform fewer instructions than a general CPU but since it's hard-wired, it's much faster than on the CPU for those few instructions that it supports (Matrix operations is one of those). GPUs also have higher bandwidth once the data is inside the chip's memory. So the CPU can do more but slower, not exactly. The CPU is better at sequential code, those programs that rely on one state before to the next. So in some cases CPUs are considerably faster than GPUs. More to come. Why is knowing about CPU and GPUs important in discussing the Cell? Because the Cell is a design in between a GPU and CPU. It doesn't have the parallel power of a GPU nor does it have the broad general-purpose power of a CPU but it's better at parallel tasks than CPUs and better at sequential programs than GPUs. themyth01

An AMD Fusion APU is good with both workload types. Anyway, SPU's instruction set is based on IBM PowerPC's VMX instruction set.

A CELL has 8X 128bit FMA3 (1X PPE + 7X SPUs) units, while AMD Bulldozer (Quad-Module) has 8X 128bit FMA4 units.

PS; FMA3 =3 operands, FMA4 = 4 operands

[QUOTE="themyth01"]Cell = 1 PPE and 6 SPUs. The difference between a general purpose processor and a GPU is that the former consists of a broader instruction set and more cache space in the chip among others. The GPU consists of dozens or evne hundreds of mini-cores with many threads that can perform fewer instructions than a general CPU but since it's hard-wired, it's much faster than on the CPU for those few instructions that it supports (Matrix operations is one of those). GPUs also have higher bandwidth once the data is inside the chip's memory. So the CPU can do more but slower, not exactly. The CPU is better at sequential code, those programs that rely on one state before to the next. So in some cases CPUs are considerably faster than GPUs. More to come. Why is knowing about CPU and GPUs important in discussing the Cell? Because the Cell is a design in between a GPU and CPU. It doesn't have the parallel power of a GPU nor does it have the broad general-purpose power of a CPU but it's better at parallel tasks than CPUs and better at sequential programs than GPUs. ronvalencia

An AMD Fusion APU is good with both workload types. Anyway, SPU's instruction set is based on IBM PowerPC's VMX instruction set.

A CELL has 8X 128bit FMA3 (1X PPE + 7X SPUs) units, while AMD Bulldozer (Quad-Module) has 8X 128bit FMA4 units.

PS; FMA3 =3 operands, FMA4 = 4 operands

I haven't looked into new hardware nowadays, but it does sound interesting. I remember getting ahold of the Cell Instruction Set specification some time ago but never went over it, I've actually never done Cell Programming so I'm not sure how flexible it is. I've done some CUDA programming though in CUDA C language. And while it's good to know the instruction set, it's not necessary. Only assembly I've done was MIPS and x86, I feel I need to go back to Assembly to really appreciate the complexity of these new machines, high level languages are spoiling me.

Cell = 1 PPE and 6 SPUs. The difference between a general purpose processor and a GPU is that the former consists of a broader instruction set and more cache space in the chip, among other differences. The GPU consists of dozens or even hundreds of mini-cores with many threads that can perform fewer instructions than a general CPU but since it's hard-wired, it's much faster than on the CPU for those few instructions that it supports (Matrix operations is one of those). GPUs also have higher bandwidth once the data is inside the chip's memory. So the CPU can do more but slower, not exactly. The CPU is better at sequential code, those programs that rely on one state before to the next. Graphics are done by drawing pixels to the screen, think of pixels as a matrix of points with color properties (shading). In this case, a GPU will do this much faster than a CPU because the GPU has hundreds of workers working on hundreds of pixels at a time whereas a CPU would do one pixel then another than another and so on. Now think of similar problems that can be solved by dividing the problem into smaller sub-tasks that can be done at the same time and you've basically found the advantage to doing GPU or Cell. The 360 CPU has 6 threads however so it too can has some parallel capabilities although not as fast as the SPUs.

themyth01

On relation to "Graphics are done by drawing pixels to the screen" comment, this POV is the old CPU and DX9c era GPU relationship..

With DX10 NVIDIA/AMD hardware, you have compute workloads being done GpGPU..

From what I know, this is a simple way of putting it. Hopefully what I say clears it up:

In a sense, yes. While it's power was never hidden,the cellsimply required developers to program differently compared to 360 and PC. Once developers caught on to this, the "hidden" power was unlocked. So, in the end, the cell's "power" was basically untapped by many developers for quite some time. Mostly third party devs. Sony didn't do to great of a job with development kits, but there is alot the cell can do compared to 360's chip.

From what I know, this is a simple way of putting it. Hopefully what I say clears it up:

In a sense, yes. While it's power was never hidden,the cellsimply required developers to program differently compared to 360 and PC. Once developers caught on to this, the "hidden" power was unlocked. So, in the end, the cell's "power" was basically untapped by many developers for quite some time. Mostly third party devs. Sony didn't do to great of a job with development kits, but there is alot the cell can do compared to 360's chip.

TREAL_Since

Xbox 360 Slim has fused CPU+GPU into one chip package, hence "XCGPU". MS/IBM/AMD made thier own "CELL" chip.

----

AMD Xenos GpGPU goes beyond the classic DX9c type GPU.

Like DX10 GPU in PCs, notice the compute workload shift with Xbox 360.

[QUOTE="specialzed"]

Its Possible. Dual Layer blu rays have not been used for games yet.

edinsftw

Oh god...I really am at a loss for words.

Yes and know. In this game of hide and go seek, "cell" power climbed a tree. Developer has found the hidden "cell" power, but this is hide and go seek TAG, and developer is too fat to climb the tree and use "cell" power to play the more entertaining part of the game (not being it). So while "cell" power can be seen, developer can't use him. At least this is what developer himself told me. "cell" power might be an imaginary friend of his because xbox won't play with him.

Crysis 2 on the 360 as well runs at sub HD and disgusting Framrate dont forget the pop ups, and the poor AA which is like 1XMSAA. While Killzone 3 on the the ps3 looks beter and still runs full glorious 720p HD, solid Framrate, no pop ups and fantastic MLAA which = 8XMSAA. And you think DVD is beter than Blueray? :lol: well let me let you know 360 is pulling multiplate games back from utilizing full ps3 hardware e.g MLAA on the ps3's dev kit. And guess what? Cell + Bluray allows ps3 exclusives to have ZERO load times(Killzone 3, Uncharted 2, God of War3) no install REQUIRED :D , now tell if 360 can do that :Pmonkeysmoke

Ummm the Blu Ray player in the PS3 is actually slow.

My 2x samsung spinpoint f3 (RAID0) hard drives laugh at it.

Also MLAA is not good. It's between 2x-4xAA and it blurs the outlines of objects.

This is no where near 8xmsaa.

Anyone who has seen 8xmsaa will know this.

.

.

^ That reminds me of my old machine that would do graphics in the CPU, no fancy OpenGL or anything. It was so slow and ugly, I remember running Tribes '98 on it and it was ugly. It's nice the GPUs are opening up to do more than the fixed graphics model programming, there are quite a few computations that get a good kick in performance from parallel processing beyond the usual suspects in Graphics. themyth01

The incoming AMD Graphics Core Next (GCN / Radeon HD 7x00) includes AMD's X86-64 CPU IP i.e. it goes beyond NVIDIA Fermi. AMD GCN has the same memory operation instructions as any AMD64/X86-64 CPU.

There are other AMD CPU IP that enables GCN to fully support C++.

Unlike IBM CELL or Intel Larrabee, AMD haven't compromised thier raster/fix functionhardware i.e. AMD GCN should beat AMD Cayman (Radeon HD 69x0) and AMD Cypress (Radeon HD 58x0)/Bart(Radeon HD 68x0)GPUs.

PS; Notice "next iteration of graphics APIs" i.e. perhaps DirectX Next...

Note that both AMD Xenos and AMD GCN uses SIMD architecture, while AMD Cayman uses VLIW4 and AMD Cypress uses VLIW5 architecture.

Let me some it up, the cell is not this amazing thing. Its a pain in the butt to code for hence why 360 multiplats usually look better. It was an interesting attempt and some interesting tech, but it ended up backing firing for the most part. Game storage means nothing you could make a 1 tb game and unless you have the proccessing power and gpu power its pointless

Let me some it up, the cell is not this amazing thing. Its a pain in the butt to code for hence why 360 multiplats usually look better. It was an interesting attempt and some interesting tech, but it ended up backing firing for the most part.

James161324

CELL is a nice idea but IBM doesn't have extensive experence to design a cutting-edge raster GPU, hence quick off-the-self NVIDIA G7x patch.

if Cell had hidden powah he should have used it against Gohan.

Cell = 1 PPE and 6 (game specific) SPUs. The difference between a general purpose processor and a GPU is that the former consists of a broader instruction set and more cache space in the chip, among other differences. The GPU consists of dozens or even hundreds of mini-cores with many threads that can perform fewer instructions than a general CPU but since it's hard-wired, it's much faster than on the CPU for those few instructions that it supports (Matrix operations is one of those).

themyth01

SPUs are not designed for 3D raster based game processing i.e. it's just a kit-bash PowerPC's VMX/Altivec. CELL is just a modern spin on PS2's emotion engine or "old school" vector processors.

SPUs doesn't beat NVIDIA Geforce 8800/AMD Xenos on image base MLAA processing i.e. the GPU is also an "image processor".

On the cache storage issue, AMD Radeon HD 4870 has about 2.5 Megabytes register data storage i.e. modern GPU uses the fastest known storage method. This is one of the areas that the modern GPUs from AMD and NVIDIA differs from "old school" vector processors.

GPUs contains complex hardwired functions e.g. BC6/BC7/3DC+ texture decompression, tessellation, raster operations, Z operations, early-Z cull operations and 'etc'.

GPUs also has a large array of load-store units a.k.a. texture units. CELL only has 8 load store units i.e. a design legacy from "old school" RISC player e.g. IBM.

DX10/DX11 GPUs from AMD and NVIDIA can do Fold @ Home (with GPU2/GPU3 client) with wider work-types than CELL.

Btw, NVIDIA (via Tesla**)and AMD (via FireStream**) competes against IBM's CELL in the HPC market. Both AMD and NVIDIA obliterates the "old school" vector processors competition from the HPC market place.

**Enterprise certified commodity array processors (a.k.a. GPUs).

No 'hidden' power. Also, I doubt there is that much optimizing being done. I think people assume that there is all kinds of coding and recoding gymnastics being done to boost visual quality. I imagine a ton of optimization comes through tweaking level design: simplifying/cutting detail where you can, tweaking enemy count, draw distance, level size, objects, etc. until you get a workable frame rate.