Red Falcon
[H]ard DCOTM December 2023
- Joined
- May 7, 2007
- Messages
- 12,452
It was pretty amazing at that time!Remember PlayStation 3 was supposed to be 8 cores, and how amazing that was at the time. They werent even full CISC cores.
The Cell was PowerPC-based, which would have made it RISC, at least on the PPE.
The PlayStation 3 units are all equiped with an IBM Cell CPU @ 3.2GHz with 1 PPE (PowerPC general-purpose CPU core with SMT) and 7 SPEs (8 natively on the Cell, with 1 SPE disabled in the PS3 Cell and 1 dedicated to the OS/hypervisor) with roughly 25 GFLOPS SP32 in the PPE and 150 GFLOPS SP32 in the 6 available SPEs (25 GFLOPS per SPE).
PPE = Power Processing Element
SPE = Synergistic Processing Element (FPUs)
The Cell also allowed software technologies like NVIDIA PhysX to be capable of even running on the PS3, since the GPU in it was the generation right before the G80 which did not have a unified-shader architecture and was not itself capable of running PhysX - the Cell CPU did all of that with its SPE units.
Without the Cell, that wouldn't have been possible on the PS3 with games like Batman Arkham Asylum.
The Cell really is the middle-man, so to speak, between classic CPUs and APUs with GPGPU compute, and was certainly a huge technological innovation at the time, especially when x86-64 CPUs were only just becoming dual-core designs.