AMD CEO Lisa Su reminisces about designing the PS3's infamous Cell processor during her time at IBM

[erek]

"Interestingly, the seventh generation of home consoles (PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii/Wii U) also marks a shift in AMD's allegiances to console manufacturers. AMD produced graphics chips for both Nintendo and Xbox, and all three console manufacturers used the PowerPC CPU architecture. But come to the eighth-gen (PS4, XB1, Switch), both Xbox and PlayStation had switched fully to AMD-powered x86 CPU and GPU architecture. The Switch also saw Nintendo pivot to an Nvidia-powered SoC design (with Arm CPU cores) for their new hybrid console focus.
With the added context of this interview, one can't help but wonder if Lisa Su's unifying thread throughout the last three generations of PlayStation hardware isn't a coincidence. It could just be corporate happenstance, but going from a humble Product Director and Engineer working on the PS3 at IBM to Senior vice president (in 2012, CEO in 2014) at AMD, setting the future course of both PlayStation and Xbox hardware, is truly impressive.
It's also a great win for AMD, in general, to provide the hardware behind the two biggest consoles on the market for two consecutive (and a third upcoming) console generations. No matter who wins between Sony and Microsoft and their console war, AMD wins, and that's the kind of thinking that earns you a CEO spot."

Source: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-i...esign-the-ps3s-infamous-cell-processor-at-ibm

 

[SOAREVERSOR]

The PS3 was interesting in that it was way ahead of the multicore trend with the CELL/BE. Which was ludicrusly hard to work with as everyone wanted to work with engines and just port to different things and so it couldn't be used. But the few dedicated PS3 games really stood out and by the end of it's life they'd mastered it and some of the stuff that came out on it was amazing.

It also helped solidify blueray as the HD disk format. At the time it was one of the better and cheaper bluray players on the market. There was also the backwards compatibility with PS2 hardware, media center functionality, and linux. Two of which were removed though some of the ports for the media center were removed as well.

It's real problem was all of this drove the cost up for, what was at the time, insanely high and out of reach for many.

I sort of miss having consoles based on different hardware competing. The only company doing that now is Nintendo.

 

[LukeTbk]

The previously released in 2005 Xbox was a tri-core CPU, almost the same cores than the Cell processor used.

The game on the Xbox had access to 6 threads running, on the PS3 it was 8 I think. You had 2 different type of compute unit going on in the PS3 obviously, with those special for vector operation SPEs a bit like GPUs.

I wonder how big the difference actually was versus the hype around it, not sure about the multi-core aspect being ahead of its time, general all-purpose combined with different specialized core on the same chips like we start to see again (or apple started to do a while ago) for sure.

Because the Xbox was going up in thread count before it has well, 6 thread for games in 2003 was a lot at the time if I am not wrong people at Ubisoft told be the dev kit were actually Power Mac dual cpu powerPC at first to simulate what it would be.

 

[SOAREVERSOR]

The previously released in 2005 Xbox was a tri-core CPU, almost the same cores than the Cell processor used.

The game on the Xbox had access to 6 threads running, on the PS3 it was 8 I think. You had 2 different type of compute unit going on in the PS3 obviously, with those special for vector operation SPEs a bit like GPUs.

I wonder how big the difference actually was versus the hype around it, not sure about the multi-core aspect being ahead of its time, general all-purpose combined with different specialized core on the same chips like we start to see again (or apple started to do a while ago) for sure.

Because the Xbox was going up in thread count before it has well, 6 thread for games in 2003 was a lot at the time if I am not wrong people at Ubisoft told be the dev kit were actually Power Mac dual cpu powerPC at first to simulate what it would be.

The games for just the PS3 were the best of that generation in terms of show off ability.

But the CELLBE and BLURAY were included to get them into other markets and that did work well.

 

[LukeTbk]

Wonder if they have kept at it, if IBM CELL successor will be doing what CUDA GPU and other datacenter special chips are doing now, reading about it now it sound like a lot like a console having today CPU with only 4 core but use a GPU for what would have been traditionally run on CPU and try to code-compile to take advantage to giant parallelism and throughput of results.

Maybe those core evolve over time to have modern GPU like memory management and capability

 

[cjcox]

Sometimes (not saying this is true), the "strange" (and often wondrous) processors end up "behind the scenes" (like in embedded situations, etc.).

Other times, they are cool pieces of history that probably died "before their time". That is, some of those "embed" solutions would have benefited, but they stuck it out with the "crap" that we're supposed to use (sometimes, that's cost driven of course).

I'm "old", so I've seen a lot of closed IP get thrown away permanently. Some of it was "genius".... but nobody cared (?)

 

[SOAREVERSOR]

Sometimes (not saying this is true), the "strange" (and often wondrous) processors end up "behind the scenes" (like in embedded situations, etc.).

Other times, they are cool pieces of history that probably died "before their time". That is, some of those "embed" solutions would have benefited, but they stuck it out with the "crap" that we're supposed to use (sometimes, that's cost driven of course).

I'm "old", so I've seen a lot of closed IP get thrown away permanently. Some of it was "genius".... but nobody cared (?)

Sun SPARC had a good run but it died off.

IBM POWER is still around and used for stuff where x86 isn't going to cut it.

 

[cjcox]

Sun SPARC had a good run but it died off.

IBM POWER is still around and used for stuff where x86 isn't going to cut it.

Tell you the truth, these wouldn't have even been on my list, but sure... I suppose they might be on someone's list.

 

[SOAREVERSOR]

Tell you the truth, these wouldn't have even been on my list, but sure... I suppose they might be on someone's list.

I've dealt with a lot of.... let's go with esoteric... shit over the years. But I started my career in the Navy and there's a lot of stuff I can't get into. Those I can. If you know what DISA STIGS are and how everything has to be validated from the hardware through the software you have a rough idea what I do.

 

[cjcox]

I've dealt with a lot of.... let's go with esoteric... shit over the years. But I started my career in the Navy and there's a lot of stuff I can't get into. Those I can. If you know what DISA STIGS are and how everything has to be validated from the hardware through the software you have a rough idea what I do.

Hmmm, I do. But then, there are STIGS for Windows, and that's crazy town. Might as well post the launch codes to FB.