IBM, in partnership with Sony and Toshiba, has released
500 pages of documents detailing the features of the Cell processor (not exactly bed-time reading). They've also
kindly setup a forum so peeps can discuss the information contained in the multiple pages. Unless you've been in a hole
the past five years then you'll know that the Cell is the chip that'll be running the Playstation 3. This'll be
pitted against the three core IBM chip in the Xbox 360, as well as a yet unannounced IBM chip in the Revolution.
According to the linked article over at TheConsoleWars.net, the chip's
architecture will make developer's job's harder at first (something to do with requiring all instructions to be in
order?), which would confirm some of the industry
speculation about the chipset. This is nothing new really, since it takes some time for programmers to take full
advantage of console features. Just look at the progression from Halo 1 to Halo 2 over the Xbox's
life and you get some idea of this in action.
Taking it back to the console wars, I don't think any of the fine points of each console's architecture will have much
effect on the outcome of the war. As previous console battles have shown, the processor is generally irrelevant to a
console's success. It's only since PC giant Microsoft came in with the Xbox that we've seen spec comparisons being
banded about as console's true performance. So, it's cool that the Cell has a Synergistic Processing Unit or that the
Xbox 360 has 1MB of Level 2 Cache, but these kind of specs will never influence the majority gaming audience's buying
decision.
[Thanks, D.Vader]
