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The weird PS1/PS2/PS3 were because of Japan's heavy arcade culture, where quirky hardware/software designs were the standard. Xbox was approached from the "let's make a DirectX Box" angle, from commodity PC hardware, and it wasn't until the PS3's initial huge cost blunder that Sony realized they needed to go the commodity angle.

> There's a persistent rumor that the Cell was so powerful that Sony had intended for the Playstation 3 to be equipped with two Cell chips, and no true GPU at all. But it seems Sony realized during development that their philosophy had no future.

The original plan was for no GPU at all, relying on the SPUs as pixel processor units. When they realized that that wasn't feasible for a few reasons, they quickly partnered with Toshiba to make a custom GPU, and that ended poorly too, so Toshiba scrambled and licensed an NVIDIA core. The final "RSX" chip was still a Toshiba design, but with NVIDIA at the center.

As games got more and more complicated, the amount of developer support & tooling did as well. The Xbox 360 had incredibly strong tooling (ask someone who worked on the device about 360's PIX, and they'll gush for days), and the PS3 had very little. The PS3 shader compiler infamously had a random search for an optimizer, and Sony's recommendation was to just run it continually with different random seed inputs in hopes it found a better optimization for your shader.

>The weird PS1/PS2/PS3 were because of Japan's heavy arcade culture, where quirky hardware/software designs were the standard.

MSX, PC98. The Nintendo uses a standard 6502 CPU with a PPU and the Mega Drive used the uberknown M68k.

I mean, the PS3's Cell uses PowerPC. We're not talking about the ISA here, but the architecture and bizarre stuff coming along with it, like the NES PPU.

> The PS3 shader compiler infamously had a random search for an optimizer, and Sony's recommendation was to just run it continually with different random seed inputs in hopes it found a better optimization for your shader.

Sounds like machine learning with linear regression.

How is it like linear regression, considering linear regression has a closed-form solution, and even if you're using an iterative solver, is a convex problem.

> The weird PS1/PS2/PS3 were because of Japan's heavy arcade culture, where quirky hardware/software designs were the standard.

TBF until the early aughts bespoke hardware was the only way to hit a suitable price target and get the performances and graphics snazz you wanted.

The first "consumer" PCs which were competitive with consoles in terms of gaming (late 90s, starting with the Voodoo 2 or so) had the graphics adapter alone costing as much as a current-gen console.

The architecture and design of PS1/2/3 were driven from Tokyo, where as PS4/5/+ are driven from the US. It happened because the internal corporate structure changed significantly, leading the design to be heavily influenced by game dev community vs hardware engineers.

As such... its sad as we will never see any new crazy ass hardware architectures going forward.

It's a shame in a way. I remember the reports about the Cell architecture for the PS3. By all accounts it wasn't easy to program for, but that was a hell of an innovation only to fall back to the standard PC arch. Impressive as hell but it took game devs a long time to make the most of it; and then they did in spades. You only have to track the trajectory of Uncharted in the space of a console generation to see what that architecture could do. It must have informed Naughty Dog's design ever since because they haven't suffered from rolling back to a traditional chipset.

It was a different world though, PowerPC was still alive and strong back then.

The PS4 does continue the trend but I think that's more a question of time and investment rather than pure tech considering they have a steady trickle of top notch exclusives.

The homogenization of compute hardware is indeed very depressing

The rise of ARM via mobile devices is a nice antidote.

The different ARMs don't even share a common instruction sets, I think.

I prototyped some physics modeling on the Cell BE. Having Linux on it was a huge help, but it definitely was an odd beast to program for.

One thing that made it practical to work with was that we could install Linux on a PS3.

When Sony retroactively killed the ability to install Linux, they did more than make PS3 irrelevant to supercomputing. They made me deeply skeptical of relying on a technology with a single-vendor gatekeeper.

For the sake of the environment and not throwing away hundreds of thousands of perfectly functional computers I hope they will change that situation. If nothing else, it's going to be a hacker's dream to play with such a unique chipset. It shouldn't die out.

I'd love to poke into it myself. The only barrier is the language you have to use to speak with it.

I suppose there are multiple measures of environmental-friendly. I would guess that the ps3 offer pretty bad flops per Watt compared to newer hardware.

I'm more curious about the subsequent death of PowerPC. Back in the day we had a decent amount of hardware running on that chip.

But on benchmark levels Cell would be competing on different grounds to an X64 and a few PCIe slots right? I've not a clue, I'm curious but I know I don't really know what I'm talking about after this point.

I got two big take aways from reading naughty dog’s blog about what they learned from the cell.

the cell really taught them the trade off between latancy and throughput. That by batching up computations they could do orders of magnitude more than naive pipelining. But, to get that good batching, they had to compromise on framerate.

Which gets to the second big takeaway, which was that standard deviation in the framerate was more important than the framerate and by keeping the framerate low they could also drastically reduce standard deviation in the framerate (Incidently I understand that this was something the amiga demoscene really understood, and low S.D. was a must for any text marquee to look completely smooth).

I remember them pushing the idea the Cell would be used everywhere. At a game conference the brought out an engineer talking about how the Cell would be used in everything...like refrigerators...and then the price for the PS3 was $600 USD...

Meanwhile off the shelf hardware is cheap and has support from developers. And any kind of enhancement to consumer products involves cheap hardware to keep costs down.

I couldn't help but wonder if it wasn't a functional and yet a bit of a corporate vanity project that had missed the boat and had nonsensical ambitions.

The PSP as well had essentially a second CPU with some kind of programmable DSP for handling media like MP3 & MP4 playback. Some enterprising individuals figured out how to use it for general computation in the PSP homebrew heydays. I think there was a Nintendo DS emulator that used it for some kind of speed up.

> As a result, the PS4 and Xbox One have PC hardware.

Does this mean the Xbox was pretty revolutionary for showing that you really can make a console with commodity hardware?

Didn't they have to kill it only a couple of years in because it wasn't cost-effective? IIRC it was sold at a huge loss that they never managed to get back.

The original Xbox had some contractual problems that prevented it from being cost-reduced. I don't think MS cared if they broke even since they were in it for the long haul. Everybody knows Xbox 3.11 for Workgroups was the first good Xbox anyway.

Very different from the Windows Phone philosophy, then.

Not necessarily. PS2 dominated its generation; Xbox did OK, but only a company Microsoft's size could have sustained it (and even Microsoft superseded the console in four years, unusually short for that generation). Xbox 360, Microsoft's second try, was hugely successful, beating PS3 everywhere outside Japan. Had it only been as successful as Xbox was, though, Microsoft might not have tried again.

No Windows Phone iteration ever had more than a few percentage points of share. iOS and Android both clearly destroyed it in the market. Had WP seen a few years of sustained success it would still be around today, sort of like how BlackBerry the brand is still around, albeit for Android-based devices.

The Xbox 360 only beat the PS3 in English-speaking countries. By the end of the generation the PS3 had outsold it world-wide, if only barely.

Yeah, I recall the Xbox being super popular to pick up for the sole purpose of repurposing into a media center (the main OS being the Linux distro Xbox Media Center (xbmc), today known as Kodi)

"Revolutionary" is probably not the right term, at this point it was pretty much inevitable given the progress of PC hardware, but it was ahead of the curve by necessity.

It was as much a pragmatic choice as an inspired one; commodity pc hardware was obviously getting close to cheap enough. Others have suggested Microsoft lost money with this move, even if so it was probably still a pragmatic choice. Microsoft were entering a market that has been notoriously unfriendly to new entrants and spending more on hardware to ensure a successful launch of such an ambitious brand could be argued to make sense, with consoles able to recoup hardware loses in software revenues.

It was likely more about making it easy to port existing windows directx based games quickly and cheaply. Similarly, it granted a development stack that a great many developers would already be somewhat familiar with. All good things for a new entrant to a tough marketplace.

Presumably it also allowed them to get to market faster? Much less custom silicon?

Why doesn’t Intel make a chip specialized for gaming? Something like a dual core CPU optimized for single threaded performance and a variable number of GPU cores (a guaranteed minimum up to a perfect maximum), binned by clock speed. Skip all the support for extra pcie lanes (except maybe for storage).

From your comment, it seems like Sony tried exactly this but failed. Is there an inherent flaw in such a design or just poor execution?

Edit: the biggest problem I see with such a design is RAM IO, but I would think that could be mitigated. Maybe even eliminate support for DDR, instead embedding 4 or 8 GB in the package.

That's what the current console SOCs pretty much are - intergrated CPU/gaming GPU on one die backed by unified GDDR for both CPU/GPU, though 8 weak cores as it was the only viable architecture AMD had at the time for a console type device.

From what I understand this is still different from the Sony approach where you'd have a weaker GPU, but would offload shaders etc to the CPU which could do this due to it's powerful dedicated vector processing units. Of course this had the flaw of GPUs eventually develping shader capabilities etc and making it pointless - and harder to program for if you have to target PC/xBox etc as well.

IDK specifically, but generally: parallelism is the way to get more compute despite limited GHz, and something like GPU architecture is a neater fit than general-purpose CPU architecture.

BTW the latest AMD GPU architecture (RDNA) is specific for gaming, in that they get around 40% better framerates for the same raw GFLOPS of their previous architecture (GNC).

> Console hardware is not really interesting anymore if you ask me.

and Hallelujah to that

Praise Talos

We really do not need a Wakanda with an independent history of processor technology. Maybe 50 years ago the Cambrian explosion of possibilities was relevant, but this century?

Consoles had to compromise based on heating and costs while being competitive in graphical capabilities, those things haven't been issues that the market actually cares about in 15-20 years. For the market, the graphics pale to the actual experience, they're good enough and would never attract enthusiasts that are willing to use more electrical energy for bragging rights.

General processors and off the shelf graphics processors are good enough.

Interchangeable parts wins again.

> Console hardware is not really interesting anymore if you ask me.

Agreed. And that’s a good thing.

PS1, PS2, and PS3 were all underpowered. I’ll never forgive the PS2 for holding back games for 7 years. Grumble grumble.

PS3 may technically not have been slower. But if it takes 2x the effort to get a 10% improvement it is in practice.

Everything’s a PC now. Which means the focus can be on making good games instead of optimizing for specialized hardware to serve a fraction of the audience.

I disagree any of them were underpowered. The PS1 and PS3 arguably produced the nicest graphics of their generations - the PS1 because its competition was compromised in their own way, and the PS3 due to sheer brute force.

The PS2 for sure was less powerful than the more conventional architectures of the GameCube and Xbox, but it was released 18 months before either of them in a time when Moore's law was still extremely relevant. Yet it could still hold its own against the competition. All pieces of impressive hardware.

PS1 didn't hold back PC or other consoles so I bear it no ill will.

PS2 dominated sixth gen sales. By being the winning console but releasing 18 months earlier it held back everyone. And since, like you said, Moore's law was very much alive this represented a significant reduction in overall quality for an entire generation. :(

PS3 at it's peak was great. But it took waaaay too much effort to get there making it a very poor value proposition for developers. And 7th gen was a fully multi-platform era so the end result is the average game was held back and only first party prestige titles could justify the extra cost.

> But it took waaaay too much effort to get there making it a very poor value proposition for developers.

It’s funny that this is always a criticism levelled at the CPU and not the developers.

It’s a financial decision. Building a competitive console game wasn’t cheap by that generation, and passion only goes so far. Publishers ultimately want to recoup their investment, which means developers targeting the common subset of functionality and using middleware wherever possible to support multiple platforms. Unless Sony was your publisher, it wouldn’t have made economic sense to deeply optimize for Cell. PS4 and Xbox One being so similar to each other is good for developers, which is good for games, which is good for gamers, even if it does mean fewer esoteric toys for passionate engineers to play with.

Yes. The blame correctly lies on the processor architecture.

Assume you have a developer who is one of the best in the world at writing hyper-optimized SPU code. Imagine this dev WANTS to write micro-optimized assembly. (And there are many such devs). This developer's time would far more efficiently spent if they were writing "normal" code for a "normal" processor.

So yeah. The criticism belongs squarely on the processor. :)

This reminds me so much of the discussions around the Amiga back in the 80s.

Powerful custom hardware can be great for the developers that invest in it, until it isn't anymore and now you've got a bunch of sunk R&D. And then there's the need to ship on more than one platform...

You kinda have to work with the people existing, while there were other CPUs available at the time.

And even if everyone were a super smart 10x-developer like you surely are, their time would still be better spent on a platform that is more productive. The idea that some technology is difficult but rewards proficiency with incredible productivity is almost entirely wrong, which is why nobody does web development in Assembly. LaTeX vs Word would be the only example I would have agreed with in the past, but if you search you'll find a study showing even the most proficient practitioners are slower and make more typesetting mistakes using the former.

> And even if everyone were a super smart 10x-developer like you surely are

That's not called for. They never implied they were even above average. Just that a bunch of game devs were somewhat lazy.

> Just that a bunch of game devs were somewhat lazy.

That's not called for. You don't know those developers, you don't know what work was on their plate or what constraints they were toiling under.

It is completely fine for you to say that opinion is unjustified.

But they still weren't calling themselves some kind of better-than-everyone dev.

Though if you're using "developers" to mean that entire section of the company, including management, then what was on their plate and the constraints are almost all self-inflicted.

No, its' tragic that blaming developers is even considered an option. Developers are human and can be expected to behave as such. The value of developer time is well known, and if anything developers undervalue their own time, and are far too willing to waste their time microoptimising for a gratuitously difficult CPU design rather than getting on with more valuable work.

Compared to PCs of the same era they were very underpowered. And that only got worse as the generation went on. The PS3 and 360 only had 512mb of ram shared between the cpu and gpu which was a pretty serious handicap.

(The lack of ram was definitely the biggest issue, and the thing that held back PC games the most as levels had to be made a lot smaller than they could have been otherwise - Destiny and Final Fantasy XIV are two concrete examples, both released expansions with much larger playable areas as soon as PS3/360 support was dropped).

Compared to other consoles of the same generation they were on par though.

> Compared to PCs of the same era they were very underpowered.

Compared to top-of-the-line PCs of the same era yes. But the GPU alone of "PCs of the same era" would set you back as much as a 6th gen console, and you'd have a shiny graphics adapter sitting in a box.

The 7th gen is where consoles started really falling behind (though somewhat ironically also where MS decided to go with somewhat more bespoke hardware than the "PC in a box" Xbox).

Did you just call wobbly fixed point vertex no subpixel precision no transparency no perspective correction mess full of gaps on PS1 a nicest graphics of their generations?

For what it’s worth, I do really enjoy the aesthetic of that sort of work in the same way that I enjoy a nice piece of pixel art with a limited colour palette.

Well, if you like textures, then yes.

The most serious competition at the time was the Nintendo 64, and it lacked storage.