the Cell processor in the PS3 was not terrible in the PS3 and I doubt you ever worked on it. So talk about 'not the best-researched'. You can find many people singing it's praises, including me.
Sony gave you 6 of the 8 SPE cores to use (I think they reserved two, but it's been ages). They are indeed very fast, however, they have no cache coherent access to main RAM and only 256k of memory for each element. So, you have to meticulously write DMA scheduling code to keep them fed. If you're a simpleton like me, you double buffer your SPE memory, cutting in in half, so 128k to work with, 128k for paging into, and you hope to be done paging before it's needed. Latency to memory is on the order of 2,000 cycles to first byte, but then they arrive fast.
So, what you do is decompose your problem into data streams that can be cruched through, but in such a way that you minimize the need to randomly access much memory. It's often cheaper to recompute things locally than to fetch them from RAM. Random access into your RAM is pointless, so you have to marshal all your input into DMA buffers, do some work, marshal all your output into other DMA buffers, and send back to host CPU.
Anyhow, I got this working. Meshes were being skinned at very high rate, but it was very frustrating. The PPE was really slow, so you had to offload as much as you could to those SPE's. But hey, I may be complaining, but it sure beats dealing with the "Emotion Engine" on the PS2. I can tell you which emotion that engine brings up.
Unrelated: Every time I’m reminded about Cell I’m reminded of the OtherOS fiasco. I purchased a PS3 for the processor solely and I was very upset when I only got a $2 check for it. I never cashed it.
If the chip were so wonderful to work on, then it would still be in use today as the theoretical performance per area beats everything else by a wide margin.
Roadrunner was built in 2008. It would still be just barely off the top 500 list in 2021, but was decommissioned just FIVE years later in 2013. Its x86 replacement was already underway in 2010 TWO years after its launch.
I'm glad you got to work with the architecture you loved for so many years, but I think the rest of the world disagrees with your assessment.
Seriously? You can find people bitching about anything on Google Search. The fact is most people just weren't prepared for multi-core data oriented programming in 2006.
List my titles: no you first
And in this thread, you can find credible people with specific complaints about the Cell processor.
> List my titles: no you first
That’s unfortunate. If you’re not full of shit, how could anyone possibly know?
One of the cardinal rules of argumentation is that the burden of proof is upon the person making the claim.
You've made it. Now back it up.
Until today, I’ve never once seen someone “singing it’s praises” that’s actually written code for one. At best, they’d curse it under their breath while saying it had its benefits. Usually however it was a full throated rant about how bad the experience was.
Sure that may be true, but that does not mean they are singing its praises either.
Just look at this very post on HN where folks who’ve written code for it have commented on the experience, how many would you say are:
- singing its praises (you)
- cursing it under their breath while saying it had its benefits (few)
- full throated rant about how bad the experience was (few)