IIRC, the original PS3 design was rumoured to have dual Cell processors. It didn't meet performance targets, so the Nvidia GPU was wedged in quite late on in the development cycle.
Then they tried the 2 Cells and software rendering approach, to try and keep it as an "in house" solution.
Finally they went to Nvidia and we got the final Cell + RSX solution.
I can't recall if if had all the details regarding adding a GPU to the PS3, but I remember it had stories about the awkwardness of having the IBM Cell team also working on Microsoft's Xenon CPU for the 360, which IIRC used modified Cell PPE cores.
This was another interesting take on the CPU for consoles. The 360 was born with a GPU, however.
I wonder how many PS3 games ignored the Cell processor and just developed for the CPU and GPU?
It would have been a library.
> I wonder how many PS3 games ignored the Cell processor and just developed for the CPU and GPU?
Essentially none.
A library can be convenient to use or not. I had one afternoon with the Cell and it wasn't a pleasant one.
Gabe Newell famously sounded off about how useless it was and wouldn't transfer to any other hardware, but he ended up being wrong. The architectural model forced on you by the SPEs is the model that the industry (not just games but any compute intensive work) has embraced for the heavy multicore but coherent system world.
Rather than the "thread per vague activity" model, we've embraced a one thread per core with a work stealing scheduler walking a DAG of chunked compute tasks.
For a modern view of this, this is exactly how Rust's rayon library works.
The whole thing reminds me of a lot of the complaints about the N64, a lot of which ended up being the fact that DRAM was no longer a single cycle away like it was for the SNES. Yes cache conscious code is more difficult to write, but that memory hierarchy architecture was more a harbinger of the new world rather than a one off weirdness of a single console.
To be fair the PS3 port of the Orange Box runs like absolute crap in many instances. Although I believe it was developed by EA, not Valve.
Maybe - the Orange Box at least was outsourced to EA and the performance was reportedly not great. I think Portal 2 was done in-house though and I don't remember anyone complaining about it.