Looking Back at the Power of The Cell

Just reminiscing today, thinking back to the days when The Cell, PS3 and Sony were all under heavy scrutiny as to why they would include a processor with so much power that the game developers couldn't harness it for years. Eventually the developers would harness the power, hence today we still get some fantastic looking games on PS3 (better than XBONE I would argue!), and the PS3 ended up completely dominating last gen.

Fast forward to today, and it's interesting because now Sony and Microsoft are being forced to release 2.0 versions of their console in order to keep up with the latest games. Looks like the decision to include the world's most powerful processor (at the time) was the right decision for Sony and the PS3.

Sony made a HUGE mistake by not including The Cell 2 in their PS4, which is why I have yet to purchase one.

Yeah... No...

Cell was a disaster, had more theoretical power on tap that has still not been touched and was more difficult to develop games for than the Sega Saturn.

It may have been a great piece of technology, but it was a shitty console in terms of architectural design for game development.

As evidence by it playing catch-up for the better part of the gen and multiplats running better 90% of the time on the 360?

PS3 completely dominated last gen? In which universe? The Cell was garbage and was filled with anime mythology of hidden powers and unlock potential and this is not my true form bullshit. No-one has time for that crap in this day an age. Hardware should simply work. The new architecture does that and does that very well. The games that the PS4 and Xbox One can produce are stunning. Gamers didn't not have to wade through years of bullshit looking and performing games before the price of their console was justified.

Yes but look how successful Sega Saturn was. The company going out of business had nothing to do with the console.

PS3 was a piece of art, and IMO, the best console ever due to it's longevity, superior exclusives, FREE online play, backwards compatibility, 4 USB ports, SD card slot, 6-axis, folding@home, Home, The Cell, and EXTREMELY reliable hardware unlike Xbox 360.

Cell over delivered.... If it wasn't for developers using Cell to handle the tasks that RSX was too weak to handle itself PS3 games would of looked horrid.

Cell was used for lighting, culling, Post AA, shading, shadows.... Loads of stuff....

It was a pain in the arse to code for but any one who claims it didn't live up to the hype is an idiot.

the PS3 dominated nothing last gen. it was a catastrophe.

the cell was a joke. the entire architecture of the PS3 was a farce. no one came out of that a winner.

Where were you last gen? Were you still in diapers or something? The PS3 was a LITTLE slow out of the gate, but before long it was by far the preferred console everywhere! The Cell wasn't designed for the amateur developer. It required great skill and patience, and that patients paid off by brining up some incredible games, even to this day!

lol at teh cell. I'm glad Sony ditched it.

Sony must have performed mitosis in order to separate from the Cell

@applebeatspc: no it wasnt.

and the cell wasnt designed for any developers. it was never designed with the needs of gaming in mind at all...it was a trojan horse so sony could get their foot in the server and super computer market. the PS3 was designed with very little developer feedback and a shed load of complaints came back as a result. its lead architect was promoted sideways and we havent heard from him since.

the patience never paid off either. every time someone thought the PS3 got one up on the 360 it turned out not to work out. MLAA being an example. there was a big hooplah about sonys teams having this revolutionary post process AA technique using the power of the cell for GOW3. the 360 did it with higher precision and with less overhead on its GPU. a cheaper console was getting a better result.

the blu-ray drive was also slow as hell (another trojan horse) leading to insalls and longer loading times on a console that costs more than its nearest competitor.

the PS3 never pulled away in the visuals or performance department.

dont get me wrong..the PS3 ended with some great games and a great library (im raiding its backlog for my fat PS2 BC PS3). but, hardware wise, it was a lesson in how not to approach a consoles design. in a gen where sony should have absolutely dominated they made a complete mess of it and it was the poor choices in hardware that really cost them. the only positive i can think of about the PS3s hardware is that it uses easy to replace, industry standard HDDs.

well that and it led to the PS4s design which is far superior....in every way. credit where its due...sony learned.

MS and Sony aren't releasing new consoles to keep up with games, Sony is releasing Neo to make a better case for selling VR, and MS is doing it to get out of its rut. Consoles have limits to their power but there's lots that can be done on the create side to squeeze out better performance of that hardware. There's quite an evolution in performance last gen that's very noticeable and even this gen we're already seeing better performance of our games with time, and that trend would continue if time allowed it.

Longevity - Xbox 360 was released a year before.

Superior exclusives - Yeah, in the last two years.

Free online play - Which was far inferior to the 360. No party chat, horrible download speeds, worse connections, more unstable ugh, horrible.

Your name is a joke, hence why I didn't read your op.

The cell was one reason why the 360 punked the ps3 for an entire generation.

person of interest made a episode about it the other day.

@Tjeremiah1988: Great video. The Cell really was a super computer. To think that a processor was so advanced and powerful that the best developers on the planet couldn't harness all of it's advanced technology. Sony made a HUGE mistake not incorporating Cell 2 into the PS4. It would have been revolutionary.

This. It's too bad the GPU and memory was gimped because of the costs of the Cell and BluRay. The bottlenecks in the PS3 was mainly the split pools of RAM and the weaker GPU. Porting would have been a lot easier if these key elements had been similar to the X360. And then there is also the missing main CPU core compared to the X360, which also was a bottleneck. But the biggest was the weak GPU which ment the Cell had to help it out, and that took a lot of work from devs.

They would probably have been better of with two RSX GPU's and a simple Dual core CPU. For 900$ cost per PS3 made, they could probably have had two GPU's in there.

Dat avatar+Name=

No point in engaging this discussion.

The Cell 2.0 was that 8GB of GDDR 5 that was inside PS4 and that was going to destroy every single game on PC graphically.

Guess it didn't turn out that way when PS4 is to weak to play games 1080/60 or do VR at an acceptable framerate.

The cell was an interesting point of discussion for gamers. But in practical terms, it was not great for games development.

In a business sense, the failure was that the cell was so damned costly. It was a financial disaster for Sony. It might have worked had Sony put a more beastly GPU and more memory in there, to really give it a clearer leap in hardware power over the 360. But with the cell being bottlenecked, or just not utilized by developers (some ports not even optimized), it really was just a costly mistake.

PS3 still came out as the best console in the end, but only because Microsoft went full stupid with Don Matrick.

Right..... Cell's SPE's (the number cruncher's) couldnt even keep up with Intel's Q6600 cpu or a 2007 mid ranged gpu.

Then The Cell's PPE (actual cpu core) wasnt any faster than Pentium 4 from 2004.

It was a poor idea for a console. It became very clear very early in the generation. But coming from an apple fan, You know all about trying to make excuses for overpaying for products that under perform.

http://phys.org/news/2010-12-air-playstation-3s-supercomputer.html

NotAFanBoy is back?

Who? Not me, just an unbiased fan of Sony.

Alt confirmed

ps3 won console graphics king for the last 4 years of last gen. If you count same time span then ps3 won. Lems seem to forget the 360 had over a year head start and ended up behind

Cell was a load of rubbish. All this talk of "harnessing the amazing breathtaking power" is just hogwash marketing. We are taking about a CPU, not some Dragonball Z power levels. When developers complained about optimizing for the Cell, it meant they were saying it was horrible to program for, not because they "couldn't handle the amazing, awesome power of the honorable, noble Cell CPU" or whatever. Again, we are not talking about Dragonball Z power levels.

The Cell was terrible, But hey, don't take my word for it, take IBM's word for it. IBM helped design the Cell CPU, and even they abandoned it in favor for their other PowerPC CPUs. Glad Sony chose x86 CPUs for PS4.

PS3 fat is the best system ever created. Only downside to console was download/install times. The PS4 is behind it in a lot of ways.

PS3 ended up crushing the competitors in the very end. Wii and 360 were a wasteland the last couple of years in the generation. lol at people trying to suggest 360 was better than PS3 in the area of exclusives...the only AAA exclusives 360 had once PS3 hit the market was Halo/forza/gears that's it! FACTS look it up.

PS3 curb stomped 360 in quality exclusive game content having multiple GOTY winning games and a coveted 10/10 exclusive to top it off, anyone saying anything to the contrary is not only wrong they are completely delusional.

@TheEroica: 360 GPU was better though.

@lavamelon: I strongly disagree. The cell, in many ways, was more than just a processor. It represented unlimited potential and a whole new way of experiencing games. Although the developers were never able to fully unleash the 120fps 4D power, they did an amazing job of tapping into the power and providing 10+ years of AAA gaming. Like I said, The Cell was a lot more than just a raw processor capable of performing tasks at the level of a super computer.

I won't comment on power but what I will say is that the 360 never had a game that looked anywhere near as good as Uncharted 2+3 or Ratchet and Clank, the lighting effects in those games were a real step above anything on the 360.

Exactly. The Xbox 360 was also limited by not having a HDD come standard. The PS3 and Cell were, IMO, the gaming duo in the history of gaming.

IBM PowerXCell 8i (second version after PS3's CELL) was blown away by AMD and NVIDIA GpGPUs in the HPC market space.

In terms of IPC (instructions per cycle) and chip area size, 90 nm AMD Jaguar beats 90 nm IBM SPE.

Chip area size at 90 nm process technology

AMD Jaguar = ~9.96 mm^2 (scaled from 28 nm process tech's 3.1 mm^2)

IBM SPE = 14.76 mm^2

IBM PPE = 28.86 mm^2

X360 = 3 PPE cores at 3.2 Ghz

PS3 = 5 SPE cores at 3.2 Ghz

PS4 = 6 Jaguar cores at 1.6 Ghz

XBO = 6 Jaguar cores at 1.75 Ghz

AMD Jaguar has superior IPC over IBM's SPE and PPE.

I wonder if Microsoft will be able to pull off what Sony did last generation. Last generation Sony started out far behind, then later closed the gap and they did it by releasing game after game. Something that never happened in console history before. I don't think it will happen with MS. Sony had talented devs to help them bring PS3 to glory.

@Juub1990 Last two years? I remember quite differently. I owned both 360 and PS3. Microsoft started dropping the ball around the 08/09 era. Which was right along the time games like LBP and Uncharted 2 started to release. I remember there being years, E3 list after E3 list of 360 not having content. I remember how excited I was just for State of Decay to release just to have a game to play on the 360. It was way more than 2 years Sony started having better exclusives.

Sony went with the cell thinking they would have the market lead and thinking developers would use the ps3 as lead plantform .which would have made it awkward for other platforms

Guy with an AppleBeatsPC forum avatar talks about the Cell being the best thing that happened in gaming.

Sounds legit.

@applebeatspc: You can argue whatever you want. Its a nope, imo. PS3 games don't reach X1 levels and the cell was a financial pitfall. It was a stupid business move and PS3 didn't dominate last gen. It was outsold.

Alright youre just romanticizing shit now.

Hmm after reading this thread and TCs responses I can't help but think..........moooooooo? Yeah sounds about right.

People in this thread apparently don't know of Sony's Ice Team. PS3 was a train wreck for its first couple of years but then devs started to decode the alien language that was The Cell.

The PS3 is actually 5 times faster than the PS4. The true power of the PS3 has not been unlocked and only masters of the alien language would be able to reveal its true power and form. Thats when it becomes the Perfect Cell.

@misterpmedia: yeah it was so good they abandoned it.

Game dev costs money and it was logical and financially sound to move to less exotic components. What did you expect them to do, abandon the PS3 in 2007 because it was too complicated?

Ice Team.