I always wondered about the legacy of the Cell architecture, which seems to have gone nowhere. I've never seen a developer praise it, and you can find devs who love just about every silly weird computer thing. Like, surely someone out there (emu devs?) have respect for what Cell was doing, right?

I've never understood it. Multicore processors already existed (the X360 had a triple-core processor, oddly) so I'm not clear what going back to multiple CPUs accomplished. Cell cores could act as FPUs also, right? PS3 didn't have dedicated GPU, right?

Such a strange little system, I'm still amazed it ever existed. Especially the OG ones that had PS2 chips in them for backwards compatability! Ah, I miss my old PS3.

[–] invertedspear@lemm.ee 16 points 4 months ago (1 children)

It was very experimental, that’s really the reason Sony went with it and it was at the genesis of multi threaded processing, so the jury was still out on which way things would go.

Your description of it is a little wrong though, it wasn’t multiple CPUs, at least not gore would be traditionally thought. It was a single dual core CPU, with 6 “supporting cores” so not full on CPUs. Kind of like an early stab at octocore processors when dual core was becoming popular and quad core was still being developed.

I remember that the ability to boot Linux was a big deal too and a university racked 8 PS3s together into basically a 64 core super computer. I’m actually sad that didn’t go further, the raw computing power was there, we just didn’t really know what to do with it besides experiment.

Honestly I think someone had a major breakthrough in multi-core single-unit processors shortly after the PS3 launch that killed this. Cell was just a more expensive way to get true multi threaded processing and a couple years later it was cheaper to buy a 32 core processor.

Maybe in a different timeline we’re all running Cell processors in our daily lives.

[–] CodexArcanum@lemmy.world 2 points 4 months ago

Ah, that sounded familiar as you described it! Thanks for the correction and context! I'd forgotten how early into multicore we still were. Well that also explains why it doesn't have specific fans then, it's "basically" "just" parallel programming (which people still don't understand!)

Yeah the university running a PS3 cluster was fun news! I recall there being a brief run on the devices as people thought there'd be sudden academic demand for them as supercomputers. I think you could run "folding at home" on them as a screensaver? Which (if I remember right) kind of would make ps3 the biggest research computing cluster around for a while!

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