The Cell and next gen gaming, ME2 PS3 letdown.

By Valkyr December 23, 2010 1 Comments

The Cell and next gen gaming

Recently a report showed that Sony wants his Nagasaki chip plant back, the one sold to Toshiba back in 2008 ( see). Also IBM in october stated that the Cell processor is still important, that is in fact they way to stay in the Power business and that they are talking to console manufacturers to use them in  'next generation gaming', which could give a hint that some sort of Cell architecture will be used in the PS4, the PSP2 (which is rumored to used a 4 spu shrinked version of the Cell) and maybe other platforms such as Nintendo next gen home console. 
 

The crazy PS4 theory

 
It is believed and also proved that the Cell is an excelent number crunching processor, with a manufacturing cost of $400 when the ps3 was released but with a processing value of $10000. This high per dollar value lead some companies and even the us air force to set up ps3 clusters using linux. It is also proved that  the use of serveral Cells talking to each other has an impresive increase of performance, you can read more about this subject in a recent Digital Foundry article.  Some time ago even Toshiba released some Qosmio laptops with a form of cell processor as a third processor (CPU+ GPU + Cell) in order to improve video decoding duties of software written to take advantage of this configuration.
  

The landscape

The fact that Sony expects to sell at least 15 million PS3s during 2011 fiscal year, that their next gen handheld device is going to use a 'mini-cell' and that in order to make a higher profit per ps3 sold they must already be improving the manufacturing process to keep shrinking the chip, the key of a future ps3 price drop and the launch of the aforementioned PSP2 at a competitive price. 
 
The landscape is suitable for the cell manufaturing process to keep improving reaching such a low cost that could make possible its use in the next Playstation iteration as a co processor to improve duties like post processing, screen space antialiasing, AI, physics and other cpu bound tasks. It would also make possible PS3 backward compatibility, a feature that is a MUST whenever you want to launch a new console that is obviously going to suffer the initial lack of games. 
 
You must be thinking, it's the ps3 situation all over again, putting old hardware just to enable backward compatibility ended up bad, with the emotion engine chip being removed to reduce costs and the feature lost, nevertheless the current situation is very different as explained before. The cell processor will still very good at number crunching, the emotion engine was shit even by the time of the  ps3 launch and now you have the advantage of the PSP2 and other products (Toshiba TVs, IBM Blade servers, etc) pushing the manufacturing process evolution at a accelerated speed.
 

The advantages

The PS4 could still carry a standard multi-core cpu, with only general purpose cores, making multiplatform and indie development easy and cost effective but at the same time giving second and first party studios the edge with a co-processor to offload some of the work and make their games shine among the competition. 
You need some extra raw power to keep exclusive franchises like Uncharted (currently praised as the best looking console franchise to date) as the flags of your system, just imagine water, sand and snow physics using the power of the co-processor + the current and future gen Nvidia chips that keep improving their use in that department. Remember the 'free' antialiasing of the Xbox 360 using the dedicated eDRAM, well, this could be Sony's free antialiasing standard method, offloading and using MLAA on the cell,saving a lot of GPU power at the same time.
Most important, the expertise on cell programming gained during the ps3 generation could lead to a very good initial results, saving us from abominations such as Genji: Days of the Blade or any launch title that look like an upscaled version of a last gen game.  
 
To sum up, there are enough clues showing that  Sony could be using again the cell in the PS4, we know it's crazy, we know it may not be cost effective to have two processors but we also know Sony, they like to make things this way and with the recent rumors  of a Playstation Phone AND a PSP2 as two different upcoming products we can say that they are the same old stubborn crazy japanese console manufacturers we all know and love.
 

Mass Effect 2 PS3 letdown

Since the announcement of the ps3 port,  the media rumors and even bioware statements that the graphics were going to be superior made me not buy the 360 version of the game, today I played the demo and holy crap, it looks like shit, no AA at all, over saturated colors and very heavy shadowing, insane amounts of screen tearing even during SD(yeah SD!, why not a 1080p reencoded version, why?!) FMV cutscenes. Ok, this is running on the future PS3 Mass Effect 3 engine but Bioware saying that this looks better is a let down and a LIE so   I ordered today the 360 version and it will arrive in a few days, that gives me enough time to beat Mass Effect 1 on the 360 (I originally played it on the PC as a Soldier) as a Vanguard, the class that I think I would want to use till the end of the trilogy.
 
See ya!.

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