• Minecraft Cross-Play Trailer
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We're talking a lot of different beasts here. The 360 is PowerPC, the Switch is ARM, and the PS3 ran on Cell. Both the Xbone and PS4 are x86-64. Of these four, Cell is still the least documented and youngest, and is an absolute nightmare to develop for. While x86, ARM, and PowerPC all follow the standard computing paradigm of "CPU+GPU running on top of DRAM," Cell consists of a bizarre circular bus of interlinked general-purpose computing units that can't be adequately described as either CPUs or GPUs, all managed by a central supervising unit that distributes tasks to the other units. Oh yeah, and instead of sitting on top of a pile of DRAM that's directly addressable, Cell's memory is entirely virtualized, passed around in "blocks" by that circular bus. It's a nightmare for software developers. With the normal computing paradigm, you can mostly dump data into the RAM, take note of where the data is, and relax. With Cell, your software needs to be managing Cell's memory in real time, passing required chunks of data between different SPEs according to what they need to work on. It's a nightmare. And that's basically why early PS3 games either look like shit (Sonic 06) or run like trash (MGS4) or both. It took YEARS of experience for developers to be able to leverage all of the processing units of Cell while maintaining stability, because by many reports, Sony didn't really do an adequate job of documenting Cell for developers. wait what were we talking about
Yep, it's significantly closer. The Switch's SOC consists of an ARM-based CPU and a Maxwell-based GPU, which is a conventional setup. The PS3's "SPEs" represent a kind of halfway point between a CPU and a GPU. A CPU is slow but has an extensive instruction set that makes it good for general-purpose computing. A GPU has very limited capabilities (ignore CUDA and other GPGPU implementations existing) and can only push pixels. SPEs handle both computational and graphical tasks on a single chip that isn't really dedicated to either one specifically. The PS3 literally rewrites the book on computing, ignoring 50 years of convention.
I agree completely. You know how some things just get more bizarre the more you learn about them, and that's so compelling you can't stop reading more about it? As someone who's very interested in computing, Cell is one of those for me. It's the closest a home computer has ever gotten to an eldritch abomination. There's a lot of speculation on why the fuck Cell exists. I'll list off all the ones I've ever heard. Any, all or none of these may be true. -Early in development, Sony thought that Cell would significantly outperform the traditional, single-core x86 or PowerPC processor that Microsoft would inevitably end up putting in the Xbox 360. (They went with PowerPC for some reason, despite the original Xbox running on x86.) After all, Cell is modeled on the compute cluster architectures that supercomputers run on. The difference is that supercomputer workloads are heavily parallelized and don't generally need extreme amounts of synchronization between "threads." Games are so hard to spread across multiple threads and multiple cores that only now are games on PC taking advantage of more than one thread, which kneecapped Cell's operational potential forever. IIRC, in pure brute-force floating-point computing, the PS3 absolutely annihilates the X360, but of course, games never looked or ran significantly better on PS3 than on X360. It's hard to get real data or information about this, but it's easy to speculate that games never actually used Cell to its full performance potential. Also, remember that marketing buzz in 2006 about the PS3 being "a supercomputer"? That's where that comes from - Cell is modeled off of supercomputer clusters. -Cell was a deliberate attempt to make it extremely difficult for developers to port software from the PS3 to other platforms, essentially creating exclusive titles without the mess of exclusivity agreements. If this was their intention, it backfired heavily because the PS3 didn't start to have a decent software library until years after release. That's because it was also extremely difficult to port software from other platforms TO the PS3. The $599 USD MSRP didn't help here at all, most consumers weren't willing to pull the trigger on a platform that expensive while it didn't yet have games, which made the PS3 less appealing to developers. -The goal of Cell was modularity and R&D futureproofing. As I've explained earlier, the implementation of Cell on the PS3 consists of 8 (??) SPEs (Synergistic Processing Elements) arranged in a circular bus with virtualized memory. In the center is a unit called the PPE (Power Processing Element) that handles input/output and assigns SPEs tasks. The interesting thing about this arrangement is that you could theoretically add more SPEs to the mix, and if you run out of PPE processing power or bandwidth, you can even add more PPEs. Theoretically, you could add a second PPE, with its own collection of SPE cronies, and have the two PPEs communicate with each other. You can theoretically have as many clusters of SPEs as you want, with all of their respective PPEs "networked" together. Cell, therefore, is theoretically infinitely scalable in a way that CPU cores are not. The idea may have been that, for future PlayStations, engineers could simply add more SPEs and PPEs to the existing PS3 architecture and result in a more powerful console. If this is what Sony had in mind, it's an impressively bad idea from the get-go, because as I explained before, games are hard to parallelize and scaling Cell in this way would make developers' headaches exponentially more painful. uuhhhhhhhh I can't remember any more I've heard but I'll come back if I remember anything
Only real problem aside from sony/microsoft politics is its different update schedule. Not so sure DE would want to delay PC updates in order to give everyone cross platform unfortunately.
I kind of wish they would direct some of their effort into mining in general. Maybe some cool as shit cave biomes.
True, they do hotfix rather fast on PC.
You never know, but honestly I don't think that will happen under Phil Spencer - I think the whole Xbone launch fiasco has shown him that trust and goodwill is hard to build, but easy to tear down, and allowing cross play probably doesn't hurt sales much, when the bigger factors are exclusives, console price and features. In general, Microsoft has gone from a vertically integrated company, to not really caring which platform you're on, as long as you're using Microsoft services. While that's not exactly what's going on here, I think some form of that platform agnostic mentality might carry over.
i still have platinum on my PS4 account along with really good gear from like 2 years ago. i'll never play warframe again until I can port that account lol. I hate sony.
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