Sorry for this kinda gamerbrained question.
The Xbox 360, Playstation 4, Xbox One, honestly most consoles after the Playstation and Saturn have shared memory pools. It allows flexibility in how much memory and VRAM developers want to assign, right? Why does the PS3 not have a shared 512MB pool of GDDR3? It caused all kinds of problems, most notably with Bethesda games.
Is it the Cell Broadband Engine needing the specialty XDR memory? Is it an artifact of the Nvidia RSX graphics chip being added late in development? Looking back I a)most wonder if the split memory was more of a problem than the Cell tbh.
Yes, but in a limited fashion and the Cell could not access GDDR3, yes? Plus the RSX has to request access to XDR via the Cell. I'm pretty sure using it all as one continuous ram chunk would have been tough at least.
"Difficulty programming for it" meaning 'weird hardware design' or 'bad SDK/devkits'? Having just looked at the Element Interconnect Bus, and the state of multithreading in 2006... Oh boy
Yes to everything. The Cell processor was ambitious to say the least, but confusing hardware design and poor support from sony for developers lead to poor performance in many of the games that were developed for it. Or devs simply didn't make games for the Playstation at all, a trend that would continue to this day. This actually reminded me of a parody song from a now defunct gaming website I used to listen to.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
But yeah no kidding, it just seems to me like this bizarre PPE/SPE orchestra is so much worse than simply three cores with simultaneous multithreading. (and a unified, flexible memory pool) It's like they tried to reinvent the multitasking wheel...
Just joking since the PS5 is also lacking in games. The PS4 did fairly well with game support, especially towards the end of it's life.
Someone at sony said "get a supercomputer for our console" and this is how it ended, though The PS3 did have some success in that field. Then GPGPUs became popular like 2-3 years later so it was all for naught.
O yea it doesn't have any gaems, true =)
I saw that the PS3/Cell had OpenCL stuff too, hilarious. What was Sony's sales pitch with this? They want it to be a media center, a superpowered gamer box (lol) and... also a highly parallel mainframe-ass computer? Is that gonna sell to gamers?
I can only guess as to what is going though Sony executives' heads sometimes. Though the ps3 did it's most important job (to sony) extremely well: pushing the Blu-Ray to be the dominant format for HD home video.
For all the good it did them winning that war, when Netflix was popular by 2010