Generally speaking, Im not all that into hardware. "Incredible new hardware" is usually the same hardware you already have but it runs a little faster... *snooze*
Not so with the Playstation3 and the Cell processor from the combined efforts of IBM, Sony and Toshiba. The cell appears to be a radical change from previous designs and that makes it really exciting. I havent purchased a game console since the Sega Genesis but Im planing to pre-purchase a PS3 just to see it (although my wife doesnt know/hasnt approved of this critical expenditure this yet).
Actually being "totally new" is both a blessing and a curse. If you are too different from a marketing perspective, customers dont understand what you do/offer. If you are too different from a development perspective, devs dont know how to use you properly. It is the later issue that worries me about the cell.
As this author points out, all that power is irrelevant if developers dont know how to write software for it. And if the new games look like the old games, customers are going to wonder what all that talk about "different" was for (not to mention the high price).
As such, I am looking forward to seeing the PS3. I understand why Sony is having so many problems getting it shipped. I can accept the high price tag. And I dont expect the initial games to be that amazing because of the developer learning curve. With luck, Sony will debut with 1 or 2 amazing things that show the potential and the rest of the dev community will catch on over the following year.
This article from Gamasutra gives a great overview of the new cell design. (In language even I could mostly understand :) Is it November yet?
(not sure if the article is free)
A Glimpse Inside the Cell Processor
July 13, 2006
What's remarkable is that Cell wasn't developed for scientific applications, military computers, or code breaking. Instead, Cell is primarily intended for entertainment. It says a lot about embedded systems when three of the world's top multinational corporations devote millions of dollars in R&D and thousands of personnel into developing one of the world's most complex processors--for toys.
Mere mortals can program the Cell processor but it's a unique experience. A handful of embedded systems developers already have experience programming multiprocessor systems; some have even coded multicore processors. But Cell promises to up the game. Each of the chip's nine individual processor elements is itself a dual-issue machine with complex pipeline interlocks, cache-coherence issues, and synchronization problems. Keeping all eight SPEs fed at once promises to be a real chore. Yet the results are bound to be spectacular. If your application can benefit from sustained high-speed floating-point operations and can be parallelized across two or more SPEs you should be in for a real treat. That is, once you get the code running.
IBM is working on an "Octopiler" that compiles C code and balances it across Cell's eight SPEs. Tools like that, and like the ones described in our companion article on page 18, are absolutely necessary if Cell is to be a success. To take another example from the video game industry, Sega's Saturn console was a failure largely because its four-processor architecture (three SuperH chips and a 68000) was too difficult to program. Developers working under tight deadlines simply ignored much of the system's power because they couldn't harness it effectively. Cell brings that problem in spades. It's an impressive achievement in computer architecture and semiconductor manufacturing. Products based on Cell promise to be equally impressive. But bringing Cell to life will require real software alchemy.
