Ars Technica takes look at the brains of the Playstation 3 ... or rather Playstation 3 Portal does ... and gives us an overview:
This white paper was one of the first to be released on Cell, and it clearly indicates that PS3 was designed from the ground up as a node on the network. It also suggests, well before anything was known about Playstation World other than a name, some of the scope of Sony's online ambitions: real-time communications, DRM-protected audio and video, the dynamic integration of online-only content into gameplay, and more.
Not only is all of this enough work for one SPE, but in some circumstances it may be enough work for two SPEs. And for what it's worth, I also think that the reserved memory numbers given are fairly reasonable, as well.
In sum, the performance of PS3's network-facing functionality is going to be limited by network latency and bandwidth, where latencies are counted in milliseconds. This being the case, the SPE's distance from main memory, lack of dynamic branch prediction, and steep branch penalty aren't going to be a killer if it's primarily tasked with processing this kind of traffic while a game runs on the rest of the Cell.
-- New PS3 operating system details? (digg it)Not only is all of this enough work for one SPE, but in some circumstances it may be enough work for two SPEs. And for what it's worth, I also think that the reserved memory numbers given are fairly reasonable, as well.
In sum, the performance of PS3's network-facing functionality is going to be limited by network latency and bandwidth, where latencies are counted in milliseconds. This being the case, the SPE's distance from main memory, lack of dynamic branch prediction, and steep branch penalty aren't going to be a killer if it's primarily tasked with processing this kind of traffic while a game runs on the rest of the Cell.
Remember that, for there shall be a quiz later.
tagged: playstation , gaming
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