Guerrilla dev: PS3's Cell CPU is by far stronger than new Intel CPUs

The PS3's cell CPU is still more powerful than any of today's modern Intel desktop chips, Guerrilla Games co-director and technical director Michiel van der Leeuw says.

[Jin_Sakai]

“Even desktop chips nowadays, the fastest Intel stuff you can buy is not by far as powerful as the Cell CPU, but it's very difficult to get power out of the Cell. I think it was ahead of its age, because it was a little bit more like how GPUs work nowadays, but it was maybe not balanced nicely and it was too hard to use. It overshot a little bit in power and undershot in usability, but it was definitely visionary”

Sony Worldwide Studios pushed what the Cell CPU was capable of and it showed. It’s too bad it was such a pain to develop for and wasn’t used to it’s full potential by 3rd party developers.

Can’t imagine what the Cell CPU would be like today if it were standardized and developers learned how to develop for it.

Jaguar CPUs in current generation consoles are garbage and a huge bottleneck. So happy we’re getting powerful Ryzen desktop CPUs next generation.

[UltraNova]

True.

I remember the ps3 launch days like yesterday. The weird -out of this world adds, the discussions, the benchmarks... it was everything a new console gen had to be to make that period magic. Unfortunately, we wont get to live that "magic" again as Sony and MS will never risk making such revolutionary tech as the Cell.

That said, AMD and their Ryzen 2 architecture are beasts in their own right. Every tech blog/site praises it for its efficiency, IPS and multicore performance. The current RDNA GPU architecture is not top tier yet but I have high hopes in Sony's and MS's customization abilities so that means we will get significantly improved Navi chips with the next gen consoles with Ray tracing to boot. Add the fact that next gen will be designed around SSDs and yeah the advancements over current gen are evident.

All in all the wait for next gen full spec reveal and their launch is still exciting and I'm happy for that.

[frostypants]

Just to be clear, the Cell was primarily developed by IBM (one of the few truly interesting things IBM has done in recent years, IMO...far more interesting than their overhyped Watson nonsense), with Sony and Toshiba attached. They actually sold servers using it as well, but even in that market it's pretty much dead now. The software side of things just never caught up...be it gaming, business, or science applications, it was too much manual effort for devs to take advantage of the architecture and the community never got the critical mass to address that (because developing those tools would have been a massive task itself, and there wasn't enough adoption to justify the effort).

It's a bummer because it was pretty amazing. But future CPUs will have more and more in common with the Cell.

[milohighclub]

Leave it to ducktard to think he knows better than the technical director and studio veteran Michiel van der Leeuw
who had 20yrs @ guerilla under his belt.

[Zeref]

It's not revolutionary if it's a pain in the butt to develop for 😂

[sprinterboy]

Agreed, imagine the games today on ps4 if they went with the cell and 8gb ram? Instead of the jaguar? Great talented studios got the best out of the cell but because 360 was the lead console at the time it never got the love it deserved from 3rd party (lazy devs and cell being hard to use contributed)

[JG10]

I wouldn't say lazy, my guess would be not wanting to spend the money for the extra man hours it would take

[Minute Man 721]

So what happened when EA made that Burnout game on the PS3 first and ported it to the 360?? The Xbox ran the game just fine. No downgrade, no framerate problems.

[ApocalypseShadow]

I still wonder to this day what the Cell was capable of if all 8 SPEs were turned on and was towards games and not worrying about all the other features people expected the system to have based on Xbox launching first. Not one journalist has asked about 8 SPEs turned on.

I think first party games would have been even better. Just think what Killzone 2 or Motorstorm would have been like.

Not only that, but based on Folding at Home, I think if two or three PlayStations or Cell pack expansions were connected, the power would have been ridiculous. GT would have looked even more real than it did.

[UltraNova]

I'm still wondering what a Cell v2.0 with 2 or 4 PPEcores + 16 SPEs could do today that devs are finally accustomed to parallel/multicore coding...

[DarXyde]

One SPE was always disabled for yield defect purposes; the other ran in reverse for the operating system.

It was a strange architecture, for sure.

[frostypants]

To this day, tools do not exist to make developing an application that takes full advantage of the Cell an efficient process. Yes, more could have been done, but even developing for a slightly gimped Cell was difficult (we're only talking about one SPE here though...I'd argue nobody ever took full advantage of even the available ones). The software development infrastructure available to efficiently develop for that sort of architecture was, and remains, SO far behind the hardware capability. Somebody needs to develop the tools for the developers, and even if the community pushing for that was larger it is still a highly difficult task. If it's extremely difficult (not simply time consuming) for devs to manually figure out the best way to balance/distribute the processing burden, that makes automating it well even more insanely tough. It's hard to automate complex trial and error.

[ApocalypseShadow]

Darxyde, I'm aware about redundancy and one for applications. It still doesn't answer the question on what 8 SPEs could have done.

Would 2 more working have created even better physics or explosions or helped with A.I., etc. It would be an interesting interview to hear it from a Sony developer. Or from someone on the Ice Team. But no one has asked.

When I mention looks, it's about that extra that makes something more real. I doubt the graphics would have changed much. But physics and A.I. could have looked amazing with more help. Motorstorm already had great mud. But crashes would have looked even better. Maybe even more frame rate speed. I don't know. But would like to know. When Sony showed that gas station explosion tech demo, I expected more. Same with that Getaway demo of all the people and vehicles. Or the car being shot in the desert and the bullet holes tech demo. I wanted more of that in games on PS3.

[fatbastard11]

Where’s the source on desktop CPUs? They’re most likely custom downscaled versions and not even close to the clock speeds of desktop Ryzens. Do people really think they’re getting a RTX 2070+Desktop Ryzen+2Tb SSD for $500? That’s the definition of delusion.

[milohighclub]

Dont forget sony will be shifting at least 60 million of all the components. They will be purchasing them in the 10s of millions and will get them at a fraction of a price.

Seems they have a very good relationship with AMD at the moment so expect they're getting good deals.

Whatever's In the box you can expect performance gains above what a 2070 can do.
It doesnt even launch for another year, dont expect it to be outdated on launch this time.
Then wait til the likes of naughty dog max it out.
100% there'll be nothing that comes close to what it'll be doing, on xbox or pc.

PC and X will mostly be held back by the xbox one x thanks to their forward compat. xbox family.

[Loktai]

The CELL continued to be used in IBM enterprise level equipment and where the base OS is capable of distributing use of cores across LPARs(logical partitions, like a virtual machine instance that can be IPLd separately as needed) it's quite efficient . It's really a PPC style RISC core ...

[Rude-ro]

It was controlled..
not about how hard it was to develop for..
Anything new is hard to wrap your head around..
But there are higher powers that did not want Sony creating a better pathway in computing.
To say it came down to developing video games and the eventual tools that got released is a total lack of reality.

To take on how computing works is to take on Microsoft, google, Apple etc... Apple has their own game plan, but Microsoft could have been put in a huge pickle at the time.

[Zarock]

Ryzen is Garbage for gaming.

[stuckNhere4Good]

Hot garbage.

[Nineball2112]

Does anyone else remember being able to use the function on your PS3 that allowed colleges or research teams to use your PS3 in a network? I think they were using the CELL to run different research programs or something like that.

[phoenixwing]

almost makes you wonder what it would have been like if they'd kept making cell based consoles for ps4 and 5. However, i think sony made the right move as a business. People just aren't willing to spend a lot and cheaper off the shelf cpu's cut costs significantly.

[DarXyde]

I would not exactly call the next generation hardware off the shelf. It is based on familiar architecture, but that's it—both are custom built and will very likely synergize well with the other components far better than any off the shelf parts could. Sony and Microsoft really did great in simplifying development for their partners by both going with x86 because it helps cut costs and time with ports and multiplatform titles. This continuation into next generation is a solid move, for sure.

It is true that CELL was something else, but also true that it was pretty difficult to utilize.

[DarXyde]

Cloud computing is certainly possible, but I am still highly skeptical about its application. If you ask me, we have yet to see anything genuinely impressive but Microsoft using the technology yet. I am sure it is possible, but I simply do not believe in Microsoft. No need to tell. Just show.

[Kaze88]

@cigi have you been playing on pc with DX12? If you had, you would know that it's utter trash. more than half the time DX12 is worse performer than DX11. Even some games are unable to function on DX12 mode. Even the games that run better on DX12 have like 5-10fps edge on DX11. Another thing raytracing, shure a nice graphical look but a real fps killer. even on 10XX nvidia series raytracing totally bogs down your fps. You can have it though you must love that sweet 30fps. As for could compute, I hope you remember crackdown 3 mp. Do not forget that it was reviewed as of one of the worst mp in the whole year.

[stuckNhere4Good]

PD gave the world an early glimpse of what a CELL-based PS4 would've been like when it connected four PS3's together to run GT5 in native 4K at 60fps/2K at 240fps... https://www.gtplanet.net/gr... , https://www.gtplanet.net/gr...

Its fair to say had things gone Ken Kutaragi's way, native 4K/60fps for most if not all PS4 games, PS3 backwards compatibility, native 4K rendering of all PS3 games and PS VR games rendered at up to 120fps per eye (240fps in total) would've been just a few features ready to go out of the box courtesy of 'Quad Cell/B.E'... https://image.slidesharecdn... , https://image.slidesharecdn... (it had four times the number of PPEs and SPEs compared to CELL... https://forum.beyond3d.com/... ) and whatever Geforce-based GPU it would've been hitched to.

Shame people aren't willing to spend more for top-end consoles. The market is becoming a race to the bottom. We'll see how good that turns out for the industry/community in the long run.

[MrVux000]

Yup, which is why i was kinda dissapointed SONY went to a more safer route with PS4.They could have achieved much more if they sticked with CELL.

[GTgamer]

it would of been a unnecessary cost tbh but i hear you, if they had put more time into upgrading Cell to make easier to develop for this gen who knows what they could of done with it.

[Loktai]

More potential performance but a whole new generation of bad ports and with the popularity of PC gaming you're much better off making it easy for games to be brought to your system.

That being said the first party titles of course they would be spectacular .... but you'd end up with issues like xbox360 where some games run better even though it's weaker on paper ... and that's factoring in that they both used a PPC architecture

[bluebenjamin]

Me too I really expected them to use cell Since they said they would use it in Ps4 but they didn’t just imagine Horizon Zero Dawn would have benn 70 fps lol

[Stanjara]

On paper yes, and they had the idea of running gpu calculations on it. Reality was that they had to call Nvidia for a gpu chip and had to split memory and over engineered it.
I'm am so glad that Sony moved on from it.
Maybe Jaguar cores are inferior, but games never looked better, and also can be backwards compatible (running on ps5). They are also easier to port to other platforms, or to port other platforms on it.

Cell never again.

[stuckNhere4Good]

Never say never.

[Stanjara]

Go to PS store, click on ps3, and see the number of total games in upper left corner.
Then click on PS4 and see the same number.
It isn't a fair comparison, cause there are multiple iterations of the same game, and also pre orders, but still ps3 had longer generation.
Cell was not good for developers, for Sony (expensive) and it wasn't good for the end consumer cause he got less content.
Cell was also planed for Sony's other products like TVs and laptops- nope.
I actually can compare it to Kinect-
fantastic tech that was too expansive and never implement as intended.

[343_Guilty_Spark]

Powerful in what way? Floating point operations, single threaded operations, multi-threaded applications, physics, graphics processing?

[sinspirit]

Versatility. PowerPC architecture which are beast for number crunching. Obviously, this versatility requires tons of effort on the developers part. Some of the lighting in KillZone 2 was rendered by the CPU rather than the GPU. The game had a ridiculous amount of light sources and effects on screen especially for its time. This is why they had a ray-tracing demo with the Cell. A CPU that is efficient enough to be used to do work normally done by the GPU if need be. And, simply being very powerful for the time and a number crunching machine.

I don't get the single/multi-threaded questions. Cause only the PPE had two threads. If I understand it right. The Cell would assign tasks to the SPU's onto local memory for each one and they would solve it and send it back completely rather than feeding it bits at a time for it to send back here and there. And, they could work in parallel very efficiently. So, it would end up being able to do some complex stuff. Its theoretical performance ended up having more real world results especially in calculations, simulations, and scientific types of applications. It's one of the stepping stones to APU's that we have today. Basically, it was far more smart to focus on the GPU with the PS4. Luckily, next gen will have a Ryzen CPU that won't be such a bottleneck and the GPU will only hold itself back at that point.

[Bluemaster77]

These are appropriate questions left unanswered by the article.

[rainslacker]

Yes

[Max_Eckhardt]

Sony - redeemed!

[traumadisaster]

State of the art kitchen and serves me a ham sandwich.

I put 87 octane in my vet.

[Bluemaster77]

I will certainly not believe that this poorly designed chip out classes an i7 in any measurable way.

[FernDiggidy]

Good. This article is bullshit.

[bluebenjamin]

Whoa 😳 you love your ps4 dont ya 😆

[rainslacker]

Depends on what your trying to calculate and what generation of i7 you're talking about. For random cpu task, the i7 is more suitable, for raw floating point calculations, which is what most games use, the CELL does outclass any Intel processor released around the same time, and even most today as CPUs arent really meant to be floating point calculators. That's why GPU compute is a thing, because general purpose CPUs are not good at what GPUs are designed for.

Put a CELL up against a CPU alone, and you'd have a pitiful looking game. CPU relies on a GPU for graphics performance, while the cell just used an RSX.

[Donnie81]

Yeah I remember Sony saying the ps3 was capable of 1080p 120 FPS. That didn’t happen

[dumahim]

Dual HDMI outputs too, IIRC.

[RevXM]

I dont think it happened, but if the graphics is simple enough you can run 1000fps at 8K provided you have an interface that can stream the amount of data that requires.

I cant remember if the HDMI version they used back then could even do it, but again the hardware otherwise is good for provided the game is simple enough. I remember PS3 got a patch that made it able to display 4K, I think it was useless for gaming as it was running at like 24fps but I remember it could show 4K photos. lol.

Anyway the engineers and system architects and frontmen of companies may say such things and it isnt entirely false but in the end it is up to developers how to utilize the hardware and as you keep adding visual, AI, physics complexity etc you have to sacrifice somewhere else.

PS5 8K 120 fps!!!!
Sure. but most AAA games will be 4K or sub 4K upscaled and running 30-60 fps.
Devs might go like. sure we can do 8K 120FPS, but the game will be so much better if we put that power to use with more/better polygons, animations, lighting and shaders....

Same as it has always been. hopefully more devs are on board to make 60 fps games or at least let us choose between a couple or a few preset modes like resolution or framarate modes etc like TLOU remastered. that way everyone wins. 4K 30fps and a couple extra bells or sub 4K upscaled at 60 with a couple less bells. would be good.

[FlyingFoxy]

Being more complex does a console no favours, PS2 was supposed to be a lot more powerful than Dreamcast but look how close visually most of the games were there.

[bluebenjamin]

Dreamcast games had better Textures and AA

[Absonite]

I remember the first time I saw Soul Calibur running on Dreamcast at EB Games. I thought wow, I can take this home?!

[bluebenjamin]

Absonite yeah IT was DOA2 thats made me want one I thought those were the best graphics it still looks good idk what kind of tricks dreamcast was using to get His Rez Texures but it made game
Look beautiful

[mrmikew2018]

It’s a shame we never really got to see the true potential of the cell CPU.

According to the developers, it was real pain in the buttocks to use.

We saw in shine in Sony’s first party games, but not so much with third party titles.

[343_Guilty_Spark]

You just contradicted yourself.

[mrmikew2018]

@343_Guilty Spark

Not really, we only got to see what Sony’s first party studios were able to do with the cell, “not so much” with third party developers.

If third party developers would’ve took advantage of the cell. I think we would have saw the true potential of the cell CPU.

Apologies if you couldn’t comprehend that simple comment I made.

[NXFather]

You think any third parties would have done better than Sony in House?

[mrmikew2018]

Better than Sony? I don’t believe so. But it would have been nice to see at least one of them try to utilize the benefits of the cell at the time.

[343_Guilty_Spark]

That's kinda what I was getting at. We saw the best the Cell could do.

I still think Halo 4 was the best looking game last gen. Those character models were insane.

[FernDiggidy]

Yeah, sure.

[bluebenjamin]

Oh I remember getting downvoted tremendously when I pointed out that Ps3 cpu was better than the Ps4 and Xbox one Cpu, I guess yall were so happy with your new toys that the truth disrupted your happiness now that the new cycle is coming people finally admit Ps4 and X1 are the weakest most minimal upgrade we ever had In gaming it was basically ps3.5 vs 360.3 it was hilarious I bought the Alienware Alpha console and it still runs games better higher frames and textures plus Ps2 and Gamecube emulation in 4K, I didn’t buy an 8th gen consoles until the Ps4 Pro came out

[Minute Man 721]

I love how non owners love to say Xbox One and PS4 wasn't any jump graphically. I remember playing R3 when the PS4 dropped. Now R3 is a nice looking game for the ps3 but it looked like mud comparing it to Killzone ShadowFall

[bluebenjamin]

None owner lmao I can prove I own dare me!!! You just only played consoles so you don’t know any better a PC form 2011 will blow your mind Facts console games are cut down a lot you just dont know

[Giblet_Head]

I remember it being almost universally despised by studios outside Sony's own. That's it's legacy.

[OC_MurphysLaw]

You can all the power in the world but if you can't harness it effectively and efficiently it is not a good chip design.

[rainslacker]

That's a problem with the devs learning how to do it in my opinion. They were resistant, so said it was hard. I did some CELL tools for my portfolio when I was an intern, and used the company PS3 dev kits, and I personally didnt find it hard to program for.

It wasnt as easy as low level on a regular power pc or intel chip at the time, but that's because I already knew how to do that, and the CELL had it's own function calls and a higher requirement for timing to be right, but hard isnt hard in my opinion. Developers liked to say hard to avoid saying they just didnt want to learn.

In the end, they learned anyways, because GPU compute is basically what CELL was, with the timing requirement reduced due to the chipset handling function calls. Basically, gpu compute removes one line of assembly code.

[bluebenjamin]

So in theory do you think PS3 could run Ps4 quality games? I say this because the cell wasn’t being fully utilized if people were afraid to program it for GPU computation.We cant really blame the devs too hard for ignoring it due to the fact they may have had deadlines and the general populous probably wouldn’t be too happy waiting longer to play games than the other console owners just to allow cell time

[rainslacker]

The CELL in the PS3 couldn't handle the same kind of graphics that we see in current gen software. CELL does a lot of what GPU compute does now, but GPU compute is capable of doing more calculations per cycle on this gen's APU's However, the CELL could process those same commands, at least functionality wise, much much faster due to it's clock speed. A modern day CELL would show significant gains if coupled with a modern day GPU, instead of the RSX that was in the PS3.

As far as blaming devs. I don't really blame them. But it's a crock of BS when they say that it's hard. If they can program assembly code on a x86 or PowerPC chip, they can do it on a CELL chip. Low level code is procedural, and it's not like they had to reinvent the wheel to get it done. Write a hardware call, add your variables, and go through the procedure of getting a function done. CELL had some of it's own unique hardware calls, which may have been foreign to game devs, but last gen saw the rise of the 3rd party game engine to the point that most of the devs saying that it was hard had no reason to really be fussy about it anyways.

Just my two cents. If given the choice myself, I'd probably prefer x86 or GPU compute, but that's more because I don't have to worry about timing issues as much. But if I did write for CELL, I wouldn't see a significant amount of time added onto development, as timing issues are a thing anyways when you start dealing with memory management, which is actually much more complex than what was done for timing on the CELL.

I think the CELL was utilized about as well as it could have been given the memory and the RSX GPU, which was a derivative of one of the NVidia chips(can't remember which one off the top of my head). RSX was really good at shaders, and I think that was underused by 3rd party or non-exclusive titles. But, other graphics tricks available through the SPE's were largely ignored by third party, because those special things weren't available on other systems, and devs weren't really that keen on rewriting graphics pipelines to make it happen, and many non-multiplat games really didn't have the kinds of graphics where you really see much difference anyways.

[Panicradio]

Why did Sony not continue working on CELL? For the PS5?

[343_Guilty_Spark]

Devs hated it

[TheHan]

That’s great and all but if it’s too difficult to develop for than it’s time to upgrade and Sony knew that. At least it said it “it was visionary”

[airshiraz]

they r talking about the end or moors law and this dude may have a solution for that.ps3 cell architecture !

[stuckNhere4Good]

Exactly.

[tochi]

This was, in short, Sony's attempt to make ARM-like legacy-free platform.
ARM became successful because;
1. They completely kicked out x86-type legacy for benefits of power efficiency.
2. They found completely new hardware platform, smartphone.
3. Efficiency outweighed speed in the mobile platform in early days.
4. Microsoft's monopoly policy did not work.
CELL did not have any of above.
Gaming programming and hardware already existed for long time, so Sony themselves weren't quite capable of doing 1 and 2, actually. Plus regarding 3 and 4, they had to ask 1 to existing PC game programmers without any short-term tangible benefits.
Timing was also unfortunate. Shifting of SD to HD console required massive renewal of development resources to console game developers. I guess Sony hoped it was good opportunity for console developers to adapt completely new techniques. Reality was that they just adapted already existing HD programming resources, PC game, for console in the end.
That's how CELL failed.

[Minute Man 721]

They would say something like this, but multi console owners know the truth

[Silly gameAr]

We know more than people who actually work on games, and have to learn the tech they work on? Because we own multiple consoles. Is that what you're saying? Because some games looked better on the console that was easier to program for, right? If you owned both, and played Uncharted 2/3, Killzone 2, ect, you're right. We know the truth.

[Minute Man 721]

Yes bro. Anything the ps3 can do gamewise the 360 can also no hiccups

[Vipre77]

It’s probably better suited as a specialized co-processor than it is as the main general-purpose CPU, though. It’s only really good at running certain kinds of code and certain types of calculations. It’s only average at performing as the main system processor which then takes away resources and processing cycles from doing what it’s actually good at. A well-designed general purpose CPU may have a lower peak potential but it’s easier to use the available power for more things and will result in code that easier to port to other platforms as well. That helps 3rd party multi-platform devs as well as first party devs if backward compatibility on newer hardware in the future will be a concern.

[rainslacker]

If the CELL was used with a standard GPU nowadays, then the CELL would be freed up to do a lot if system tasks which can bog down modern CPUs. It could also serve as a backup for graphics calculations. The setup on the ps3 may not be as useful nowadays with GPU compute taking over so much of what the CELL was designed for, but the CELL was designed to be a chip that would handle the way games were being made back then, or where the development was going. It did go that way. In the end, sony abandoned the idea of CELL and went with a more standard design paradigm, offloading a lot to the GPU. But, if they had stuck with it, a modern day CELL chips would easily outclass the APU in this gen consoles by a wide margin...assuming they had an equivalent GPU.

Cost wise it wouldnt be a good thing, because the CELL isnt cheap to make, so Sony probably made the right call.

[bluebenjamin]

360 had the stronger Gpu and it was easier to make games on because it was power PC based

[ProjectVulcan]

Cell was a bad CPU and it was a bad GPU. It tried to be the best of both and ended up being the worst of both.

So in terms of parallel and vector processing yes, it's still better than modern x86 CPUs because they are not designed that way!

However compared to a modern programmable GPU which is designed that way then it's not even remotely as fast.

This is a bit like saying a 1950s fighter jet is faster than a 2019 passenger airliner. Yes it is, but that's not very useful if the job you need to do is to move as many people as quickly as possible. You might be able to do three trips in the fighter in the time it takes the airliner to do one trip because it's still faster. Problem being you can only take one person at a time, whereas the airliner can take 500 people at a time.....

In short a modern x86 CPU is vastly superior to CELL for branch predicted, general purpose computing, and a modern GPU is vastly superior at parallel workloads and vectors.

Which is why the best gaming systems have the best of both, top end x86 CPU, top end DX12 class GPU.

[Gwiz]

CBE just wasn't really put into a configuration where it could show you a lot of advantages.
Even for its time the memory in the PS3 was anything but optimal and definitely not build for the future.

[CertifiedGamer]

The best decision Sony made is getting rid of the Cell. It was powerful but not convenient.

[isarai]

It's just too complex and unsupported to really be taken advantage of.

[3-4-5]

I call BS....no way it's true....I would like some proof....not that it wasn't a great idea....but there is no way it was more powerful than the chips we have no....especially with the latest tech jump in the last 2-3 years.

[franwex]

The PS3 was basically the Trojan Horse for Blu-ray and CELL. It was a great machine but even then the CELL was a moonshot and risky.

[Jon_Targaryen]

BS. If its so powerful why use an entirely new CPU architecture for PS4 when it launched? This article is just a Sony fanboy way of showing he is pro Sony. The Cell is shoddy at best, If Im not mistaken the 460 used a similar CPU which proved to be just as good as the Cell back in the day if not better. FACTS!

[rainslacker]

Price most likely. CELL was never adopted outside servers and the PS3, and even on servers it had limited acceptance. It's a costly chip to make, and they could get more bang for their buck with an APU architecture.

If they had coupled a CELL with an equivalent GPU from this gen of consoles, it would have really been a sight to behold, but the console probably would have cost 25-50% more. We're talking a difference or CPU price from maybe $10(cost of the cell part of the APU) to $50-100. To put it in perspective, the cost if the CELL chip in the PS3 was $50 at the end of the gen. A more powerful one would cost more. The whole APU in the PS4 was estimated to be around $80 OEM cost.

When GPU compute takes over the functions of the SPE, then there was less need to overspend and potentially lose.money on the system. The downside was that that cpu power couldn't be utilized in the CELL so they have a weaker core in the ps4 APU

[TheEroica]

Ok prove it...

[Cueil]

Intel doesn't even make the most powerful cup for consumers so not sure why he would use that as the example

[Imortus_san]

"Guerrilla dev: PS3's Cell CPU is by far stronger than new Intel CPUs" - I will give you an advice, stop taking drugs they are fucking up you brain.

[willdoom]

Mídia lixo, dando destaque PS3 cell cpu, enquanto as next gen estariam chegando com tudo, especialmente Anaconda. Sempre tapando o sol com a peneira.

[Good-Smurf]

This article makes me want to buy another PS3.
It just too bad that last gen the bottleneck was RAM and weak GPU while CPU clock speed are faster than what we have in PS4.
What CELL tried to do are what APU nowadays are doing just not nearly as fast as CELL so it makes sense why this thing was so ahead of its time nobody can truly harness its true power.

[NeoGamer232]

If it was so good then why is it gone?

Answer is simple... Too hard to get the power out and the power was in the wrong places. Games are expensive to build. You don't need them to be more expensive just because you use a custom processor.

[deno]

The cell cpu is a beast. IBM is way ahead on the game when it comes to processors. I remember them showcasing the Gamecube power pc gekko chip. Blew me away back in 2001.

[Lamusiqa]

I still remember the tech demos and interview about the chip supposedly being able to render graphics and RAY TRACING in real-time. Mind you, this was in 2005. It was THAT fast.

[Jon_Targaryen]

And you actually believed them?

[Lamusiqa]

https://www.youtube.com/wat...

It's real. I didn't say the tech demos were ray-tracing on a single PS3 though. Nor was it for gaming.

[Tross]

That's incredible, if true. If so, I have two of that CPU in my house, one of which is in a working PS3.

[PhoenixUp]

Power doesn’t mean a lot if you can’t utilize it properly

[waverider]

The Cell was a beast, but it demand too much work. Even so, it allowed to make amazing games, like TLOU, Uncharted, Killzone that look better that many games this gen....

[Jon_Targaryen]

Right..... You aware that the engine of those games had nothing to do with the Cell right!?!

[waverider]

lol. the engines were build with CELL in mind.... Thats why all those games were miles and miles ahead of what the rival could make.

[bluebenjamin]

The Cell The Cloud I guess we can say both companies made promises they couldn’t follow