[sergers]

i was thinking similar lines.

maybe i dont full understand "many-core", but the definition the article implies aligns with what i think of latest qualcomm snapdragon mobile processor for example with cores at different frequencies/other differences.

also i dont understand why ps3 is considered a failure, when did it fail?

in NA xbox360 was more popular (i would say because xbox live) but ps3 was not far behind (i owned a ps3 at launch and didnt get a xbox360 till years later).

from a lifetime sales, shows more ps3s shipped globally than xbox.

[MBCook]

The incredibly high price of the PS3 at launch cost it a lot of sales, and it took forever to come down. Both of those are direct results of the hardware cost of the Cell and BluRay drive.

Early on the Xbox also did a better job with game ports. People had very little experience using multicore processors and the cell was even worse. So often the PlayStation three would have a lower resolution or worse frame rate or other problems like that.

Xbox Live is also an excellent point. That really helped Microsoft a lot.

All of that meant Microsoft got an early lead and the PlayStation three didn’t do anywhere near as well as someone might suspect from a follow up to the PlayStation 2.

As time went on, the benefits of the Blu-ray drive started to factor in some. Every PlayStation had a hard drive, which wasn’t true of the 360. The red ring of death made a lot of customers mad and scared others off from the Xbox. And as Sony released better libraries and third parties just got a better handle on things they started to be able to do a better job on their PS3 versions to where it started to match or exceed the Xbox depending on the game.

By the end I think the PlayStation won in North American sales but it was way way closer than it should have been coming off the knockout success of the PS2.

[masklinn]

> also i dont understand why ps3 is considered a failure, when did it fail?

> The PS3 failed developers

It failed as an ISA (or collection thereof), and in developer mindshare.

[dcow]

I would argue that the failure extended to the user-perceptible performance deficit vs the XB360 despite arguably more capable hardware. Released games didn't perform better on the PS3 even if they technically could.

[masklinn]

That's part of the failure in developer mindshare: leveraging SMT for games in 2005 was difficult enough, heterogeneous multi-ISA hardware, a ring bus, and the peculiarities of the SPEs made the PS3 not really a consideration. Things might have been different if sony had provided ready-made more or less plug and play SPE applications you could use with just a little tuning for your circumstance (e.g. a physics engine or something) but as far as I know that wasn't the case. I've never heard Sony being praised for its SDKs, while the 360 had straight up directx (with more hardware access).

[mattnewport]

Big little cores like on mobile or some Intel processors are really not the same thing. The little cores have the same instruction set and address the same memory as the big cores and are pretty transparent to devs apart from some different performance characteristics.

The SPEs were a different instruction set with a different compiler tool chain running separate binaries. You didn't have access to an OS or much of a standard library, you only had 256K of memory shared between code and data. You had to set up DMA transfers to access data from main memory. There was no concept of memory protection so you could easily stomp over code with a write to a bad pointer (addressing wrapped so any pointer value including 0 was valid to write to). Most systems would have to be more or less completely rewritten to take advantage of them.