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by mort96
16 days ago
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I'm sure there's some degree of just not being used to multi-threaded code, but it's also not like today's multi-threading. When we think about utilizing multiple cores today, we're thinking about running normal application code across many identical cores, within one process managed by a multi threaded kernel. The PS3 wasn't like that. It was a single core machine, with one big CPU core which runs the operating system and your application, and it had a bunch of co-processors. I've never written for such a system, but I'd assume that a somewhat close analogy would be a single core Linux computer with 10 microcontrollers attached. (Though I'd love to hear from someone with more knowledge whether this is a reasonable analogy.) |
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Where this otherwise good analogy basically lacks is that the SPEs of a Cell were really fast (in opposite to microcontrollers), so a better analogy could be: a single core computer that has 7 ultra-fast, identical DSPs attached, of which you can use 6. [1]
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[1] For the 7 available and 6 usable SPEs, see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cell_(processor)&...