IBM and Devs cooperate to tap PS3's Cell |
Obviously, it would be easier to learn the ins and outs of the PS3's Cell processor if the people who actually created the chip were there to guide you along. Well, here's some good news folks.
Next Generation reports that a workshop held this week at High Moon Studios' Carlsbad, California offices is bringing together IBM engineers and game developers across multiple Vivendi Games studios (including High Moon, Radical Entertainment, and Swordfish) to learn how to maximize the multi-core Cell processor in the PS3. Multi-core processor experts from RapidMind will also participate in the workshop.
So what's the dev's take on all of this? Well, Clinton Keith, High Moon chief Technical officer had this to say:
We've been talking to Sony for almost two years now, but they didn't create the Cell. ...They created the architecture for the PS3 and theyÂ’ve created a lot of the developer libraries. WeÂ’ve had access to those [Sony] engineers... but theyÂ’re not the hardware engineers. We want to hit [the Cell] on all fronts. WeÂ’re talking to the guys [IBM] who designed this chip and have been working on it for five years now.
The developers and IBM's chief engineers will be working together during hands-on programming and knowledge-sharing sessions as they peer into the inner workings of the PS3's Cell. Participating programming teams will be using software development kits from IBMÂ’s Global Engineering Solutions labs. To add a healthy sense of competition to the workshop, groups will be going against each other in an effort to create the best Cell-based game development algorithm.
Will this mean better games for the PS3 and less complaints about how hard it is to program for the PS3? Time will tell.
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Comments [refresh]
It's about time for communication.
I've seen so many companies that have communication problems. Software doesn't talk to hardware VS and production get nothing out of them either.
I hope we see some awesome games because this cooperation.
We could possibly see much more better games graphically on the PS3, as the the cell was devloped to be the graphics processor at first, but it was too complicated so sony went with Nvidia. So if the Cell is finally tapped into we could see game graphics running both on the th Nvidia graphic card and the Cell
"the the cell was devloped to be the graphics processor at first, but it was too complicated so sony went with Nvidia."
Cell is a great processor, but Sony went with NVidia because Cell is nowhere near as powerful as a modern GPU for rendering polygon based graphics.
"we could see game graphics running both on the th Nvidia graphic card and the Cell :D"
Although Warhawk hasn't been released yet, the volumetric clouds are all rendered with Cell. :)
Cell is rubbish, Motorstorm etc they say is getting best of cell and it ends up being 32 fps LOL
Ummm I'm pretty damn sure the cell is only a single core processor with 8 synergetic processing units, one of them unused for some reason (redundancy?).
I guess sony likes the confusion surrounding that because it seems most people compare numbers and think the cell is better (XBOX 360 Xenon has 3 true cores, cell has one plus the 8 SPUs.)
It's the same reason the PS3 can support 7 controllers over the 360's 4 (which I don't know how you could use 7 controllers with one system.) They also did that with the blu ray drive by rating the read speed in megabits instead of megabytes. Very sneaky!
Do you have anything better to do than spread lies?? Seriously. Are you 14? I come here to read news, and every post has some comment from you talking trash. Get off the computer, go play with your xbox and stfu.
Mister Common Sense - grow up. Both consoles are great, the cell IS single core with 7 spus but that truely means nothing as the architecture is entirely different so you can't try to compare in terms of hardware types, it is the results that count and the amout of processing power in terms of data.
The consensus is that the Cell is superior and more powerful, we are just starting to see this even though the first string of games have only just been released. I can't wait to see the second set.
Games that will be using the Havock engine 4.5 will apparently utilise the 7 SPUs and should look awsome see this http://ps3.qj.net/Havok-4-5-Enjoy-ALL-your-SPUs-in-FULL-PS3/pg/49/aid/80351.
DAM DX10 is better thAN THE ps3.thIS SUCKS.Il still think playing games on a computer is gay thought but dam look at crysis at ign.
cell plus rsx beats dx10. it's just up to devs to take use of it.
RSX is not a DX 10 card, period....no Shader 4.0, no DX 10, both PS3 and 360 do 3.0 Shaders...
It's good to be educated before you try to slam someone, otherwise the end result is you looking twice the fool.
exclusive games, that's it.
Yes maybe the second set of PS3 games will not have slowdown on !,even FLOW has slowdown and I didnt think that would be possible on such few graphics
Fl0w was created by a high school team.... not a veteran sony powerhouse... so from a high schooler's perspective, it's the best game possible with their knowledge... plus it's $7.99 what more do you want?
Kewl Game123, I never knew Warhawk used the cell.
Crysis is Not coming to X360 unless they cut many lighting effects that Xenos is incapable of! That including 128bit HDR (supported by RSX), Bloom Effects, certain shaders. OpenGL v2.2 out since August does support 128bit HDR Lighting and it also supports bloom effects and other lighting tecniques used on RSX (which Xenos does not). Second the RSX on PS3 is not merely a 7800 chip. That 128bit HDR lighting is only available on Nvidia 8800 and ATI's so called DX10 capable cards. Is it some kind of hybrid? Probably. Being DX10 capable is a limit on features more than a asset to them. Just ask the card makers about what DX10 does not support is a better question.
OpenGL is the not only the father of multiplatform graphics API's (thanks to SGI turning all of OpenGL support and development over to the Khronos Group), it is in a rapid development cycle that will see v2.5 and v3.0 out before the end of this year. Reality is OpenGL is more closely developed by the chip makers themselves. They are the ones most involved with it's development to make sure features they want are included not excluded like what Microsoft is attempting with DX10.
DX10 has done some good things and some very bad things in the eyes of GPU makers. First it somewhat leveled the playing field by limiting additional features the card makers could use under it's certification requirements. Ultimately this will kill it! Nvidia has proven that although they'll play by those rules to get DX10 certification, they also are making sure that the competing API will support everything they offer. NOW everyone except Microsoft is on the Khronos Group Contributors for OpenGL!
Now Microsoft are creating a great divide between chip makers and themselves. They thought it would work for their benefit with a lazy company in ATI on driver development, who didn't want or care about features, just raw power. Because it was Nvidia who's chips rely on feature sets to compete. Naturally then MS thought it would be MS/ATI against Nvidia a company they've hated for a long time anyway!
But surprise, surprise oh Joy! AMD stepped in and bought ATI. A real wrench in Microsoft's Works. AMD along with Nvidia, Sony, IBM, Motorolla and many others were already on the newly organized Khronos Group OpenGL development team. Now instead of the way Microsoft had envisioned it's DX future, it now had them pitted against all of the hardware companies themselves, out for the good of a Multiplatform World Market. No proprietary centered MS has a chance. So now we are faced with a co-operative co-development of the OpenGL Group of all it's API's against M$ and it's DX9 DX10 inferior product.
Most of us see OpenGL and think just one thing. They see the old OpenGL that was just sort of kicked around for years. They don't realise that M$ had indeed succeeded in buying a few of these many open format API's from SGI during bad times. They are not aware that these have been rewritten or cloned for use in DX9 and DX10. Shouldn't have happened to an Open Source Project for sure, but it did.
This is part of the reason SGI turned the whole set of OpenGL API's over to the Khronos Group to oversee! Who took over control just last August.
When Crytek was testing the first releases of DX10, a company DEV who had gotten the company interested in porting to OpenGL before, put together a demo of Crysis running on OpenGL supporting all features of DX10 in a developer's conference. This afterall would be the API to be used on any games developed for Sony PS3. It was running the game at twice the frame rates, with a few shaders DX10 didn't even have. It was OpenGL v2.2!
Subsquently that video has been yanked from the net. Plus even the announcement from the DEV conference has been yanked. What we know is that OpenGL outperformed the as yet optomized DX10 then. That's it! But history has told us that OpenGL has always outperformed DirectX in FPS and most of all resource management.
DX10 was supposed to correct that and was one of it's primary goals by spreading it's memor
y access to main memory as well as onboard chip memory, more like how OpenGL now works. But it is still a bogged down consummer of memory and compute cycles. It's still designed to center on only one platform.
Which limits it and now over the next few years because of it's closed proprietary nature it will die a premature death. It's why the Google's and Firefox's of the world are having great success in the Open Source world. It is the end of Software and OS's dictatorship of the computer graphical interface, and that's the sad truth for an extremely stuborn company without the will to share!
Now we have a new interface born and it's not just on one platform. It too is Open Source. It comes from a small startup who got their big start by developing a small demo for Sony. The name of that company was "Serious Hack Inc" and later they would be renamed to "RapidMind" of Canada. The demo has now become a game and we know it as the "Duck Demo" from E-3 2005.
Many other chip and hardware manufacturers have jumped aboard this Stream Rolling Train with a completely new instruction set of language tools developed over 10 years called "Sh". Using common C++ code (no assembly code required) with these new development tools, any developer can duplicate the "Duck Demo" in a very short period of time. The method of getting those instructions to the chip is considered the code to metal interface. Or more aptly, Close to Metal. The OpenGL runtimes are interfaced directly by being embeded in the game or application itself not in the OS as with DX10.
In tests done by ATI/AMD on their new Streaming GPU Processor (like Cell BE), "CTM" produced a 32 times improvement over using just OpenGL alone. With CTM no core is ever vacant, no compute cycle left emty, every core on every GPU or CPU on a system is utilised 100% of the time. It works on any multicore or multiprocessor system. Whether it is linear or parallel like the Cell BE! For the first time nothing gets wasted.
The result of RapidMind porting it's Development Platform to Yellow Dog Linux (Enhansed Version) will not be apparent soon. It will take some time for DEVs to adjust and learn, but it is enevitable and if not evolutionary, it is at least Revolutionary in it's vision to harness the computing power for our future.
No doubt RapidMind has a great future and that future not only started on the PS3 with the Duck Demo, but is sure to give us a better, more connected game reality now that it takes us Closer to Metal. Devs we do not know about are at this very moment "Putting the Pedal to the Metal" to Motorstorm us into the future on PS3!
Which limits it and now over the next few years because of it's closed proprietary nature it will die a premature death. It's why the Google's and Firefox's of the world are having great success in the Open Source world. It is the end of Software and OS's dictatorship of the computer graphical interface, and that's the sad truth for an extremely stuborn company without the will to share!
Now we have a new interface born and it's not just on one platform. It too is Open Source. It comes from a small startup who got their big start by developing a small demo for Sony. The name of that company was "Serious Hack Inc" and later they would be renamed to "RapidMind" of Canada. The demo has now become a game and we know it as the "Duck Demo" from E-3 2005.
Many other chip and hardware manufacturers have jumped aboard this Stream Rolling Train with a completely new instruction set of language tools developed over 10 years called "Sh". Using common C++ code (no assembly code required) with these new development tools, any developer can duplicate the "Duck Demo" in a very short period of time. The method of getting those instructions to the chip is considered the code to metal interface. Or more aptly, Close to Metal. The OpenGL runtimes are interfaced directly by being embeded in the game or application itself not in the OS as with DX10.
In tests done by ATI/AMD on their new Streaming GPU Processor (like Cell BE), "CTM" produced a 32 times improvement over using just OpenGL alone. With CTM no core is ever vacant, no compute cycle left emty, every core on every GPU or CPU on a system is utilised 100% of the time. It works on any multicore or multiprocessor system. Whether it is linear or parallel like the Cell BE! For the first time nothing gets wasted.
The result of RapidMind porting it's Development Platform to Yellow Dog Linux (Enhansed Version) will not be apparent soon. It will take some time for DEVs to adjust and learn, but it is enevitable and if not evolutionary, it is at least Revolutionary in it's vision to harness the computing power for our future.
No doubt RapidMind has a great future and that future not only started on the PS3 with the Duck Demo, but is sure to give us a better, more connected game reality now that it takes us Closer to Metal. Devs we do not know about are at this very moment "Putting the Pedal to the Metal" to Motorstorm us into the future on PS3!