I always wondered about the legacy of the Cell architecture, which seems to have gone nowhere. I've never seen a developer praise it, and you can find devs who love just about every silly weird computer thing. Like, surely someone out there (emu devs?) have respect for what Cell was doing, right?

I've never understood it. Multicore processors already existed (the X360 had a triple-core processor, oddly) so I'm not clear what going back to multiple CPUs accomplished. Cell cores could act as FPUs also, right? PS3 didn't have dedicated GPU, right?

Such a strange little system, I'm still amazed it ever existed. Especially the OG ones that had PS2 chips in them for backwards compatability! Ah, I miss my old PS3.

[–] biscuitswalrus@aussie.zone 6 points 4 months ago

I knew a Datacenter that had hundreds of ps3s for rendering fluid simulation and other such things that at the time were absolutely cutting edge tech. I believe F1 and some early 3d pixar stuff was rendered on those farms. But like all things, technology marched on. fpgpas and cuda have taken that space.

Cell definitely was heavily used by specialist/nichr industry though.

I wonder if I can find you some link to explain it better than the rumours I heard from staff that used to work in those datacentres.

Hmm hard to find commercial applications, probably individuals might have blogged otherwise here's what I'm talking about: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster

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