The "mighty" Cell - blown away by nVidia

We all heard the talk, that the Cell processor would wipe away all before it. Of course anyone with any knowledge of this kind of technology would see it for what it is, more Sony bullshit. Remember the PS2?

1000 times the power of any PC. 66Gb/s of memory bandwidth. Toy Story graphics in real time. And such & such.

The same kind of outrageous claims were made with this Cell processor which is developed by IBM, Toshiba, and Sony. They claim this to be completely "revolutionary". It's not you can clearly see it's relation to the Playstation 2's processor. In that it's basically lots of weak processors bolted together, the fundamental reason the Playstation 2 is so insanely difficult to develop for and why developers are dropping it and shifting focus to the Microsoft Xbox. Which like all Microsoft platforms is notoriously fast and simple to develop for. Allowing developers to spend more time creating decent games instead of struggling to try and get their software to even work.

Just days ago the official press release about this Cell thing was released. The Sony fanboys started cheering, I guess they just never learn do they - and what should happen just yesterday? nVidia released a statement saying their graphics processors would feature in the Playstation 3 and other Sony products.

What happened to the mighty Cell? Sony now have to back-off saying the Cell is all mighty, and require a seperate GPU to handle graphics, yes it's 1000 times more powerful then any PC today, right that's why it can't perform GPU-like operations on it. They need a PC manufacturer to remotely stand a chance of coming up with a better graphics processor then their extremely lacking PS2. The hypocracy! Just a few years ago they were blasting the Xbox because of it using PC hardware, it featured an nVidia NV2A chip (which at the time they seemed to think was a bad thing). Of course nVidia have since been replaced by ATi, as the performance/quality graphics leader of the PC market, ATi winning the contract to develop the GPU for the Xbox 2, which they have now completed.

Sony are still lagging behind. Good luck with your Playstation 3, you're going to need it.

Posted by Paul on 8th December 2004 in Gaming, Technology

9 comments

Comment from: Wester Visitor

"1000 times the power of any PC. 66Gb/s of memory bandwidth. Toy Story graphics in real time. And such & such."

??? Um, that's total BS dude. That sounds like some over hyped advertisement nVidia exagerrated about at the release of the GeForce 3 back in 2001. Toy Story graphics in [you mean pre-rendered solid *cough*] real-time? 66 GB/s of [BS shared?] memory bandwith? 1000 times the power of a PC? LOL, let's look at the PS2's specs:

Custom Sony Pentium II 297 MHz CPU, 32MB of shared EDRAM, and a custom crap sony graphics chip and sound chip. That can only literally compete with a 1997-circa PC ROFL, that's 1000 times the power of any PC huh? Even with the greatest console fine-tuning and optmizations OS shell and hardware wise it still sucks ass. Oh and the PS2 was released in 2000 if I'm not mistaking? Hah.

The PS3 [not sure if the code-name but don't really care], the Xbox 2 [Xenon], or the GameCube 2 [N5], ummm.... I think we already know the winner of that pointless competition. Sony's PS3's release date is slated for 2006 and it's special "cell" processor is slated for a 2005 finish date, while Xbox 2 will [hopefully] be out in 2005. Creates even more competition. Hmmm...... time will tell. ;)

Comment from: Paul Member

Oh dear god Wester. "1000 times the power of any PC. 66Gb/s of memory bandwidth. Toy Story graphics in real time. And such & such." is what Sony used to market the PS2 before it came out.

Comment from: Wester Visitor

Yes and I think that's completely wrong.

Comment from: chapstick Visitor

Paul wrote:

Oh dear god Wester. "1000 times the power of any PC. 66Gb/s of memory bandwidth. Toy Story graphics in real time. And such & such." is what Sony used to market the PS2 before it came out.

No they didn't. Sony never made that statement. The media made this statement based on the specs they had no clue about. Sony gave away the PS2 specs and the retarded media turned around and made it seem like some gift from heaven.

Comment from: Paul Member

Sony executives said that.

Comment from: Raijin Visitor

Actually, Sony execs did not say that. And Cell can and has been used for graphics processing in one of the E3 tech demos. Its just that a processor designed for grzphics functions would be more efficient at it

Comment from: AkiraX Visitor

"Its just that a processor designed for grzphics functions would be more efficient at it "

but yet the cell is all powerful and a supercomputer....ummm...ok

Comment from: Sephiroth027 Visitor

But the Cell Processor hasn't even been made and the "trailers" that were running at e3 were on a COMPUTER and were not Real-time. The Cell has not been proven to run graphics or even just as normal coputer yet so it will be EXTREMELY difficult to program on. Also Sony Execs DID say "1000X more powerful.....etc".

(I am not a "fanboy", i just wanted to shed some light on the subject)

Comment from: jimmy Visitor

How could you say that the ps3 or ps2 are shit. Sorry to say but who is leading the game consol industry. Sony have been and for quite some time now. Sure the ps2 was a difficult devise to make games on but that was only when it first came out. People soon figured out how to make it work and game companies are leaving the ps2 um what has the largest range of games here ps2. Now with this processor business yes what sony has said is bullshit but microsoft bullshits to. Your saying ps3 is crap because it realise on nvidia. have you read about the two consols? the ps3 has one prossesor yet the xbox 360 (not xbox 2) has three and the ps3 still has a higher picture resolution. I think sony knows what there doing microsoft specilises in software sony specilises in hardware which will always give them an advantage.

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