In 2006, Sony unveiled the long-awaited ‘next generation’ video-game console, a shiny (albeit heavy) machine whose underlying hardware architecture continues the teachings of the Emotion Engine, that is, focus on vector processing to achieve power, even at the cost of complexity. Meanwhile, their new ‘super processor’, the Cell Broadband Engine, is conceived during a crisis of innovation and will have to keep up as trends for multimedia services evolve.
This write-up takes a deep look at Sony, IBM, Toshiba and Nvidia’s joint project, along with its execution and effect on the industry.
An extremely deep dive into the somewhat unusual architecture of the PlayStation 3. Not for the faint of heart, for sure.
I always thought the PS3 cell processor design was really cool. Developers had trouble exploiting it’s full potential at the time because of how different it was. I wanted to get one to work with under linux. But as I recall there were restriction that took it’s full capabilities off the table. And of course they went on to retroactively block linux with firmware updates. I completely lost interest after that, but it was a good precursor for GPGPUs.
I found a detailed account of the PS3’s other-os support and subsequent removal…
https://tedium.co/2020/11/27/sony-linux-otheros-geohot-history/
It was jailbroken after other-os got disabled. Ironically this enabled more control over the hardware as opposed to running under the hypervisor that games and other-os were originally required to run under.
As much as I found the Cell architecture interesting, I was relieved that the more generic Xbox style won at the end. Actually even Xbox’s strange features were dropped in future hardware (ESRAM specific for post-processing only, connecting L2 cache directly to GPUs), but actual nice things like vector instructions and unified shader architectures were kept.
Just today we could reach a milestone of being able to boot all PS3 applications in an emulator: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2021-10-21-ps3-emulator-reaches-new-milestone-in-quest-to-run-every-game-made-on-platform . It is not that Xbox 360 is better, though: https://github.com/xenia-project/game-compatibility/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3Astate-crash-guest
While these strange architectures help in their day, they make software preservation and porting a mess for the future.
These were the last hurrah in unique console architectures. nearly every dedicated console before was a custom architecture, trying to squeeze as much power out of the technology of the time for a price that many could afford. Most end users wouldn’t even know what a MIPS processor was, but i bet many of them had played games on one.
Nowadays, the console world has stagnated, with every major console being based on existing consumer hardware, be it the x86 home consoles like the PS4/PS5/XBox One/XBox Series X or the ARM-based systems like the Switch and SteamPadthingy. It’s much easier for the big gaming companies to go to the big silicon companies and go “build us one of those out of bits of that” than it is to homebrew a complete architecture, with all the R&D, money, time, and engineers that would require.
I’ve said it before, and i’ll say it again, the modern monocultures of computer designs are boring, and in the long run, not very good for security, innovation, and in the end, the consumer.
But that “boringness” is actually helping us consumers today.
Take the new Xbox and PS5. They have almost full backwards compatibility with the previous generation titles. Xbox also has compatibility with some older generation titles as well, and Sony is completely lacking anything from PS3 and prior. The main determiner is PS4/PS5 and XboxOne/Series have the same architecture, previous generations did not.
Phones, too, are almost entirely backwards compatible with older software, and of course PCs have always been like that. Even the latest gen i7 or a Ryzen chip will install MS-DOS fine.
Yes, there was a time pushing more performance from custom chips were important. It was common to see DSP cores on ARM handhelds, or video post-processing on gaming consoles. Fortunately our generic purpose processors (GPUs) are now capable for almost all tasks, and we now have simpler TPUs for massive low precision calculations.
@The123king
I love the fact that getting a console with tflops of processing power is nowadays considered “boring.”
The PS3 is completely jailbroken nowadays so you can install linux with hardware acceleration, not that hobbled OtherOS Sony gave you. The 256MB RAM limitation and piss poor PowerPC support remain though…
I read somewhere that originally the PS3 wasn't going to have a GPU, it was going to have more than 1 Cell processor.. That would have been very interesting indeed.
It’s been long enough that I think the NDAs don’t apply anymore.
I worked with the original RSX team, the PS3 was designed to have a GPU from the get go.
At that time IBM was smoking a lot of crack with their CELL. So there was a lot of ridiculous stuff going on the internet at that time.
That console soured a lot of vendors.
I wish there had been a Dreamcast II to kick it’s butt. All Sega had to do was make their original GD ROM a DVD and who knows what might have happened …. online gaming would have taken off sooner for one thing.
I read somewhere that the XBox was a spiritual, if not direct, Dreamcast successor. Something something Dreamcast devs something something hardware team something something DirectX
Correct. Something something Windows CE runs on the DC and Bill Gates attended a meeting where he saw something something.
Believe it or not the PlayStation also somehow emerged from a botched colab with Sega. Sony and Sega were planning a console colab. Sega Japan decided it was a bad idea. Sony then had a better one and PS was born. They did everything right – easy to program, great programming support, brilliant advertising and polygon optimized.
And Saturn still might have done well if they hadn’t made more stupid decisions, like launching early in the US with no games. Saturn actually did a lot better in Japan until GD Rom and broken DRM destroyed the Dreamcast along with Sega as a console player..
The Playstation was born out of a collab between Sony and Nintendo, not Sega. It was originally a CD-based SNES
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-51628836
You are correct. I will let my error stand for the world to see. Only God is perfect ;-). I read all those books years ago. I backed the Atari VCS trying to recapture the old days. A bit of a mongrel. Not sure what it is really useful for but just discovered it can run Haiku. So that is what it will do.