What went wrong?

What went wrong?

You made a shit thread.

>no more linux on ps3

Core 2 Duo got released.

Too advanced for the time

Over-engineered much like the entirety of the Sega Saturn

-hardware was barely documented, not even professional, licensed PS3 devs had documentation for all of the cores and features it had
-years have passed by the time they managed to utilize it properly
-Sony removed otherOS support without any good explanation. Secondary OS' running on PS3s had limited access to the hardware (they were running on a hypervisor, not on ring0), however someone might used it to hax the PS3 via security holes (tamper with the firmware?). This killed completely legit usages too like using it as a universal home computer or using it in labs for heavy scientific calculations

they made a gpu with down syndrome and try to pass it off as a cpu

It was the right product at the wrong time, soon after Cell came out there was a takeoff in GPGPUs that made most of its special features moot. Still an awesome processor though.

> Sony removed otherOS support without any good explanation.
The PS3 was being sold at a loss. It doesn't take a genius to realize that people buying it for computational power were costing Sony money and not buying games to make up for it.

this

From a technical standpoint, lots.
-For a chip that was reliant on magic SPE sub-units, they were disappointingly weak.
-Memory management was non-standard and pushed a lot of stuff normally handled by hardware and compilers like translation lookaside onto the software level.
-The designer refused to implement basic hardware helpers like basic branch prediction that even shitchips had to deal with their long pipelines.
-Documentation and support was lackluster at best.

This was a chips that shipped just past the age of developers that write engines for consoles. Game devs were moving towards premade engines and nobody wanted to deal with the weirdness that was the Cell.

There are entire books written about the misadventures of Ken Kutaragi and his misguided attempt to produce magic by putting together custom silicone. To him weird = magic potential. Sony showed him the door and rightfully so.

>-Sony removed otherOS support without any good explanation.
They didn't have to explain it to gamers. They were doing it for tax purposes. With the OtherOS option, they could call the PS3 a general computer and sell it for a nice tax discount. Once the tax loophole was closed, they had no reason to keep it around with Geohot and others using it as a potential attack vector.

>Sega Saturn
I would have said Atari Jaguar, but yeah.

By the time they removed the support I'm not sure that was true anymore.
I was always surprised that Sony didn't actually try to push the general purpose aspect of the machine more to open a second front against Microsoft and Apple.

I'd say under engineered considering it had no hardware mutex locks.

Really interesting idea and extremely powerful when used right, kinda sad we'll never see what it could do if developed further

>silicone

Not really, VLIW/super-wide architecture was popular in previous decades since parallelism made sense when you didn't have single unit power. A lot of old arcade boards were designed this way.

IBM never materialized anything commercially viable with their Octopiler when they tried to sell the Cell as a general purpose processor.

The only modern VLIW processor to actually function in any meaningful manner is the Russian Elbrus chips. It would have made a lot of sense for Sony to contract them to help build a compiler for their wacky chip.

Thanks, pedantic user.

The CELL or both the NEC MIPS chips in the Saturn?

>Sony removed otherOS support without any good explanation
They removed Linux support within weeks of Geohot using it to mess with themes, they knew exactly what they were doing

>MIPS chips
The Saturn's CPUs were SH-2

It was More-Parallel-Processing-than-a-traditional-CPU right at the beginning of the massively-parallel-processing-from-the-gpu-everyone-has Era.

babushka net

Needs more cores.

1) Tools and software usage
- Programming paradigm was not common
- Lack of proper documentation
2) Hardware
- Memory Management / partitioning - SPEs could only work on their very small local cache
- As combined SPEs were quite powerful (for special purposes, lol), but the main control CPU was very weak in-order architecture that lacked many commonly implemented hardware assistance.

General purpose vector processing got moved to the gpu so the main point of the Cell processor, having cores dedicated to working with vectors, became redundant.