manunited: In a demonstration of SMP with 16 playstation 2s two or four of them were required just for load balancing. A high number of processors doesn't necessarily make games faster. In fact almost no game supports multiprocessing. The PS2 is a multiprocessor architecture and nobody can fully utilize it. Multiprocessing (and heavy multithreading) adds a lot more possible errors to the whole job and costs a lot of performance to handle. Your average game can be split up in two ways: One thread per game component (audio, video, physics, control, ...), which is what games currently do, or one thread per entity (enemy, player, projectile, etc), which would create thousands of threads and demand a powerful processor just to ive the work to the rest. Now imagine you're trying to load something and there are two load processes at the same time. Since they're asynchronous and maybe even on different CPUs you'd have a hell of a job coordinating both accesses. Thread interaction in realtime environments can cause trouble with e.g. two threads modifying one object, etc.
This is not a problem in supercomputers, since those don't calculate in realtime, but have a predetermined amount of data which has to be processed. User interaction doesn't happen often and can take time to handle, in a game you'd expect the game to react now, not in five seconds. The whole interaction deal makes the data unreliable, so you can't just throw data at a processor and look again when it's done, the data changes and likely invalidates any results the processor has at that time.
Termin8: The Cell (apparently renamed to Grid) is a scalable multiprocessor that Sony plans to use in any and all devices they manufacture. In theory you can throw any number of those processors at a device and use more where more processing power is required. Supercomputers use similar setups. Unfortunately power consumption and heat production rise with the number of processors as well and each individual unit has to be less powerful than a normal CPU built at the same time (despite what Sony claims) unless you feel comfortable installing an industrial-grade cooling system into a games console that has to run in the living room (and therefore be less noisy than a PC that runs in a work room or office environment). Sony claims they can produce a console that is many (1000) times more powerful than any other home computer on the market. We all remember their claims for the PS2, though.
Topic: The rumored and newsed specwar (Read 4420 times)
