CrysisFreak
Banned
Yes. Ken Kutaragi insisted.
The Cell will probably outperform the APU
The Cell will probably outperform the APU
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The Tempest Engine Inside PS5 is Just a PS3 Cell Processor ?
- Thread starter CobraXT
- Start date
Md Ray
Member
Yes. But in some cases, the PS4 CPU can even be behind PS3's Cell.
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General purpose CPUs (read: anything non-GPU) are performant at processing data in serial. Complex calculations like happen in succession very quickly.
GPUs can be thought of as having opposite strengths, they excel at simple calculations but at many orders of parallelism, such moving the vertices of a shape.
In which case, if these sound processors really were cut from the same cloth (so-to-speak), physics and raytracing would be out of their wheelhouse.
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LordOfChaos
Member
It's not likely the exact Cell, they said it's a modified CU from the GPU, but I think they're doing the reverse of the PS3 BC situation. Back then, the hardware was built into early versions, but the software didn't always come along, so they had over promised.
It was weird to me that they went back 15 years and two generations to describe the Tempest engine as SPU-like, so maybe what they're doing is just saying it's for audio at first, but are working at PS3 BC and using that for any tricky SPU code, without promising anything just yet as they work on it.
It was weird to me that they went back 15 years and two generations to describe the Tempest engine as SPU-like, so maybe what they're doing is just saying it's for audio at first, but are working at PS3 BC and using that for any tricky SPU code, without promising anything just yet as they work on it.
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LordOfChaos
Member
It's not so simple, the Cell was very SIMD heavy, that's almost all an SPU was apart from some local memory and DMA engines, and that's why it excelled in that Ubisoft dancers benchmark, but a game doesn't spend all its time running pure SIMD. The Jaguar was not a powerful CPU even at the time, but it's still a much more modern processor with prefetching, caches, out of order processing, which make general code you'd write faster invisibly, while the Cell was all about hand wringing out more performance as the silicon budget was spent on as much peak SIMD as you could get at the time.
As Ubisoft also concluded, what the Cell was better at is also now much better suited to a GPU.
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Neo_game
Member
Actually Ubisoft ran a benchmark of cloth simulation on CPU and found that PS3 was faster than PS4. Xbox has slightly more overclock than PS4 so it was slightly ahead of PS3 CPU
http://www.redgamingtech.com/ubisoft-gdc-presentation-of-ps4-x1-gpu-cpu-performance/
chilichote
Member
I think it is part of the GPU but not part of the other CUs, because 4 of them are deactivated because of the yield and it was explicitly said that the Tempest Engine was revised and not that all CUs have this revision as well. I personally would interpret that the Tempest Engine is part of the GPU but independent of the rest of the shaders.
I'm looking forward to the tear down promised by Cerny!
JareBear: Remastered
Banned
I think that
I think it's a cool chip that will enhance audio capabilities while offloading tasks from the CPU.
That's all I really care about.
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Ar¢tos
Member
So edgy!
mili2110
Member
So you can deactivate the cache from a CU and have a "Tempest Engine"!? That means that you could take any of othe 36 active CUs as the tempest engine? I cant but help think that one of the 36 CUs is being used as the tempest engine. I dont think you could re-purpose one of the defective CUs for audio....I hope Cerny will address those concerns sooner or later. Or is there other info?
itsjustJEFF
Member
Probably not, the CPU's in the PS5/XBSX are pretty great. But, apparently the Cell CPU is better than the Jaguars. The issue is that they're a B to code for. You'd supposedly have to code in a completely different way than if you were coding for the 360. But if you did put in the effort, then the results were great. Sorry, I forgot which dev made that statement. If i find it I'll update my post.
LordOfChaos
Member
It's not taking one of the 36. They couldn't have claimed their GPU numbers if it was, mathematically.
It's CU-like but modified to rely on DMA rather than caches, I don't know where physically it resides and would be vaguely curious, but there's about zero chance it's taking away from the 36 active CUs they already claim.
Disabling a CU for yields also doesn't mean it's a defective part on all chips or that every part of it is defective. I wonder if disabling the caches and no longer counting it as a CU is the disabled bit to improve yields, but enough is functional to work as the Tempest.
SantaC
Member
Without the shitty time traveling?
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RaySoft
Member
No, its not that simple. The way I see it Cerny used the CU reference because they probably takes up about the same die size and use the same interconnects.
But it's NOT a CU. Its a totally custom piece streamlined for simd operations and probably something else optimized for sound calculation. The SPU reference was thrown in for a nice nod to the Cell, where the SPUs functions in a similar way.
You can NOT turn a regular CU into a tempest like block using software;-)
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