51–60 of 133 posts
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No, this is more like any modern processor, which translates instruction codes into micro-ops. To over-simplify IBM just has two of these units per thread rather than one.
I wonder how they handle potential differences in memory barriers, instruction order scheduling and other stuff and do they run the core in one mode continuously or do the mix instruction streams from different instruction sets? Anybody got a link to an article?
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It's a little more complex than that, IMO. For starters, IBM did also do the CPU for the GameCube, and that was likely a part of the Wii using an upgraded PPC arch for that. On the flipside, there is the theory (I think even Copetti brings it up in their XBox 360 Architecture breakdown [0]) that IBM using the Cell PPE for the 360's tri-cores left a sour taste in Toshiba, but more-so Sony's mouths. I think the big 'X…
I think Nintendo used Tegra because it was super cheap. AMD has access to the same ARM cores as everyone else (see Seattle and Sound Waves) but a semi-custom chip would have been more expensive than an overstocked Tegra.
Hell Nvidia was so desperate they did the whole Shield thing...
Right click -> Open image in new tab -> zoom in If you haven't already.
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More like mid-2000s, even with the least charitable interpretation. There was a time when IBM dominated console CPUs for a massively successful generation (PS3, Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii).
It's a little more complex than that, IMO. For starters, IBM did also do the CPU for the GameCube, and that was likely a part of the Wii using an upgraded PPC arch for that. On the flipside, there is the theory (I think even Copetti brings it up in their XBox 360 Architecture breakdown [0]) that IBM using the Cell PPE for the 360's tri-cores left a sour taste in Toshiba, but more-so Sony's mouths. I think the big 'X…
It's more than a theory. It's pretty much spelled out explicitly in The Race For A New Game Machine how salty not just Sony and Toshiba were in the broad sense, but also the Sony and Toshiba engineers that the IBM team worked with felt pretty betrayed.
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Xbox 360 used an Intel CPU. PS3 used the Cell processor but it’s debatable how much that was an asset vs handicap. Total PlayStation sales dropped for that generation vs both PS2 and PS4. The manufacturing costs didn’t fall nearly as fast as expected and it was a poor fit in terms of cross platform development etc. PS4 moved to AMD.
> Xbox 360 used an Intel CPU. No. It was a PowerPC based one called, IIRC, Xenon.
This feels like a baby step towards Arm being able to emulate z/Arch workloads, maybe with a bit of secret sauce for certain specific operations, which doesn't seem very much like IBM.
(or QEMU, for partition level emulation).
why is IBM moving forward that way
Earlier quoted context omitted.
More like mid-2000s, even with the least charitable interpretation. There was a time when IBM dominated console CPUs for a massively successful generation (PS3, Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii).
It's a little more complex than that, IMO. For starters, IBM did also do the CPU for the GameCube, and that was likely a part of the Wii using an upgraded PPC arch for that. On the flipside, there is the theory (I think even Copetti brings it up in their XBox 360 Architecture breakdown [0]) that IBM using the Cell PPE for the 360's tri-cores left a sour taste in Toshiba, but more-so Sony's mouths. I think the big 'X…