PlayStation 3 Architecture (2021) • Hacker News Board

Re: PlayStation 3 Architecture (2021)

#61

Post by jonhohle » Sat, Oct 18, 2025, 11:10 PM UTC

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #43

CHB0403085482 wrote: post #41

PS3 would have done better as a gaming console if the architecture wasn't so hard to program and wasn't forced to be a trojan blue-ray player.

IIRC the Cell architecture was OK-ish for a CPU architecture, just that the PS3 was too gimped on RAM(256MB) for game devs to use to its full potential. The trojan Blu-ray Player actually worked in its favor. The big issue with the Cell architecture is that it was designed to act as a GPU as well which they realized later in development that it won't be powerful enough for those graphics and they'll still need a dedi…

Every console chose PowerPC that generation. It definitely wasn’t obvious to anyone (except maybe Apple), that the architecture was reaching it’s commercial limit.

Re: PlayStation 3 Architecture (2021)

#62

Post by izacus » Sun, Oct 19, 2025, 8:50 AM UTC

izacus wrote: post #34

lepicz wrote: post #23

i did a bit dev on ps3 and i remember there was a small memory on the chip, like 256k that was accessible to programmer. i always found this very appealing, having a blazing fast memory under programmer control so i wonder: why don't we have that on other cpus?

We call it "cache" don't we these days? And they've become massive - Apple M series and AMX Strix series have 24/32MB of L3 cache. This is where a lot of their performance comes from.

*AMD, obviously I meant AMD, not AMX :)

Re: PlayStation 3 Architecture (2021)

#63

Post by lepicz » Mon, Oct 20, 2025, 7:05 AM UTC

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #31

lepicz wrote: post #23

i did a bit dev on ps3 and i remember there was a small memory on the chip, like 256k that was accessible to programmer. i always found this very appealing, having a blazing fast memory under programmer control so i wonder: why don't we have that on other cpus?

> why don't we have that on other cpus? We do, it's called "cache" or "registers".

as a programmer you have (almost) no control over cache. that's not what i meant.

registers ok, but i want at least one megabyte of them :)