AMD CEO Lisa Su reminisces about designing the PS3's infamous Cell processor during her time at IBM

Nemeski@lemm.ee to Games@sh.itjust.works – 99 points –
AMD CEO Lisa Su reminisces about designing the PS3's infamous Cell processor during her time at IBM
tomshardware.com
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it's also a great win for AMD, in general, to provide the hardware behind the two biggest consoles on the market for two consecutive (and a third upcoming) console generations.

Doesn't the Switch have as much market share as the other two combined?

different generation

How can the switch be a different console from last gen, current gen, and next gen? Those are literally the only generations it could be considered part of.

but the switch is last gen?

Setting aside that the industry professionals definitely count it as current gen for sales metrics, that's fuckin, irrelevant when the statement is about all three of last gen, current gen, and next gen. Whichever one you want to call the Switch part of, it's the best selling console of that generation, so the statement that AMD sold chips the best selling console of that generation is false. Unless you want to make the claim the Switch is from 2006, they are incorrect.

oh okay, i see what you meant now. but:

  • switch sold 125 million by march 2023
  • ps4 and xbox one sold 117 + 58 million by september 2023
  • wii u, which had amd gpu, also sold 13.5 million by its discontinuation

amd did win, it seems

Does it count as a console?

I really don’t know, I guess you could say handheld gaming console, but consoles have to hook up to something.

I’ve always heard it as consoles are static and portables are called handheld gaming systems

Per Wikipedia, yes. A game console is the general term. A home console is the one that plugs into a tv, and a handheld console is something like a switch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_console

In that case isn't the DS the best selling console of that gen?

If you put them all (handheld, home, micro, and hybrid) into the same bucket then, yes.

DS > Wii > PS3 > 360 > PSP > N-Gage > Ouya

It also makes the DS the best selling console to launch in the 21st century.

Kinda nuts that the least popular (of the big 3) device that gen sold like 80 million units. It's no wonder everyone was scared of mobile by the end, you can see the impact it made.

Also shows how the Switch was a clever move by Nintendo, getting a lot of that audience back

I’m nitpicking, I know, but to be infamous is a bad thing. It’s more likely the author meant prestigious or esteemed.

The cell processor is infamous for making the PS3 notoriously difficult to develop for.

It was ahead of its time and required parallel processing before most developers or game engines had experience supporting it. Multicore processors didn’t become mainstream for another ~5 years.

Multi-core CPUs were still starting out to be fair, but they were definitely at least somewhat mainstream by the time of the 360/ps3. The 360 was tri-core, and was considered easier to develop for since all three of those cores shared resources. Meanwhile, the cell architecture is hard to develop for even by modern standards. As such, most games only made use of the PPE and left the SPE alone.

The problem was less parallel processing but that every one of the cell‘s 8 co-processors (SPE) needed to be individually programmed. The 360 had a tri core design that was much easier to develop for and take full advantage of. Thus, most 360 games, especially early in the generation, look and/or perform better than their ps3 counterparts, since the latter usually only ran on the one regular processor core (PPE) that the cell had, without taking Ananas off the SPEs. Notable exceptions are the ps3 exclusive titles and some other later games, that took partial or even fully advantage. Even Naughty Dog only used 3-4 SPEs in their earlier uncharted games, while their later games like the last of us uses them all.