Comments on: Cell companion chip gets hot demo

Toshiba shows off a "super companion chip" to the Cell microprocessor that can record 48 TV shows at once.

[wazzledoozle]

The real truth behind the cell and PS3

http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=510&Itemid=2

In reply to the link you posted

I dont put much faith in what anyone at valve has to say, dont get me wrong i dont hate valve, i just dont like steam and having to be connected to the internet just to play a single player game like you do in halflife 2.

Anyways subject at hand it is difficult for a company to program for next gen consoles at first and i believe most know that almost all next gen console hardware is never really fully utilized even when its life span is almost up, case in point the Sega Saturn system.

Sega's Saturn system was in alot of ways superior to Sony's Playstation because of Saturns parallel processing power, it has 2 hitachi sh1 cpu's but most companies found it very difficult programming a game to use both Hitachi SH1 cpu's, so most wrote code utilizing only one of the cpu's, it wasnt untill later much later that some game companies finally had some games that did use both cpu's and yeah the quality of the game was superior to those on PS1 but by that time it was a little to late as Sony had captured most of the Market.

To add a little more, Epic didnt seem to have a problem running the unreal engine 3 on Sony's PS3 Prototype Hardware and i know that they were working on that code before Sony even ever anounced the PS3... Im guessing that most companies wont be using all the cores in the cell chip to begin with even so as long as the quality of the game is good most people wont care, and i cant see were Valve would make anything of a deal out of this unless they were planning on scrapping HL2 code and rewriting it to use all the cores at once found in the next gen consoles.

[Andrew J Glina]

Read your own link

Newell is commenting more in regard to the Xbox 360, not the PS3.

Even so, they both do have the same problems that he describes. It is hard to write a multithreaded program due to syncronisation. The more threads the harder it is. But the bottom line is that it is the future (and not just on consoles) so he should just get over it and get back to coding.