Playstation 4 Cell Chip Due To Change?
Here’s some technical information on a possible new cell chip for the PS4. We’ve heard about the Cell 3 chip with 32 SPEs and 2 PPEs, well it seems IBM are due to change all that. The new possible chip now is the design for 32 SPEs and 4 PPEs.
Some features of the new chip:
100% backward compatible
Performance on PPE significantly better
Performance per SPE equal or better
Significantly better on applications that benefit from new instructions
Better inter-SPE latency
More on-chip memory
Better main memory latency and bandwidth
Apparently IBM are aiming for 1 TeraFLOPS of performance with this new chip. To put that into perspective the current Playstation 3 Cell chip is only capable of 204 GigaFLOPS.
The new cell is projected for around 2010/2011, with 2011 rumored to be the year we’ll see a PS4 release…coincidence?
Edit: Since publishing this post the download link to the IBM .pdf is now broken. Sadly it seems the .pdf has disappeared entirely from the site, however i have managed to find a number of screenshots from the relevant pages mentioned above – hope that helps.
last year i attended a public lecture on game development by an employee of sony. in that lecture he said that more impressive games could be written for the ps3 than were possible on the xbox360 so long as full use was made of all six of the ps3s available spes.
he said that looking to the future it was very important for developers to get used to using spes because future cell processors would include hundreds of spes. this prediction is agreement with your story that the ps4 will feature 32 spes. i guess that it is also an indication that the ps5′s cell processor will have 128 or 256 spes.
paulm said this at 12:48 pm
the link to the ibm website is broken. i would really like to read page 10. is this document available anywhere else?
paulm said this at 1:15 pm
Hi paulm, sorry about the broken link.
I haven’t been able to find the missing PDF file but i did manage to locate some scans of individual pages – pages 10,11,16,17 and 22 – hope that helps.
admin said this at 2:45 pm
The chip will have to have support disparate SPE’s to be a true gaming chip like AMD’s future plans. This way one of the SPE’s can be a graphics processor, another a physic processor, etc.
That would make a bas a$$ chip. I think AMD would come out ahead, if IBM doesn’t plan this for the future of cell processors.
Narutosan said this at 8:57 pm
Wow. An even more powerful chip than the current Cell. The PS4 will be amazing.
Also, is “100% backwards compatible” related to backwards compatibility with PS1, PS2, and PS3 games, or is it a reference to something else?
JackS said this at 7:52 pm
[...] next-generation CPU, then the rumoured new 32 SPE/4 PPE Cell chip will be more than capable (thanks ps4forums.com), as it is planned to hit the 1TFLOP region as well. As the site suggests, IBM will be pushing out [...]
Sony's PS4: Ray Traced Games A Possiblity | PS4Sony.net - Your PlayStation 4 console info site! [Sony PS4] said this at 5:51 pm
Full backwards compatibility with previous code/work/whatever developed for the previous iterations of the CELL.
@Narutosan
Eveything can be runeed on the CELL, it only depends on the developer/programmer to shoose what chip will do what.
me said this at 11:19 am
[...] has it that they are aiming for 1 TeraFLOPS of performance (PS3 does 204) with 4 PPEs and 32 SPEs PS4 Cell Chip Capable Of 1 TeraFLOPS Going out on a limb i don't think it will have a separate GPU doing all the processing but instead [...]
PS3 has lost to Wii and Xbox360 (discuss) - Page 87 - FreddysHouse said this at 6:33 pm
[...] has it that they are aiming for 1 TeraFLOPS of performance (PS3 does 204) with 4 PPEs and 32 SPEs PS4 Cell Chip Capable Of 1 TeraFLOPS Going out on a limb i don't think it will have a separate GPU doing all the processing but instead [...]
PS3 has lost to Wii and Xbox360 (discuss) - Page 88 - FreddysHouse said this at 12:10 pm