The PS3 Licked the Many Cookie

Yea, this was the horrible world of embedded programming and working with SoCs before the iPhone SDK finally raised the bar. BSPs composed of barely-working cobbled-together gcc toolchains, jurassic-aged kernels, opaque blobs for flashing the devices, incomplete or nonworking boot loaders, entirely different glue scripts for every tiny chip rev, incomplete documentation. And if you wanted to build your own toolchain? LOL, good luck because every gnu tool needed to be patched in order to work. It was a total mess. You could tell these companies just made chips and reference systems, and only grudgingly provided a way to develop on them. iPhone and Xcode was such breath of fresh air. It pulled me out of embedded and I never went back.

I didn't gain direct experience with Cell, but given that description of the tooling, I'm unconvinced that the issue is fundamental to many-core, or that the author's assertion of non-composability holds up under scrutiny. Composition in "flat" processing architectures is, in principle, exactly what is already seen on a circuit diagram. It recurs in the unit record machines of old, and in modern dataflow systems.

That architecture does have particular weaknesses when it is meant to interface with a random-access-and-deep-callstacks workflow(as would be the case using C++) - and CPUs have accrued complex cache and pipelining systems to cater to that workflow since it does have practical benefit - but the flat approach has also demonstrated success when it's used in stream processing with real-time requirements.

Given that, and the outlier success of some first-party developers, I would lean towards the Cell hardware being catastrophically situated within the software stack, versus being an inherently worse use of transistors.

It’s clear from one of the opening statements that the author considered it a failure for developers, not in the absolute sense you are pointing to. It’s not that far into the article.

> The PS3 failed developers because it was an excessively heterogenous computer; and low level heterogeneous compute resists composability.

The PS3 maybe wasn't a failure in the long run, but at launch it was a disaster all around. Sony was not making a profit on the PS3, and the initial sales at its initial price were not looking good[1]. With the Wii as its primary competitor, the Wii absolutely smashed the PS3 at launch and for a long while after, and it still maintains the lead. Sony mainly kept the competition close by slashing the price and introducing improved models, but in the long run I think the reason why their sales numbers managed to wind up OK is because they held out for the long haul. The PS3 continued to be the "current-gen" Sony console for a long time. By the time Sony had released the PS4 in late 2013/early 2014, Nintendo had already released its ill-fated Wii U console an entire year earlier in late 2012. I think what helped the PS3 a lot here was the fact that it did have a very compelling library of titles, even if it wasn't a super large one. As far as I know, Metal Gear Solid 4 was only released for PlayStation 3; that stands out to me as a game that would've been a console-seller for many.

So while PS3 was not ultimately a commercial success, it was clearly disliked by developers and the launch was certainly a disaster. I think you could argue the PS3 was a failure in many regards, and a success in some other regards. Credit to Sony, they definitely persevered through a tough launch and made it out to the other end. Nintendo wasn't able to pull off the same for the Wii U, even though it also did have some good exclusive games in the library.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20161104003151/http://www.pcworl...

The Sony-Toshiba-IBM alliance had much grander plans for the Cell architecture, which ultimately came to naught. The PS3 wasn't just a console, it was supposed to be a revolution in computing. As a console, it did alright (though it's still handily beaten by its own predecessor and marginally by its own successor), but as an exponent of the Cell architecture that was supposed to be the future, it failed miserably. Sony yanked OtherOS a couple of years into its life, and while a Cell supercomputer was the first to break the petaflop barrier, it was quickly surpassed by x86 and then Arm.

There are a lot of different measures. The Wii (the 7th gen Nintendo console) outsold it considerably, as did the 6th gen PS2 (which far and away beat out all other consoles in its generation).

Going from such market dominance to second place is not good. Not being able to improve upon your position as the industry leader is not good. Failure might be strong, but I certainly wouldn't be happy if I was an exec at Sony at the time.

Sales wasn't what the article was referring to if you take the context of literally the very first sentence of the article

perhaps a better headline would have been "why the PS3 architecture failed". if it was a success, they wouldn't have abandoned it for the next generation.

OP is talking about developer experience. From right after the image:

> The PS3 failed developers because it was an excessively heterogenous computer; [...]

Where a console rates on the all-time sales leader board is pretty irrelevant, since the industry has grown so much in absolute terms. As when looking at movie box office revenue, you need to look at more than one number if you want to judge the real performance of a console in the market.

Here is a good example: The PS3 sold only slightly more than half as many units as its predecessor, the PS2, did. Most businesses would, in fact, consider it a failure if their 3rd generation product sold much more poorly than the second generation. Sony's rapid move away from the PS3/Cell architecture gives you a pretty good reason to believe they considered it a failure too.

I think one thing that the linked article (which I think is great and I generally agree with!) misses is that libraries and abstraction can patch over the lack of composability created by heterogeneous systems. We see it everywhere - AI/ML libraries abstracting over some combination of TPU, vector processing, and GPU cores being one obvious modern place.

This happened on the PS3, too, later in its life: Sony released PlayStation Edge and middleware/engine vendors increasingly learned how to use SPU to patch over RSX being slow. At this point developers stopped needing to care so much about the composability issues introduced by heterogeneous computing, since they could use the SPUs as another function processor to offload, for example, geometry processing, without caring about the implementation details so much.

> Both systems pushed the clock rate much higher than PCs at the time.

Intel reached 3.2GHz on a production part in June 2003, with the P4 HT 3.2 SL792. At the time the 360 and PS3 were released, Intel's highest clocked part was the P4 EE SL7Z4 at 3.73.

I'm surprised the SPUs were used for post-processing, cause whenever I try to do software rendering I get bottlenecked on fill rate quickly. I believe you, because I've seen it attested in many places, but I'm surprised by it.

> The Xbox 360 doubled down on this while the PS3 tried to do clever things with an innovative architecture.

I don't think this is really an accurate description of the 360 hardware. The CPU was much more conventional than the PS3, but still custom (derived from the PPE in the cell, but has an extended version of VMX extension). The GPU was the first to use a unified shader architecture. Unified memory was also fairly novel in the context of a high performance 3D game machine. The use of eDRAM for the framebuffer is not novel (the Gamecube's Flipper GPU had this previously), but also wasn't something you generally saw in off-the-shelf designs. Meanwhile the PS3 had an actual off the shelf GPU.

These days all the consoles have unified shaders and memory, but I think that just speaks to the success of what the 360 pioneered.

Since then, consoles have gotten a lot closer to commodity hardware of course. They're custom parts (well except the original Switch I guess), but the changes from the off the shelf stuff are a lot smaller.

in the beginning general purpose computers weren't capable of running graphics like the consoles could. That took dedicated hardware that only the early Atari/NES/Genesis had. That's not to say that the Apple or IBM clones didn't have games, they did, but it just wasn't the same. The differentiation was their hardware, enabling games that couldn't be run on early PCs. Otherwise why buy a console?

So the thinking was a unique architecture is what a console's raison d’être was. Of course now we know better, as the latest generation of consoles shows, butthat's where the thinking for the PS3's cell architecture came from.

As things got more expensive we really started to see a switch from custom or in-house engines to the ones we’re so familiar with like Unity and Unreal.

Many developers couldn’t afford to keep up if they had to build their own engine, let alone on multiple platforms.

Far cheaper/easier to share the cost with many others through Unreal licenses. Your fame is more portable and can use more features that you may have ever had time to add to the engine.

It’s way easier to make multi-platform engines if each one doesn’t need its own ridiculously special way of doing things. And unless that platform is the one that’s driving a huge amount of sales I’m guessing it’s gonna get less attention/optimization.

I suspect that as well.

It's not that the architecture was bad, it's that it's not easily compatible to other endpoints developers wanted to release on resulting in prohibitively high costs of doing a "full" port.

> The PS3 failed developers because it was an excessively heterogenous computer

Which links to the Wiki:

> These systems gain performance or energy efficiency not just by adding the same type of processors, but by adding dissimilar coprocessors

Modern CPUs have many similar cores, not dissimilar cores.

i was thinking similar lines.

maybe i dont full understand "many-core", but the definition the article implies aligns with what i think of latest qualcomm snapdragon mobile processor for example with cores at different frequencies/other differences.

also i dont understand why ps3 is considered a failure, when did it fail?

in NA xbox360 was more popular (i would say because xbox live) but ps3 was not far behind (i owned a ps3 at launch and didnt get a xbox360 till years later).

from a lifetime sales, shows more ps3s shipped globally than xbox.

I don't know why it's redacted here; maybe he couldn't find a public source.

It is a mind bendingly tiny 16MB/s bandwidth to perform CPU reads from RSX memory.

It certainly doesn't seem to have impacted adoption, though.

For whatever reasons developers seem loath to talk about how difficult developing for a given console architecture is until the console is dead and buried. I guess the assumption is that the console vendor might retaliate, or the fans might say, "Well all of these other companies are somehow doing it, so you guys must just suck at your jobs."

An early interview with Shinji Mikami is one of the only ones I can recall about a high-profile being frank about having difficulties developing for the console[0]:

> IGNinsider: Ahh, smart politics. How do you feel about working on the PlayStation 2? Have you found any strengths in the system by working on Devil May Cry that you hadn't found before? > > Mikami: If the programmer is really good, then you can achieve really high quality, but if the programmer isn't that great then it is really hard to work with. We lost three programmers during Devil May Cry because they couldn't keep up.

[0] https://www.ign.com/articles/2001/05/31/interview-with-shinj...

Sony needed developers for the PlayStation. So they did a good job.

The PlayStation did so well a lot of people wanted the PlayStation 2. And because it worked as a cheap DVD player it sold extremely well.

Sony learned hard to program expensive exotic hardware does great!

PS3 arrives with hardware that’s even more expensive and even harder to program and gets a world of hurt.

So for the PlayStation 4 they tried to figure out what went wrong and realized they needed to make things real easy for developers. Success!

PlayStation 5, that PlayStation 4 four thing worked great let’s keep being nice to developers. Going very well.

The PS2 succeeded _in-spite_ of its problems. And Sony didn’t realize that.

The PS4 and beyond is entirely creditable to Mark Cerny who spent a lot of time talking to developers who had spent years pulling their hair out with the PS3.