blazt
09-03-2007, 22:53
Sony has gotten a lot of bad press among developers for the implementation of the Cell processor, with devs complaining about the difficulty of programming, to the inefficiency of process execution. Sony has responded at GDC this year with a myriad of discussions and tools for devs that were aimed at better helping them understand and use the Cell.
During Phil Harrison’s keynote speech on Wednesday, Sony highlighted a new initiative called Playstation EDGE, in which Sony is making available to developers a set of tools for the Cell and RSX that Sony developed internally for first party games. The EDGE tools however are simply tools, and there were many discussions at the conference that Sony held to help teach developers how to use those tools.
It seems that up to this point there has been a very difficult learning curve for Playstation 3 developers. I met a developer earlier this week that claimed that there was no way to share information between SPUs, (the miniature specialized cores on the Cell).
So Sony set out and explained what works and what doesn’t for SPUs, both for performance and for efficiency. They discussed different methods for threading and dividing up work on the SPUs, and ways to efficiently pass data between SPUs.
Of particular interest however was the bit Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide (SCEWW) said about branching AI on the SPU. Branching is a common technique used in artificial intelligence where a program randomly chooses a few samples from a larger set of options, and then tests each to see which is the best. This method of AI can provide more realistic behavior, as humans often don’t choose the overall best option because it simply doesn’t occur to them, however it is very inefficient to begin with, and due to the nature of the type of process it is, most developers have claimed that the SPUs would be absolutely terrible for branching.
As Sony put it however, branching is absolutely terrible for ALL processors. In their experience, they said, it is less terrible for the SPUs however. In the upcoming game Heavenly Sword, they said that moving the branching AI off of the Power Processor Unit (PPU) increased the performance of that particular process. In other words, the same branching ran better on the SPUs.
Microsoft and Xbox fans have long claimed that the triple-core PPC setup which the 360 enjoys is far superior for AI, however it appears that Sony’s internal developers have had better success with the code on SPUs. Now that Sony is working with other developers to enable them to do the same methods of development, we can expect that developing and adapting current algorithms to the Cell will become much more manageable for many developers.
Sony said that much of their success with the Cell has come from the development of a tool they call the SPURS Kernel, a small program which sits on each SPU and enables it to better perform the tasks that programmers use it for. This SPURS Kernel was included in the EDGE suite of tools, and we can expect that many of the developers who have been complaining of harsh learning curves, long development cycles and poor performance will soon be breathing a collective sigh of relief.
http://www.psu.com/node/8715
During Phil Harrison’s keynote speech on Wednesday, Sony highlighted a new initiative called Playstation EDGE, in which Sony is making available to developers a set of tools for the Cell and RSX that Sony developed internally for first party games. The EDGE tools however are simply tools, and there were many discussions at the conference that Sony held to help teach developers how to use those tools.
It seems that up to this point there has been a very difficult learning curve for Playstation 3 developers. I met a developer earlier this week that claimed that there was no way to share information between SPUs, (the miniature specialized cores on the Cell).
So Sony set out and explained what works and what doesn’t for SPUs, both for performance and for efficiency. They discussed different methods for threading and dividing up work on the SPUs, and ways to efficiently pass data between SPUs.
Of particular interest however was the bit Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide (SCEWW) said about branching AI on the SPU. Branching is a common technique used in artificial intelligence where a program randomly chooses a few samples from a larger set of options, and then tests each to see which is the best. This method of AI can provide more realistic behavior, as humans often don’t choose the overall best option because it simply doesn’t occur to them, however it is very inefficient to begin with, and due to the nature of the type of process it is, most developers have claimed that the SPUs would be absolutely terrible for branching.
As Sony put it however, branching is absolutely terrible for ALL processors. In their experience, they said, it is less terrible for the SPUs however. In the upcoming game Heavenly Sword, they said that moving the branching AI off of the Power Processor Unit (PPU) increased the performance of that particular process. In other words, the same branching ran better on the SPUs.
Microsoft and Xbox fans have long claimed that the triple-core PPC setup which the 360 enjoys is far superior for AI, however it appears that Sony’s internal developers have had better success with the code on SPUs. Now that Sony is working with other developers to enable them to do the same methods of development, we can expect that developing and adapting current algorithms to the Cell will become much more manageable for many developers.
Sony said that much of their success with the Cell has come from the development of a tool they call the SPURS Kernel, a small program which sits on each SPU and enables it to better perform the tasks that programmers use it for. This SPURS Kernel was included in the EDGE suite of tools, and we can expect that many of the developers who have been complaining of harsh learning curves, long development cycles and poor performance will soon be breathing a collective sigh of relief.
http://www.psu.com/node/8715