Why Sony is rethinking the Cell (bear with me on this)

[DainBramaged]

Over the Christmas holidays the rumour mill started churning out a claim that Sony is considering ditching its Cell chip in favour of something more Intel flavoured. Several news sites picked up the story that Sony had a guts-full of the Cell and wanted to move to a multi-core chip from Intel.

However the move has left many scratching their heads. The Cell is still a good chip with many advantages in performance and creative research this generation. Its reliability has also seen the beast wired up to many DIY supercomputers.

But apparently Sony is blaming a lot of its problems on the fact that it has proved difficult to find developers to write good code for the Cell. Many of the skill sets out there are for Intel based chips and software houses are not keen to become focused on one bit of hardware. Interestingly it is the same decision that another cell user came up with two years ago. Apple messiah Steve Jobs saw what was happening with the Cell and scrapped it in favour of Intel multi-core.

The PS3 has been a disappointment to Sony and after years on the market is only just starting to make it is development costs back. It would be easier to blame the Cell for the outfit not attracting attention, however most of our sources claim that the problem was never the chip.

When the PS3 launched there was considerable optimism that it was going to be the world's leading games console. If it had archieved the same sorts of sales as the the Wii for example then the Cell would have become the default standard for games consoles. Developer skills would be there because everyone would want to write code for the leading console. Unfortunately Sony made its PS3 too expensive and had its clock cleaned by cheap and cheerful consoles.

If Sony does move away from the Cell chip it is an admission that it has to complete with the other consoles on the same terms. It can no longer afford to be flashy or rely on unusual technology.

http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/17039/38/

[lapfog_1]

1. You'd think they would have learned this lesson with Betamax...

superior technology doesn't always win, especially if there is a cheaper technology in the space solution space.

[dkf]

3. BluRay won though

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

5. Blu-ray is irrelevant

Blu-ray is the Buggy-whip Manufacturers Association Product of the Year for 1962, the world doesn't need a better DVD player. It needs universal platform neutral content that will play on anything from a Blackberry to a movie theater.

[dkf]

6. I've got one

It looks amazing. Can't watch anything in regular def anymore

[Ohio Joe]

8. It could be done but...

The two solutions that would allow that would either be to allow only one format or make it mandatory for all hardware to contain the software to play all formats.

[Statistical]

7. Sony sunk $10 billion into PS3 and Bluray subsidies.

They bought a winner.

The lifetime royalties will likely never equal the price of buying a winner.

Collectively the patent pool for DVD has collected $22 billion.

Bluray will likely have a much lower adoption rate, people will buy less titles, and it will be obsoleted much quicker. Combine that with fact that Sony is only portion of patent pool means Sony is guanteed a multi year, multi-billion dollar loss on PS3/Bluray debacle.

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

2. Apple had nothing to do with the cell,

Apple at that time went with the PowerPC 970 which came out of the server side of IBM, rather than the Cell that came out of the embedded side. However the G5 being a server chip was completely impractical for consumer hardware no matter what its performance which resulted in the eventual move to Intel.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

4. My understanding was that the PS2 and PSX were particularly successful...

because it was so convenient for programmers to work with.

Looks like they lost with the Cell, won with the Blu-Ray.