The PS3's Failure: A Licked Many-Core Cookie
2025-04-11
This post analyzes the failure of the PlayStation 3 from the perspective of a AAA game developer. The Cell processor, while boasting multiple SPE cores, suffered from limitations in usable cores and weak SPE performance compared to the GPU. The SPE's limited local memory, the heterogeneous CPU/GPU architecture, and complex synchronization mechanisms significantly increased development difficulty, hindering developers from fully utilizing the PS3's potential. The author argues that the PS3's many-core architecture ultimately failed, becoming a 'licked cookie' – a concept with great potential but ultimately under-delivered.
Read more