Chaos

I've been reading that as chip makers approach the physical limits of silicon (and quantum computers are far off), some developers are making a push towards dual core chips - two CPUs on one chip; it's supposed to enable more things to happen but it'll be harder for developers to make programs for and it'll have a negative on speed (or something like that); anyone heard of the next gen consoles considering this setup?

sorry for no link, but I read it in the paper a month or so ago (WSJ I believe)

joshd2012

PS3 and Xbox360 will be using cellular based processing. This is basically a similar idea to dual core. There is a control center which sends out processing requests to different cells, so that the more cells you have, the more different processes you can do at once. Dual core is similar in that you can be running two separate processes, except I think that is more hardware controlled where as cells are software controlled.

The same ideas are there. Multiple processors within one processor.

BeanDip0001

to make a long story short there are different types of what you are talking about. but it is possiable to put more than one "CPU" on a single "Chip" don't take those terms to heavy as the bouncing of the crystals along with different hardware equals many different things. I know for a fact that the new XBox will be using the multi-cpu on one physical chip deal. but the chip they are using is a PowerPC base so this is nothing new for that type of chip.

hdtv00

The xbox is 3 chip core with two being able to work at same time, with the 3rd chip having to wait for the other. Will it make software slower lol, no. Will it make it harder to develope software, yeah maybe at first. But to say it wont be faster when used I believe is just plain wrong. The pc's will probably suffer from this more so, as the xbox360 will be made from ground up with this is mind. Pc will take yrs to fully convert software wise to use dual core. Much in the same as hyperthreading ....sometimes it helps...sometimes you dont gain a thing. But its not killing your performance.

belboz

It sort of depends on how you define a multi-core CPU. It's probably fair to call the Cell processor as described earlier this year as a 9 core CPU with the 1 PPC core and the 8 SPE cores. Of course, these cores are much simpler and more specialized than the dual core designs that Intel and AMD have just released.

I don't know that I've seen much aside from rumour regarding the XBox 360 processor architecture. Aside from the fact that it's PPC based, not much else has been officially stated. It's almost certain that they'll be using multiple CPU's and very likely in some kind of multi-core package. We'll know more once they actually announce the thing.

Chaos

I answered my own question, anyway here it is:

http://www.thechannelinsider.com/art...119TX1K0000596

and the original announcement:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1642729,00.asp

like I said, the chip (as individuals anyway) will operate slower than normal but be capable of much more .. .. or something like that :P


nice quote from the first article:

For example, a dual-core, dual-processor system clocked at only three grades slower than the fastest AMD chip will perform at between 130 to 160 percent of the performance of the base system, McGrath's slide indicated. McGrath's performance figures used synthetic benchmarks, such as SPECint_rate 2000 and SPECifp_rate 2000.

BeanDip0001

wow now that is some borning reading. very informative but damn that's boring. back to halo i go...