John Carmack: Cell not that great?

[Flaming_Gamer]

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=2299

Famed developer John Carmack sat down with G4 TV during E3 this year and gave viewers the scoop on the Sony PlayStation 3 and the challenges of its development environment. Carmack, somewhat of a legend in the gaming community, gave us really the very first FPS title Wolfenstein 3D in 1992, along with DOOM and the Quake franchise. He was at the show this year to show off id Software's upcoming title Enemy Territory: Quake Wars.

During the interview Carmack discussed the issues with Sony’s development strategy concerning the PS3 comparing the symmetrical processing approach Microsoft took with the XBOX 360 to the asymmetric approach that Sony is using with the Cell processor developed in partnership with Toshiba and IBM.

Carmack concedes that the PS3 is a more powerful platform saying "the PS3 has more peak performance on there and that’s what Sony was looking for." However he believes that Sony made a mistake with the Cell architecture in the difficulty there is with programming for it as opposed to the 360.

To take full advantage of the Cell architecture developers must break their code in to "small nuggets" and use a different compiler for the SPEs making developing for the PS3 more difficult then it needs to be.

During the interview he speculated that the PS3 would do well because of its following and Sony’s dominance in the console market. However judging by the reaction to the PS3 in our previous article covering the console, as well as comments across the web sphere as a whole that is obviously still to be determined.


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As you can see Carmack admits that the "cell" is ALL POWERFUL (as if we didn't know that ) But he states that it's difficult to develop for. However I don't know if I belive this becasue of numerous devs and Harrison himself have come forward saying how easy that the PS3 is to develop for; this of corse in going to be a little bias. Who is closer to the truth?

[venomv]

Just about every PC devolper that has said anything has said the CELL is hard to use, at least that I have seen. The PS2 guys don't seem to be having as much trouble though.

[jaxmkii]

PC snobs... they hate the idea a console is kicking there babys arses

[OmniStalgic]

Yeah...Those first party devs are fine-everyone else might have some problems tho...It doesn't matter really-Even if PS3 slips to 3rd place this gen-we'll still have those great games that take full-advantage of the hardware-that's all I care about..

[version]

cell is more difficult to programming than emotion engine, but 5 times faster than xenon

[BahnNZ]

Nah. Emotion engine, or escepially all the processors and vector units you have to code for in PS2 are a giant paint in the ass. You have to hand code for all these processors in PS2 by hand... In Assembler.

For Cell and it's SPEs you code in C/C++. It's a custom coding job, but a fraction of the complexity of PS2.

John Carmack and Bill Gates are personal friends. Every month he pops up talking trash about PS3.

And with that I point readers towards Carmacks excellent game Quake 2, it's the last time Carmack was leading edge and relevant.

[version]

asm is great, cell 2-10 times faster with this

[RavenFox]

Nah. Emotion engine, or escepially all the processors and vector units you have to code for in PS2 are a giant paint in the ass. You have to hand code for all these processors in PS2 by hand... In Assembler.

For Cell and it's SPEs you code in C/C++. It's a custom coding job, but a fraction of the complexity of PS2.

John Carmack and Bill Gates are personal friends. Every month he pops up talking trash about PS3.

And with that I point readers towards Carmacks excellent game Quake 2, it's the last time Carmack was leading edge and relevant.

I couldnt have said it any better. Rep

[BahnNZ]

Thing about Carmack is this guy had about the best run in gaming tech from the early days of PC 2D platformers with Apogee, to Wolfenstein to Doom, up to Quake 2. He deserves a great deal of respect of what he did back then, there was no one like that guy.

But with Unreal Tournament Epc just steam rolled over Carmack, Quake 3A was too little too late. Then Valve and Crytek and a bunch of other guys turned it into a stampede.

Now iD are actually saying the next game won't be a shooter. That's hands up and surrender. With the monthly PS3 trash talk he really hacks off a lot of his old fans who also like Playstation. You don't see Tim Sweeney at Epic trash talking PS3.

Guy just annoys me now.

[cliffbo]

here we go again! i'm fed up with this.

[satriales]

It doesn't matter if it's difficult to develop for, the PS2 was even harder to develop for and look how many great games came out. As long as people buy the PS3 developers will learn how best to use it.

[Z]

what I want to know is how many other than Carmack think about Cell and PS3 like so?

[Old_Timer!]

Well Carmack can talk all the trash he wants, he still has to admit PS3 is the more powerful machine. Though it may take more programming to get the best results. This is confirmed my Hideo Kojima and on Gametrailers.com, even Itagaki(DOA/Ninja Gaiden creator) says it will be the most powerful when released. He also hints at developing for the PS3 as well.

here's the link
http://www.gametrailers.com/gamepage.php?id=2622

[cpiasminc]

what I want to know is how many other than Carmack think about Cell and PS3 like so?

It isn't really arguable whether Cell is more difficult to develop for -- it most certainly is. Whether it's because of the assymetric processor designs demanding SIMD-friendly code to get some performance, or the fact that it has room for more active contexts, or the overall slowness of the PPE, or the fact that the SPE LS SRAMs are not coherent with main memory making all context switches very costly... it's invariably more difficult than PC or XeCPU because there is just more to keep track of. XeCPU, if anything is made to make things easier on developers. And this is taking quality of development tools out of the picture.

It is also true, however, that Cell is "fun" to work with. And most multi-platform console devs tend to say that. The SPEs are just outstanding if you know what you're doing. If you don't... well... It is also true, that many of the reports about PS3 being easy were comparative to PS2 and actually a lot of prior consoles -- which speaks largely of the improvement on the tools side and the fact that the processor is less demanding at this stage as far as needing to squeeze the hell out of it in order to get anything done (that will change in time for all 3 platforms, though).

The thing you have to realize (and I said the same thing on b3d), is that when Carmack makes statements like this, he's not speaking as a programmer. He's speaking as the tech director of a small studio. It was the same thing when Gabe Newell criticized both of the next-gen consoles... his concern was about a whole development team consisting of junior, mid-range, and senior developers. With any kind of multiprocessing architecture, your most critical (and also most bug-prone) area is the management of resources, and a minor error there can have catastrophic results.

[makeitlookreal]

Carmack needs to realize the things that are worth the most in the end are things that were the most difficult to accomplish.

I do have a queston though. I have read that the SPE's of the PS3 are set up in such a way that you must use C based langrages and you cannot dive down deep into them as in the PS2 due to security features of the chip. In one article I read it was mentioned that even though the PS3 cell is more powerful than the 360 because of this security feature it might not be possible to optimize or get the absolute most out of the SPE's with such restrictions in place.

Could anyone tell me if that is correct at all?

[DofD]

Didn't we go through this exact same conversation about Carmack the last time he was interviewed and talked about programming on the Cell? There will always be some people who don't like something.

[venomv]

Yup.....pretty much.

[cliffbo]

Negativity patrol! ignore, ignore, ignore...

[cpiasminc]

Carmack needs to realize the things that are worth the most in the end are things that were the most difficult to accomplish.

I don't think he'd argue with that if iD was just him and noone else. And he probably doesn't care much what iD does after he's retired. But it's really not about his difficulty or what he'd enjoy. I can tell you a million things about how bad x86 sucks and how awesome Cell is by comparison... but that's not what gets a piece of software shipped.

I have read that the SPE's of the PS3 are set up in such a way that you must use C based langrages and you cannot dive down deep into them as in the PS2 due to security features of the chip. In one article I read it was mentioned that even though the PS3 cell is more powerful than the 360 because of this security feature it might not be possible to optimize or get the absolute most out of the SPE's with such restrictions in place.

Could anyone tell me if that is correct at all?

It's not. IBM has put out dozens of CELL benchmarks that include hand-optimized ASM that you can download and compile and run just fine.

[Nameless]

This is not news, nothing to see here...
Every new platform will receive criticism until the developers learn how to properly utilize the platform.

Also, Sony will take a more active role this generation with development support. Sony made a great move by creating a network of 1st party development houses. I guarantee the PS3 development support will be superior to the support for the PS2. Considering the rising cost of game development this is a great move by Sony, the developers can concentrate more on art direction, gameplay & game design. It will take time, but as you can see with the 1st generation titles displayed developers already have a understanding of the platform to produce impressive results...