ps3 fabled 8th processor?

drbaltazar

OK !from what I read online Sony always disabled the 1 of the core on their 8 core cell processor!at 90nm I could understand the potential gain vs heat was not great!but now at 45 nm!it would be a safe gamble to offer the option to turn it on or off to gamer!I heard the new ps3 can enable it?any did it?does ff14 support it!I'm asking because I feel the ps3might actually be a better option.can user add xdr ram?any know if the ps3 use the os timer or hardware timer.this is important since ms haven't figured it out yet.this being made by IBM might be a better alternative if user can user the cell timer!

Quizzical

The last core was disabled for the sake of yields, not heat.  If all eight cores need to be active and one is defective, you have to throw the chip in the garbage.  If the shipping PS3s only have seven of the eight cores active and one of the helper cores is defective, you disable that one and sell it anyway.  Depending on how good the chips that come back from the fabs are, that can save a lot of money on production.

Ridelynn

Funny that your just now picking up on this, and the PS3 has only been out since... Nov 2006.

drbaltazar

Didn't bother with it at 90 or 65 nm !(diminishing return)but at 45 nm!now this make the ps3 a good proposition if 7/8 can be enabled.from what read .it can.

Ridelynn

Get a Freescale T4240. It's a 64-bit PPC 12 core/24-thread on 28nm at 1.8Ghz.

Sure, it's made for embedded applications, but if you were sitting around waiting on the PS3 to change process nodes (for some ungodly reason), then why not consider an embedded CPU for your presumably evil schemes to enslave humanity?

The Cell in the PS3 is... still a PS3 no matter what process node it's on. They won't make it any faster than the original, because then games wouldn't perform equally on older and newer hardware.

They shift process nodes for reasons of economics, not for performance.

drbaltazar

might as well get a 12 core from Intel with 30mb on processor and 22nm!