PlayStation 3 emulator RPCS3 gets 75% of all games playable on PC
www.gamingonlinux.com
The incredible open source PlayStation 3 emulator RPCS3 just reached an impressive milestone for getting more games working on PC.
  • 🇨🇦 tunetardis@piefed.caEnglish
    37·
    20 hours ago

    That’s impressive.

    At my work, we had these cell processor-based blade servers for a while. Basically the same chips as in a PS3 except they could handle double-precision floats. We wanted to use them for scientific modelling, but gave up eventually. They were such a bitch to program! I can only imagine emulating them must’ve been a nightmare.

      • 🇨🇦 tunetardis@piefed.caEnglish
        1·
        56 minutes ago

        I guess you could say the Cell was as an 8-core CPU (well, 9, if you include the PowerPC in the middle) at a time when such things were unheard of, at least in the consumer space. So the theoretical performance if you could max out all those cores was through the roof. I have no doubt that’s what drew Sony to them for their next gen console.

        But whereas all the cores of a modern 8-core chip can access the same RAM, in the Cell, only the PowerPC could access the main memory and each core had its own dedicated internal RAM, meaning you had to load both code and data into all the cores laboriously yourself using asynchronous DMA requests before executing the code, and then sync the results back using more DMA. It was a bit like GPU programming, I suppose, though within the cores, it felt more like a CPU in terms of the instruction set and what not, so kind of a hybrid approach I guess?

        • BlackLaZoR@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          40 minutes ago

          Fascinating insight.

          It was a bit like GPU programming,

          Don’t remember where I’ve read this but supposedly SONY wanted it to be part of their geometry engine, but ultimately had to cut down the costs and use Nvidia GPU instead. So maybe that analogy isn’t that far off

      • 🇨🇦 tunetardis@piefed.caEnglish
        22·
        19 hours ago

        It’s a small company that does mineral surveying, but we’ve done a lot of R&D in the past that ranged from designing our own survey instrumentation to writing geophysical modelling software. The Cell thing was for the latter.

        IIRC the Cell processor was built around an IBM PowerPC, but that wasn’t meant to do all the heavy lifting. Rather, it was supposed to be farmed out to these other processing nodes (I forget what they were called), almost like using a GPU for general computation. Now, the IBM consultant sold us on the Cell, saying they had an OpenCL library that would make all this much easier and hide the hardware details. LOL!

        First of all, it was a 32-bit library. Maybe fine for a 32-bit console like the PS3, but our blades had 16 GB of RAM and it wasn’t going to cut it. So I had to dig into the guts of the architecture to get anything usable and, long story short, a summer went by and I had little to show for my efforts.

        Years later, we eventually got the program running on Threadrippers and that worked out much better!