IBM, one of the creators of the Cell architecture, has sent its engineers to a game developer's workshop at High Moon Studios in Carlsbad, California where they are giving tips on how to better harness the PS3 processor to Vivendi Games studios' Radical Entertainment and Swordfish. As part of the workshop, programming teams will use software development kits from IBM's Global Engineering Solutions labs to create the best Cell-based game development algorithm. High Moon chief technical officer Clinton Keith noted: "We've been talking to Sony for almost two years now, but they didn't create the Cell. They created the architecture for the PS3 and they've created a lot of the developer libraries. We've had access to those [Sony] engineers... but they're not the hardware engineers. We want to hit [the Cell] on all fronts. We're talking to the guys [IBM] who designed this chip and have been working on it for five years now."
It's no secret that the multi-core Cell processor makes the PlayStation 3 a very powerful machine, but its complex architecture also makes it difficult for developers to program their games. John Carmack, lead programmer of the Quake and DOOM 3D engines, has expressed his thoughts, saying, "I think the decision to use an asymmetric CPU by Sony was a wrong one. There are aspects that could make it a winning decision, but they're not helpful to the developers ... It's not like the PlayStation 3 is a piece of junk or anything. I was not a fan of the PlayStation 2 and the way its architecture was set up. With the PlayStation 3, it's not even that it's ugly--they just took a design decision that wasn't the best from a development standpoint."
News source: DailyTech
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