Playstation 3 Dissected
Sony exhibited the Playstation 3 at GDC, revealing that 1 of the 7 SPEs (Synergistic Processing Element) on the Cell Processor is reserved for the OS. Just like the Xbox 360’s OS, Dashboard, the operating system is running constantly in the background. In this OS, they added a panel that appears out of the right side of the screen that enables the user to view and join the given activity the OS prompts like multi-user chat (video or not) while playing games that doesn’t even support this feature and receiving messages between friends. With a feature like these, I can’t wait for the PS3.
Sadly, every feature has its flaws due to the fact that games have to give up 1 of the 7 SPEs, 32 MB of the 256MB of available GDDR3 memory off the RSX unit and 64 MB of the 256MB of the available XDR memory off the Cell CPU just so the OS could run. This equates to a total of 25% of the PS3 resources. So that leaves 75% for games and we would expect fps drops from time to time if this happens. Don’t fret for now since this is just based on anonymous sources and Sony still have a chance to make changes to the PS3.
Sony exhibited the Playstation 3 at GDC, revealing that 1 of the 7 SPEs (Synergistic Processing Element) on the Cell Processor is reserved for the OS. Just like the Xbox 360’s OS, Dashboard, the operating system is running constantly in the background. In this OS, they added a panel that appears out of the right side of the screen that enables the user to view and join the given activity the OS prompts like multi-user chat (video or not) while playing games that doesn’t even support this feature and receiving messages between friends. With a feature like these, I can’t wait for the PS3.
Sadly, every feature has its flaws due to the fact that games have to give up 1 of the 7 SPEs, 32 MB of the 256MB of available GDDR3 memory off the RSX unit and 64 MB of the 256MB of the available XDR memory off the Cell CPU just so the OS could run. This equates to a total of 25% of the PS3 resources. So that leaves 75% for games and we would expect fps drops from time to time if this happens. Don’t fret for now since this is just based on anonymous sources and Sony still have a chance to make changes to the PS3.
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