> For some reason, I am very fascinated by the architecture of PS3.
You’re not alone. I also am enchanted by non-standard architectures: the PS3’s Cell, its predecessor the PS2’s Emotion Engine, the Transmeta Crusoe, etc.
There’s a sibling comment to mine that talks about needless complication and dead-ends. That’s fine, but marching along with essentially optimizations to a basic architecture seems boring to me from a creative point of view (not that the achievements made haven’t been, of course, profoundly technically impressive).
And that’s on top of the fact the designing computer architectures can probably be thought of as a huge multidimensional optimization problem (where optimal can change over time or between customer demographics). I think of the approach of iterating as helping us march up that manifold to a local maxima. I think of these “exotic” architectures as sampling far away from those points to see if maybe we can find a more global maxima.
And that’s not to say that the main platforms aren’t innovating: with big-little, NUMA, etc.
But there’s a soft spot in my heart for those wild, long shot bets.
You’re not alone. I also am enchanted by non-standard architectures: the PS3’s Cell, its predecessor the PS2’s Emotion Engine, the Transmeta Crusoe, etc.
There’s a sibling comment to mine that talks about needless complication and dead-ends. That’s fine, but marching along with essentially optimizations to a basic architecture seems boring to me from a creative point of view (not that the achievements made haven’t been, of course, profoundly technically impressive).
And that’s on top of the fact the designing computer architectures can probably be thought of as a huge multidimensional optimization problem (where optimal can change over time or between customer demographics). I think of the approach of iterating as helping us march up that manifold to a local maxima. I think of these “exotic” architectures as sampling far away from those points to see if maybe we can find a more global maxima.
And that’s not to say that the main platforms aren’t innovating: with big-little, NUMA, etc.
But there’s a soft spot in my heart for those wild, long shot bets.