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The PS3 was difficult to port to because its Cell processor did not behave like a conventional multicore CPU. It paired a general-purpose core with specialized processors that could deliver useful performance only when developers restructured work for them, managed their small local memories, and coordinated jobs carefully. Recompiling a game built for another console could not do that work automatically.
What made Cell different from a typical game CPU?
Sony announced Cell in 2005 as a jointly developed processor from IBM, Sony, and Toshiba. In the PS3, it worked alongside the RSX graphics processor and XDR memory. That platform description comes from Sony’s announcement; the practical development challenge was Cell’s mix of general-purpose and specialized processing.
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Cell’s Power Processor Element (PPE) handled general orchestration, while its Synergistic Processor Elements (SPEs) were designed for specialized data processing. The SPEs were not simply extra general-purpose cores waiting to run any existing game code. Developers had to identify suitable work, divide it into units that could run in parallel, and write or adapt code for the SPEs. As Insomniac CTO Alex Hastings put it, “You have to customize code for the Cell processor.” IEEE Spectrum’s 2007 report on Insomniac describes the studio’s experience.
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Why couldn’t developers just recompile a game?
A game engine built for another platform makes assumptions about where its code runs, how it accesses data, and how its tasks are ordered. A compiler can translate code, but it cannot automatically redesign those assumptions into independent jobs for specialized processors. Developers had to decide which workloads could move to SPEs, adapt those workloads, supply their data, and coordinate their results with the PPE and the rest of the game.
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That data preparation mattered because each SPE had 256 KB of local memory. Rather than treating the SPEs as if they shared a conventional large cache with the PPE, programmers had to arrange for the data a job needed to be available in an SPE’s local memory when that job ran. The limited capacity made workload selection and data movement part of the engineering problem, not an afterthought. IEEE Spectrum’s Insomniac account explains this constraint.
How many SPEs could a game use?
In an April 2007 article, Wipeout lead programmer Martin Linklater described seven working SPEs in shipped PS3 Cell processors, with one used by the operating system. That left six for game programmers, according to his account—not seven available for a game to use freely. Linklater also argued that code architecture had to change to take advantage of Cell. His article is a programmer’s case study, not a survey of every studio. Read “Optimizing Cellcode” at Game Developer.
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Why did parallel work create more coordination?
Making the SPEs useful meant more than assigning them tasks. The PPE had to dispatch jobs, provide or arrange their data, track completion, and integrate results. Work also had to be scheduled so that the PPE did not wait on an SPE at a moment that stalled the game’s frame. Insomniac CTO Alex Hastings described estimating job timing and scheduling PPE queries to SPEs in IEEE Spectrum’s report.
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This is a broader tradeoff of parallel processors: work can finish faster when it is divided effectively, but dividing, dispatching, synchronizing, and collecting it adds complexity. Cell architect and IBM Fellow James A. Kahle summarized the programming challenge in a 2007 interview: “Anything besides a single-threaded processor is going to be more difficult.” Game Developer interviewed Kahle on October 24, 2007.
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Why were Xbox 360-to-PS3 ports especially hard?
The problem was not simply that the PS3 was inherently harder to develop for than every other console. Sony’s developer-group response in June 2007 said that feature-level effort for a PS3-first game was comparable with industry norms, while porting a game from Xbox 360 required re-engineering because the consoles had different architectures. It advised developers to treat them as “two different machines not as a common platform.” That is Sony’s perspective, not an independent measurement of all studios or games. Read the PlayStation Blog response.
For a cross-platform engine, developers had to determine how much game logic could remain on the general-purpose CPU, which workloads suited specialized units, how to manage data movement and local memory, and how to schedule and synchronize jobs. The engine and tools’ existing support for both consoles also mattered. Those are the reasons porting could involve substantial re-engineering; the available accounts do not establish a universal extra cost in developer-hours.
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Could Cell deliver benefits when a studio adapted for it?
Yes. The difficulty was a programming-model tradeoff, not evidence that Cell was simply weak. IEEE Spectrum reported that Insomniac worked to move roughly a dozen major systems onto SPEs. The studio pointed to potential gains such as more simultaneous sounds and additional character-animation options. Its report said Resistance could have over 100 sounds happening simultaneously, compared with 24 possible on PS2; that is a reported game capability comparison, not an independently measured cross-platform benchmark. IEEE Spectrum’s article details the studio’s examples.
Those results depended on investment in the architecture. A team with time and expertise could use SPEs for suitable tasks; an engine brought over from another console could not claim the same benefit merely by being compiled for PS3.
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What Cell does—and does not—explain about PS3 ports
Cell helps explain why some cross-platform games needed unusual engineering work to run well on PS3. It does not prove that every PS3 game was hard to write, that every port was poor, or that Cell alone caused the performance of any particular title. The contemporary accounts establish architectural differences and describe developer challenges, but they do not provide an industry-wide average porting cost or failure rate.
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