I got two big take aways from reading naughty dog’s blog about what they learned from the cell.
the cell really taught them the trade off between latancy and throughput. That by batching up computations they could do orders of magnitude more than naive pipelining. But, to get that good batching, they had to compromise on framerate.
Which gets to the second big takeaway, which was that standard deviation in the framerate was more important than the framerate and by keeping the framerate low they could also drastically reduce standard deviation in the framerate (Incidently I understand that this was something the amiga demoscene really understood, and low S.D. was a must for any text marquee to look completely smooth).
the cell really taught them the trade off between latancy and throughput. That by batching up computations they could do orders of magnitude more than naive pipelining. But, to get that good batching, they had to compromise on framerate.
Which gets to the second big takeaway, which was that standard deviation in the framerate was more important than the framerate and by keeping the framerate low they could also drastically reduce standard deviation in the framerate (Incidently I understand that this was something the amiga demoscene really understood, and low S.D. was a must for any text marquee to look completely smooth).