The Inquirer has an interesting article up currently where they reveal what appears to be a massive dent in the Playstation 3's armor. According to the article, it would appear the Cell Processor has a massively slow read speed, which bogs down the performance of the console and makes code checking very difficult. Allow me to let the Inquirer explain it a lot better than I can right now... (It's almost 5am here now! *Double Yawn*)
"For local memory, the measured vs theoretical bandwidth is missing, I wonder why? RSX is at a solid 22.4GBps for both read and write, good job there green team. Then comes the blue team with Cell. Local memory write is about 4GBps, 40% of the next slowest bandwidth there. Then comes the bomb from hell, the Cell local memory read bandwidth is a stunning 16MBps, note that is a capital M to connote Mega vs a capital G to connote Giga. This is a three order of magnitude oopsie, and it is an oopsie, as Sony put it "(no, this isn't a typo...)".
If you can write at 250x the read speed, it makes Cell local memory just about useless. That means you do all your work out of main memory, and the whole point of local is, well, pointless. This can lead to contention issues for the main memory bus, and all sorts of nightmarish to debug performance problems. Basically, if this Sony presentation to PS3 devs shown to us is correct, it looks like PS3 will be hobbled in a serious way." -The Inquirer
Now I'll be the first to admit that my knowledge of game programming is pretty much limited making simple Macromedia Flash based games and time spent as a kid changing around the text files in games to be a bit more... amusing, but if the above is true and not coated with some anti-Sony slant that's hiding some way this does work out, that seems like a screw-up of monumental proportions. If anyone has some further insight into this, feel free to comment on this article at the appropriate link below.
Check out the full Inquirer article here to read about all the gory details.
UPDATE 1: 9:15am 6/06/06 -Kotaku is now reporting that the techies over at Slashdot are currently debating the story and what exactly the specs mean. As I stated earlier, I'm not a master programmer, nor am I an engineer, so take anything I say here with a grain of salt, but the gist of the debate seems to be whether the specs are in fact horrible, if it's just a bad benchmark or if the problem is moot because the Cell Processor doesn't have to read information coming from the problem area anyway. Of course, the argument has also broken down into a fanboy argument in some areas, so expect plenty of mindless stupidity to interrupt what seems to be a very technical argument. I think I'm going to take the advice of Kotaku's Florian Eckhardt and just wait for the games to determine whether or not the PS3 is slow.
