The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers
The Playstation 1, 2 and 3 are each in their own way Sony's take on an alternate history of computer graphics. It was Sony's intent with all three consoles to put the "special effects" (that in 2019 are performed using shaders) <i>in the CPU</i>, and not the GPU.<p>As a result, the PS1, but especially the PS2 and PS3 were engineered to have amazing vector capabilities in the CPU. The PS2's Emotion Engine had extremely high performance vector processing units, and was so optimized for compute throughput it used two different floating point formats, neither of which are compatible with the IEEE754 standard that every other piece of hardware you've ever touched uses. The PS3 was the culmination of that philosophy, with the Cell being explicitly developed to put as much raw number crunching hardware in something that can still be called a CPU. It was just a single unimpressive POWER-compatible CPU core, and 60% of its die area went to specifically engineered number crunching units. This is what made it "supercomputer grade".<p>There's a persistent rumor that the Cell was so powerful that Sony had intended for the Playstation 3 to be equipped with <i>two</i> Cell chips, and no true GPU at all. But it seems Sony realized during development that their philosophy had no future. Sony compromised and introduced a standard Geforce GPU. Compared to the more conventional architecture of the Xbox 360, the compromised design still had slightly more potential but it was a lot more difficult to work with for games, and more expensive to produce as well.<p>Starting with the last generation of consoles, homegrown graphics architectures aren't tried anymore. You can only get performance and especially good developer buy-in on commodity hardware. As a result, the PS4 and Xbox One have PC hardware. Their successors will too. The Nintendo Switch shares a chip with the Nvidia Shield TV and Google Pixel C tablet. Console hardware is not really interesting anymore if you ask me.