Which links to the Wiki:
> These systems gain performance or energy efficiency not just by adding the same type of processors, but by adding dissimilar coprocessors
Modern CPUs have many similar cores, not dissimilar cores.
For example, Find My's offline finding functionality runs off a coprocessor so tiny it can basically stay on forever. But nobody outside Apple gets to touch those cores. You can't ship an app that uses those cores to run a different (cross-platform) item-finding network; even on Android they're doing all the background stuff on the application processor.
Our normal desktop processors have double the cells cores. Workstation and servers have 64 or more cores.
Many core is alive and well.
maybe i dont full understand "many-core", but the definition the article implies aligns with what i think of latest qualcomm snapdragon mobile processor for example with cores at different frequencies/other differences.
also i dont understand why ps3 is considered a failure, when did it fail?
in NA xbox360 was more popular (i would say because xbox live) but ps3 was not far behind (i owned a ps3 at launch and didnt get a xbox360 till years later).
from a lifetime sales, shows more ps3s shipped globally than xbox.
Early on the Xbox also did a better job with game ports. People had very little experience using multicore processors and the cell was even worse. So often the PlayStation three would have a lower resolution or worse frame rate or other problems like that.
Xbox Live is also an excellent point. That really helped Microsoft a lot.
All of that meant Microsoft got an early lead and the PlayStation three didn’t do anywhere near as well as someone might suspect from a follow up to the PlayStation 2.
As time went on, the benefits of the Blu-ray drive started to factor in some. Every PlayStation had a hard drive, which wasn’t true of the 360. The red ring of death made a lot of customers mad and scared others off from the Xbox. And as Sony released better libraries and third parties just got a better handle on things they started to be able to do a better job on their PS3 versions to where it started to match or exceed the Xbox depending on the game.
By the end I think the PlayStation won in North American sales but it was way way closer than it should have been coming off the knockout success of the PS2.
> The PS3 failed developers
It failed as an ISA (or collection thereof), and in developer mindshare.
The SPEs were a different instruction set with a different compiler tool chain running separate binaries. You didn't have access to an OS or much of a standard library, you only had 256K of memory shared between code and data. You had to set up DMA transfers to access data from main memory. There was no concept of memory protection so you could easily stomp over code with a write to a bad pointer (addressing wrapped so any pointer value including 0 was valid to write to). Most systems would have to be more or less completely rewritten to take advantage of them.
Did general purpose CPUs not kind of subsume this role? Modern CPUs have 16 cores, and server oriented ones can have many, many more than that