That was some funny stuff and enlightening. I remember having the PS2 experience myself when studying its architecture: so many individual processors stitched together it was like re-inventing 60-80's computing experience lol. That said, I thought it was cool that they threw in some scratchpad. It's better than cache in many ways and so underutlized in special-purpose, performance designs. Helps with real-time, too, as it's predictable. PS2's mainly just helped with I/O hacks IIRC correctly, though.
Also interesting to contrast your description of PS3 with Naughty Dog comments. Seems like they got a lot more out of them but had to work hard to do it. Curious, there were products that auto-synthesized code for SPU's like RapidMind. I had planned on trying them had I used PS3's for acceleration. Did you or anyone in that industry try those tools to see if they delivered similar performance over hand-coded algorithms in gaming workloads?
The big difference between the project I was on vs Naughty Dog was that ND was 100% committed to the PS3 exclusively and eternally. If you know you can't escape then you are motivated to put in the effort to make it as good a fate as possible. The PS3 rewarded effort, but only on a very steep curve...
Meanwhile, my team was multiplatform. That meant most people could hide in the easy spaces on the PC or maybe the 360. We had a small group of Russians and Europeans who enjoyed the challenge of hand-optimizing the SPU. They would not have tolerated synthesized code ;)
That makes sense. The Russian angle, too: prior experience showed thdm to bd good at programming and optimization. One told me it's because access to good hardware was limited for many and so people got the most out of what they had. He said some even coded and debugged algorithms on paper before going to Internet cafes.
I'd probably try to get more in OSS projects but they can be a rowdy bunch. Gotta have manager or leader that can keep the egos and nationalism in check. ;)
Also interesting to contrast your description of PS3 with Naughty Dog comments. Seems like they got a lot more out of them but had to work hard to do it. Curious, there were products that auto-synthesized code for SPU's like RapidMind. I had planned on trying them had I used PS3's for acceleration. Did you or anyone in that industry try those tools to see if they delivered similar performance over hand-coded algorithms in gaming workloads?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/Print/2007/05/08/rapidmind_two/