Over the last few days I’ve been reading up on hardware architecture for the PS3 and XBox 360. With multi-core processors seemingly the way of the future for all the major manufacturers, game developers will continue to be software pioneers over the next few years facing incredibly complex multi-threading and software design problems. From Arstechnica:
But like I said above, that free ride is over, and now it’s time to face the multithreaded, multicore music. In the new world, a world of which both the Xenon and the Cell are a part, programmers have a whole lot more work to do, in terms of both splitting their applications up into threads and of optimizing those individual threads. The fact that they haven’t yet been able to figure out how to make applications that they learned how to write on the old hardware work on the new hardware is completely unsurprising. The old hardware had a theoretical performance peak and lots of hardware aimed at helping applications reach that peak; the new hardware has a higher theoretical performance peak, and little to no hardware aimed at helping applications reach that peak. So developers have a longer distance to go, and they have less help in getting there. It certainly makes for a vexing combination, but it’s way too early to say that it’s the end of the world.
Anandtech has a number of great articles for getting up to speed on this hardware architecture and the implications for software:
While there will be many challenges in rearchitecting existing software for optimal execution under this new architecture, I’ll be more interested to see what new applications and solutions become possible as a result of the new architectures. Software that has many things going on simultaneously, software that seems to be moving around you rather than just waiting for your next piece of input.
Software developers are used to coaching a single player (think tennis), who got faster and stronger each year. Now, we’re being asked to coach a team (think football) where each player gets only slightly better but the number of players available increases each year.
It’s time to start rewriting the playbook…
