I have been reading up on the Playstation 3 and found this very interesting; here is a article on it:
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-948493.html?tag=fd_lede

Lets do a brief run over here: most CPUs are serial, having only one path or doing only one instruction at a time per step on their pipelines. This is rather very inefficient, take the human brain which processes at a millionth the speed of a average computer but we do a million different operation per instant on a million different pathways, and the computer only does one per instant. To get around this problem there is parallel computing in which we have many cpu working together in a server or big ass mainframe. This though is very expensive and space consuming. Resent ideas have been to put many processors on one slap of silicon (in one chip) this way you could have say 16 tiny 4GHz CPUs doing 16 instructions per instant instead of one, thus multiplying the performance. The concept can be extended beyond just single die parallel computing: why not have it share computing power with other compatible systems (this is call distributed computing) These combined ideas is cellular computing. This provides many other advantages:

Makes production cheaper and adds redundancy : As is, more then 30 percent of CPU manufactured are flawed and rejected. As CPUs become ever smaller and more complex their rate of rejection goes up reducing production and increasing cost. By having a single die parallel processor with redundancy any failed core can be routed around, so a 16 processor CPU can survive a total failure of one or more of it processors (of course it would no long be 16 processor CPU, but 15 or lower now and have to be sold as a lower grade CPU)

Efficiency and Redundancy With each processor having its own memory bus and perhaps it own controller say no more to the north bridged mother board controller or even the south bridge, but even more scary say no more to the graphics card! Yes the PS3 will have nothing but a cellular CPU and no GPU. So Nvidia and ATi might be in real trouble when this stuff hits.

Down with Monopolies? I already mention how this might make the video card obsolete. Unless Intel (and AMD) comes up with there own competing parallel processing CPU (Intel’s latest P4 already have built in parallel processing on a single CPU, only 2 processor emulation though) parallel processing is something most programmers have been prepared for, even so Unix and Linux are much more suited to arrays beyond 32, though I doubt Monopolosoft, eer, I mean Microsoft would take this with their trousers down and will most likely be totally ready for this when it out in 1-2 years.

I have also read up on this new ways Sony is trying to incorporate into PS3...but..many developers have been expressing their disapproval of this method. Many are already calling it a programming nightmare because Sony plans to have 100 Processors on a single chip being able to handle 1 trillion floating point precessors and many developers feel that programming on such a platform would be virtually impossible. This is after the PS2 caused such a heyday when it was nearly impossible to figure out causing first generation games of it to be rather dull. But look at PS2 now...it has amazing graphics because the developers learned their ways around the lack of video memory.....(only 4mb as opposed to Dreamcast which had a amazing 16mb). Playstation 2 was originally designed with something different in mind where as x-box and GC are pretty much staright forward programming platforms.

Also some developers argue that

it doesn't make sense to spread the processing for a single game across a network, since the delays in fetching results from a remote console are huge compared to the speed of internal processing.

and some say

it would be virtually impossible to program game for a system with so many processors working in parallel


excerpts taken form EGM

Quake 3 is the only game I know of coded for parallel processing but no it is not at all impossible if it was then nothing would work at all on a server or any computer with more then one CPU! Yes multi-threading is tricky to do efficiently since spin locks are needed to prevent each thread from trying to write data on the same point on ram, as a result one thread has to wait for the other. This can be clear up by giving each processor its on dedicated chuck of ram. Keeping all the processors running in synch with each other requires that different task be program to run on different processor in order, one or more processor would have to be wasted in controlling the rest.

I do agree about distributive computing though: the lag or ping would be incredibly high! So only a few meter way at best could it work effectively. Also distributive computing would require a Ultra high speed network (in the Gb/s!) which is just not economically feasible at this time.

Originally posted by WellCookedFetus

Also distributive computing would require a Ultra high speed network (in the Gb/s!) which is just not economically feasible at this time.


Funny you should mention that. At E3 Sony hinted at such a thing for the PS3. How will it work?? i don't know but sounds intriguing

I heard rumors it would use IEEE-1394 (Firewire) protocol of speeds beyond 800Mbs standard (perhaps 1200Mbs or 1600Mbs standard yet to be produced)