IBM 帮助 第三方 发挥PS3的性能

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IBM Helps Devs Squeeze PS3 Power
  
By Kris Graft  Print   |   Send to a friend   |   Email the editor  
  
High Moon Studios (Darkwatch) tells Next-Gen that engineers from Cell processor collaborator IBM are helping the game developer harness the power of the PS3’s advanced brains.


A workshop being held this week at High Moon’s Carlsbad, Calif. offices brings together IBM engineers and game developers across multiple Vivendi Games studios, including High Moon, Radical Entertainment and Swordfish, to learn the ins and outs of the multi-core Cell.

Figuring out the PS3’s Cell processor and its multiple processing elements would be easier with the help of the people that actually created the chip, High Moon chief technical officer Clinton Keith told Next-Gen in a phone interview.

Keith said that IBM's expertise goes beyond what Sony's support can offer in regard to the Cell.

“We’ve been talking to Sony for almost two years now, but they didn’t create the Cell," Keith said. "They created the architecture for the PS3 and they’ve created a lot of the developer libraries. We’ve had access to those [Sony] engineers… but they’re not the hardware engineers. We want to hit [the Cell] on all fronts. We’re talking to the guys [IBM] who designed this chip and have been working on it for five years now.”

Sony, Toshiba and IBM collaborated on the creation of the PS3's Cell processor.

As part of the workshop, which wraps up this week, IBM’s chief engineers and Vivendi developers—spearheaded by Keith and High Moon—will be working together during hands-on programming and knowledge-sharing sessions as they tear into the PS3’s Cell. Participating programming teams will use software development kits from IBM’s Global Engineering Solutions labs, as the groups vie to create the best Cell-based game development algorithm.

Canadian multi-core processor experts at RapidMind are also participating in the Cell workshop.

High Moon, which employs 140 workers, is currently working on an unannounced PS3 project, as well as an Xbox 360 game, according to Keith.

Getting down to the nuts and bolts of Sony's new system seemed like the best way for High Moon to support the console, according to Keith. “We just felt that the PlayStation 3 was a pretty radical departure in terms of the architecture and I don’t think we were willing to write off this market share.”

Next-Gen will have more from Keith regarding the complexities of PS3 development in the coming days.