IBM promises easy learning curve for Cell development

The Cell microprocessor which will power the PlayStation 3 will be significantly easier for developers to get to grips with than previous new platforms, according to comments from chip manufacturer IBM.

Speaking to journalists at a press event to discuss the new chip, IBM Systems and Technology group researcher H Peter Hofstee sought to allay fears that Cell could bring with it similar difficulty for developers as was experienced with the introduction of PlayStation 2.

"We're very much aware of the need to balance between innovation in architecture and the ability to leverage that innovation," he told American website News.com. "The learning curve for this platform should be significantly better than previous ones."

Cell was recently revealed to feature an IBM Power family CPU core along with a number of floating point units which are designed to work in parallel and speed through the calculations required for 3D graphics and other media-related work.

As well as powering the PlayStation 3, the chip is expected to be used in a number of Sony's other consumer electronics products, in high-end computer workstations from IBM and in devices such as televisions and home media systems from Toshiba.

Describing Cell as a "convergence between what we think of as supercomputing and what we use in the entertainment space," Hofstee went on to describe the chip's architecture as "very flexible," claiming that "having a more generic architecture will allow people to do new things."

Although Cell is expected to force developers to begin writing games using multi-threaded code, this is no different to the expected design of next-generation consoles from Microsoft and Nintendo, both of which are likely to feature multiple processors.

Comments from developers suggest that Sony is keen to avoid the mistakes made early in the life of the PlayStation 2, when programmers had severe difficulty getting to grips with the unusual architecture of the machine. PlayStation Portable, although similar to PS2 in hardware terms, boasts a much more usable set of libraries and is generally considered significantly easier to develop for.

With the problems of developing code for next-generation consoles likely to be softened by this approach, as well as by the prevalence of middleware solutions such as Criterion's RenderWare which have come to the fore in the current hardware generation, other issues are foremost in many developers' minds - particularly the thorny issue of how to generate the high-detail art resources which next-generation games will demand, and which threaten to make development costs and team sizes increase massively in the coming years.