For some reason, I am very fascinated by the architecture of PS3. Its complexity makes RPCS3 the most impressive emulator in my eyes. Though to be fair, all emulators are impressive one way or another.
You’re not alone. I also am enchanted by non-standard architectures: the PS3’s Cell, its predecessor the PS2’s Emotion Engine, the Transmeta Crusoe, etc.
There’s a sibling comment to mine that talks about needless complication and dead-ends. That’s fine, but marching along with essentially optimizations to a basic architecture seems boring to me from a creative point of view (not that the achievements made haven’t been, of course, profoundly technically impressive).
And that’s on top of the fact the designing computer architectures can probably be thought of as a huge multidimensional optimization problem (where optimal can change over time or between customer demographics). I think of the approach of iterating as helping us march up that manifold to a local maxima. I think of these “exotic” architectures as sampling far away from those points to see if maybe we can find a more global maxima.
And that’s not to say that the main platforms aren’t innovating: with big-little, NUMA, etc.
But there’s a soft spot in my heart for those wild, long shot bets.
Then they went PPC for 360.
And now back to x86.
Then they had the super riced out rsx (Nvidia GeForce 7000 series) for the GPU, but there wasn't really a "main" CPU was there?
Another reason why both the PS and XBox use basically the same hardware under the hood.
I'm not sure if it was obvious at the time in-between the Cell BE and "reality synthesiser" marketing etc. but I understand that gave the 360 an edge in a lot of cross-platform titles.
I think this really influenced the design of the PS4 which actually had a really weak Jaguar CPU but a solid GPU in its APU.
Rumours about Intel Larrabee were also flying around at the time, so it seemed like the future was here.