Anyone got one yet or know if it's worth getting to learn multicore console programming? Hydra Game Development Kit"

Quote:Original post by KaptainKomunist
Oh. It's just the xGame Station. Most of us try to ignore LaMothe. Windows Game Programming for Dummies was an atrocity, some of us are still bitter about that.

As for multicore development, Linux on the PS3 is probably your best bet, or atleast the easiest to start with.

Well, there's no real reason to ignore the man. Despite whatever your oppinion of some of his books may be, many of them were good for their time - particularly the earlier ones. If he's guilty of anything its perhaps that his newer books have not kept up with the times or are not as accessable as some people would like.

learning multi-core programming on the PS3 is not at all an ideal situation, though it might be an interesting exercise unto itself. The problem is that the PPE (PowerPC General purpose core) and the SPEs (SIMD Streaming cores) are so different. Another problem is that the SPEs themselves are also not so much suited to performing general calculations, and really only excel at stream-in/stream-out type tasks. Their ability to branch or perform any kind of logic is also quite hampered.


The Hydra (for which I was one of the Demo coder's who recieved alpha hardware) is not the XGameStation. While the XGS had a single 80mips 8bit CPU, 4k instruction/data words and 192bytes of ram, the Hydra has 8 20mips 32bit CPUs, 32k combined code/data ram. The power is really quite impressive when you combine processors (called cogs) and some of the Demo coders had SNES-level graphic systems running across 4 cogs. Overall, the Hydra has 8x the processing potential as the XGS (640 million byte instructions per second versus 80) and just over 170x the RAM.

From an architectural standpoint, the Hydra is better to learn multi-processing for the simple fact that each cog is an identical general-purpose CPU. However, like the cell, cogs also only have access to their small, local memory pool, which can cause headaches. Neither is "ideal" but the Hydra is certainly much easier to understand and fully-utilize than the Cell would be. The 360 with XNA is another option, as it allows access to 5 of the 6 hardware threads across the 3 daul-threaded CPU cores (which are the same as the PPE core in the PS3,) however, the fact that it is currently C# only may be a turn-off for some. Multi-core and Multi-proc consumer PCs are also becoming the norm, and are also good avenues for exploration.

Are any of these console-specific skills going to be directly benefitial? No. But you can certainly learn a lot about multi-threaded design, thread sync, lockless data structures, etc.

[Edited by - Ravyne on December 28, 2006 3:47:09 PM]

Quote:Original post by brandonman
what's the hydra console? :P and yea, windows game programming for dumbies... wait for it... here it is... sucked! Sorry, but I barely could compile anything...

Actually I like his casual writing style although he never really did the OOP thing.
And I have all his books and most of it still compiles even with the latest directx sdk and vc2005 compiler.
I do remember him getting sick of responding to all the emails he used to recieve about how to link/compile a directx app in vc++6.0 since I was one of them!

Quote:Original post by teh_programerer

Quote:Original post by Ravyne
The 360 with XNA is another option, as it allows access to 5 of the 6 hardware threads across the 3 daul-threaded CPU cores (which are the same as the PPE core in the PS3,) however, the fact that it is currently C# only may be a turn-off for some.

I thought that 4 of the 6 threads could be accessed.

I could be wrong, I'm still a little unclear of this myself. I read a post on the XNA forum about being able to set the thread affinity to hardware threads 1, 3, 4 and 5. I assumed that thread 0 was the default location for the initial application thread. In any case, XNA provides at least 4, and possibly 5, hardware threads to play with, and because threads 1 and 3 are on the first and second PPC core respectively, while threads 4 and 5 are on core on the third core you're exposed to different types of cooperation - Threads 4-5, because they're on the same physical CPU, share their L1 caches for instance, so are best suited to tasks which share data.