Sissily slapping Charlie Demerijian to death with their purple electronic purses, the Cylons over at Slashdot have taken umbrage at The Inquirer's earlier portrayal of the PS3's Cell as "slow and broken".

Look, there's no one currently on staff who is a hovering cybernetic brain; consequently, no one here at Kotaku is smart enough to tell you what these nerds' beef is. Here's the best layman's summary in the thread we can find, from gabebear:

The Cell reads from the graphics card's memory at glacial speeds, so they run the headline "PS3 hardware slow and broken" and fail to point out the fact that you would almost never want to do this in a game.

A respectable article would have pointed out that this doesn't have any impact on games, but will effect applications. The 256MB of RAM connected to the video card is really only good for vertex data and textures, so you are only left with 256MB to run the executables in. The practical implications of this information means that Linux will only be able to use 256MB of RAM. The RSX(graphics card) can render out of it's own local memory or main memory(almost as fast as local mem), anything that needs to be modified by the Cell must stay in main memory because of this bandwidth issue.

Luckily, games contain a lot of static models and static textures that will easily fill up the 256MB of local mem on the RSX; stuff that the Cell would never read from....

I dunno. This all just seems so analogous to sniffing someone's underpants in order to ascertain what they had for lunch. Let's just wait for the games. FLORIAN ECKHARDT

PS3 Cell Processor 'Broken'? [Slashdot Games]

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