AMD CEO Lisa Su reminisces about designing the PS3's infamous Cell processor during her time at IBM

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Even before she worked at AMD, Lisa Su was making big moves and proving to be one of PlayStation's greatest allies

Shot of the Cell CPU inside of a disassembled Sony PlayStation 3.
Shot of the Cell CPU inside of a disassembled Sony PlayStation 3. (Image credit: Greenpro on WikiMedia Commons)

Just after Computex 2024, AMD CEO Lisa Su sat down with Stratechery to conduct an extended interview about solving hard problems throughout her career— including her time at IBM and contributing to the legacy of PlayStation from both there and AMD afterward. As she notes, "I've been working on PlayStation for a long time, if you think about it. PlayStation 3, 4, 5...[like the common thread] across multiple companies, yes."

Now, even if you're familiar with the PlayStation 3 and its nature as being difficult to program thanks to its IBM PowerPC-based Cell processor, you most likely didn't know Lisa Su had any involvement with it before this week. Details are few and far between, but we did manage to find the earliest statement where pre-AMD CEO Lisa Su commented on the matter.

According to Lisa Su, then-Director of Emerging Products at IBM in 2001, "We [IBM] started with a clean sheet of paper and sat down and tried to imagine what sort of processor we'd need five years from now." The decision that IBM, Sony, and Toshiba made was to create a CPU with an extreme focus on parallelization. 

Today, that approach is fairly common through multicore CPUs, Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT, or Hyper-threading under Intel marketing), and even dedicated Efficiency cores, but SMT wouldn't emerge until 2002, and the first consumer multicore CPUs from AMD and Intel wouldn't be seen until 2005. And, of course, the first-ever multicore was released by IBM for workstation and server use in 2001— the same year they were planning the PS3's Cell processor.

The interviewer points out that Sony's PlayStation 3 is viewed as one of its least successful consoles, which is true. The PlayStation 3 pretty much lost the generation handily to Nintendo's cheap, casual-friendly Wii and Microsoft's less powerful but easier Xbox 360. The complexity of the architecture meant that cross-platform games didn't always perform as well as they should on PS3, though as developers (particularly first-party devs) mastered the hardware, it did result in the most visually stunning console games of the latter half of the generation being Sony exclusives, like Uncharted 3 and its ilk.

Lisa said, "The Cell processor was extremely ambitious at that time, thinking about the type of parallelism it was trying to get out there. Again, I would say, from a business standpoint, it was certainly successful. As you rank things, I think history will tell you that there may be different rankings."

"My perspective is, the console era has gone through phases [...] but once you went to HD, you had tremendous increase in cost of asset creation, you had developers heavily motivated to support multiple processors, you had game engines coming along. Suddenly, no one wanted to go to the burden of differentiating on the Cell; they just wanted to run on the Cell," Su explained.

Interestingly, the seventh generation of home consoles (PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii/Wii U) also marks a shift in AMD's allegiances to console manufacturers. AMD produced graphics chips for both Nintendo and Xbox, and all three console manufacturers used the PowerPC CPU architecture. But come to the eighth-gen (PS4, XB1, Switch), both Xbox and PlayStation had switched fully to AMD-powered x86 CPU and GPU architecture. The Switch also saw Nintendo pivot to an Nvidia-powered SoC design (with Arm CPU cores) for their new hybrid console focus.

With the added context of this interview, one can't help but wonder if Lisa Su's unifying thread throughout the last three generations of PlayStation hardware isn't a coincidence. It could just be corporate happenstance, but going from a humble Product Director and Engineer working on the PS3 at IBM to Senior vice president (in 2012, CEO in 2014) at AMD, setting the future course of both PlayStation and Xbox hardware, is truly impressive. 

It's also a great win for AMD, in general, to provide the hardware behind the two biggest consoles on the market for two consecutive (and a third upcoming) console generations. No matter who wins between Sony and Microsoft and their console war, AMD wins, and that's the kind of thinking that earns you a CEO spot.

Christopher Harper
Christopher Harper
Contributing Writer

Christopher Harper has been a successful freelance tech writer specializing in PC hardware and gaming since 2015, and ghostwrote for various B2B clients in High School before that. Outside of work, Christopher is best known to friends and rivals as an active competitive player in various eSports (particularly fighting games and arena shooters) and a purveyor of music ranging from Jimi Hendrix to Killer Mike to the Sonic Adventure 2 soundtrack.

13 Comments Comment from the forums
  • bit_user
    Cell was pretty amazing, for its time. IMO, the biggest problem it faced was a dearth of good programming frameworks for using it effectively. If OpenCL had existed, at the time, that probably would've helped immensely.

    In fact, I'm not the first to think this. IIRC, George Hotz (of recent notoriety involving his Tiny.AI startup) was experimenting with OpenCL on the PS3, when Sony withdrew OtherOS support and disrupted his efforts. If I'm not mistaken, that's what sent him down the spiral of legal troubles with Sony.

    Lisa Su said:
    (in 2001) We started with a clean sheet of paper and sat down and tried to imagine what sort of processor we'd need five years from now." The decision that IBM, Sony, and Toshiba made was to create a CPU with an extreme focus on parallelization.
    A key detail to remember is that GPU compute was in the earliest days of its infancy. GPUs were still incredibly specialized towards graphics and trying to use them for anything else was very hard and subject to heavy constraints. So, I'd say they were spot-on in identifying the trend, but just off the mark about which element of the system was best-suited to address the needs.

    The article said:
    The interviewer points out that Sony's PlayStation 3 is viewed as one of its least successful consoles, which is true.
    Um... according to wikipedia:
    Worldwide sales: 87.4 million (as of March 31, 2017)Okay, so the PS4 has (also, according to them) now sold "106 million (as of December 31, 2019)", but I'd argue the Total Addressable Market (TAM) for consoles grew by more than that amount, between when the PS3 was Sony's leading console and when the PS4 was. So, if we grade on a curve, I'd say the PS4 was probably the loser.

    The article said:
    The Switch also saw Nintendo pivot to a fully Nvidia-powered SoC design for their new hybrid console focus.
    The Nintendo Switch's CPU cores were designed by ARM. Nvidia made the SoC and iGPU.
    Reply
  • jeremyj_83
    bit_user said:
    The Nintendo Switch's CPU cores were designed by ARM. Nvidia made the SoC and iGPU.
    Apparently AMD made a play to be the CPU/GPU in the Switch 2 but Nintendo went with Tegra again.
    Reply
  • TheyCallMeContra
    bit_user said:
    Worldwide sales: 87.4 million (as of March 31, 2017)Okay, so the PS4 has (also, according to them) now sold "106 million (as of December 31, 2019)", but I'd argue the Total Addressable Market (TAM) for consoles grew by more than that amount, between when the PS3 was Sony's leading console and when the PS4 was. So, if we grade on a curve, I'd say the PS4 was probably the loser.

    Well, do keep in mind that the PS4 dramatically outperformed the Xbox One despite 360's lead in the previous generation. If we only look at console sales within the scope of the manufacturer alone, Nintendo and Sony definitely peaked with Nintendo DS and PlayStation 2, respectively.

    Also, good catch on Arm involvement! Will submit an edit for that one soon.
    Reply
  • jeremyj_83
    TheyCallMeContra said:
    Well, do keep in mind that the PS4 dramatically outperformed the Xbox One despite 360's lead in the previous generation. If we only look at console sales within the scope of the manufacturer alone, Nintendo and Sony definitely peaked with Nintendo DS and PlayStation 2, respectively.

    Also, good catch on Arm involvement! Will submit an edit for that one soon.
    The Nintendo Switch has sold over 140M units. It is within a Wii U of sales of tying the DS for total sales with probably 12 months before its successor is released. Very hard to say that they peaked with the DS.
    Reply
  • TheyCallMeContra
    jeremyj_83 said:
    The Nintendo Switch has sold over 140M units. It is within a Wii U of sales of tying the DS for total sales with probably 12 months before its successor is released. Very hard to say that they peaked with the DS.
    "Within a Wii U of tying with DS".

    Being an entire console's install base away from being equivalent to Nintendo's current peak? Objectively speaking, they did peak with Nintendo DS. You do understand the literal meaning of the word "peak", yes? You can hardly forecast in good faith that the current Switch will surpass NDS when the existence of Switch 2 is widely-known and an entire competing market of Deck + other PC handhelds exists.

    Also we know it's March of 2025 now, so it's more like 9 months.
    Reply
  • jeremyj_83
    TheyCallMeContra said:
    "Within a Wii U of tying with DS".

    Being an entire console's install base away from being equivalent to Nintendo's current peak? Objectively speaking, they did peak with Nintendo DS. You do understand the literal meaning of the word "peak", yes? You can hardly forecast in good faith that the current Switch will surpass NDS when the existence of Switch 2 is widely-known and an entire competing market of Deck + other PC handhelds exists.
    I do know what peak means but thank you for the condescending tone. Do you have any idea how few consoles the Wii U sold? The Wii U sold all of ~13M units with the Switch at 141M after 7 years it very well could catch and surpass the DS. Even after the PS5 and Xbox Series X were released people still bought the PS4 and Xbox One. That will keep happening with the Switch as well. The competition from Deck, etc... isn't the same. Not to mention there have been multiple players that tried to enter the handheld market against Nintendo and all failed. Plus Deck and such has been around for years and still only a bit player.

    TheyCallMeContra said:
    Also we know it's March of 2025 now, so it's more like 9 months.
    Do we really know it is March 2025? Everything for the Switch 2 release date is speculation. Nintendo has only said they "will announce the new switch within its current fiscal year, which ends in March 2025." That doesn't mean lauch in March and could very well mean it isn't lauchend until the holiday season 2025.
    Reply
  • TheyCallMeContra
    jeremyj_83 said:
    I do know what peak means but thank you for the condescending tone. Do you have any idea how few consoles the Wii U sold? The Wii U sold all of ~13M units with the Switch at 141M after 7 years it very well could catch and surpass the DS. Even after the PS5 and Xbox Series X were released people still bought the PS4 and Xbox One. That will keep happening with the Switch as well. The competition from Deck, etc... isn't the same. Not to mention there have been multiple players that tried to enter the handheld market against Nintendo and all failed. Plus Deck and such has been around for years and still only a bit player.

    Forgive the condescending tone, but you're trying to correct me when I'm already right. You're still making a forecast to try and disprove an argument that is currently true and has been for quite a long while. If Switch actually has another 13 mil in it, come back to this thread when it happens and I'll CashApp you a $5 or something. I seriously doubt anyone who wants a Switch doesn't already have one or isn't just waiting for the better version to drop next year, though.

    re: Switch 2 release...fair I guess, but I'd be seriously shocked if they didn't meet the March 2025 release window, in alignment with the first Switch. that was leaked before Nintendo made official comment borderline confirming it.
    Reply
  • JamesJones44
    TheyCallMeContra said:
    re: Switch 2 release...fair I guess, but I'd be seriously shocked if they didn't meet the March 2025 release window, in alignment with the first Switch. that was leaked before Nintendo made official comment borderline confirming it.
    I know they launched the Switch in March but a lot has changed since then and companies are targeting year Q4 a lot more these days (year Q4, not company Q4). If I could bet on it, I would put money down on September/October release, but it's truly anyones guess at the moment.
    Reply
  • hotaru.hino
    According to Lisa Su, then-Director of Emerging Products at IBM in 2001, "We started with a clean sheet of paper and sat down and tried to imagine what sort of processor we'd need five years from now." The decision that IBM, Sony, and Toshiba made was to create a CPU with an extreme focus on parallelization.
    I feel like the late 1990s to early 2000s was an interesting point in computer history as far as the server/supercomputer sector was concerned. There were like 5-6 competing ISAs still vying for this market during this time. So a missing detail here is while the Cell was made famous by the PS3, I think what the STI alliance wanted was to be the top dog in the supercomputer space and the PS3 was just a mechanism to get back some of the money they threw into it. And the Cell was the top dog in the supercomputer space for a few years. But by that point, the GPGPU concept took off, so there wasn't really a point in the design philosophy of the Cell anymore.

    Today, that approach is fairly common through multicore CPUs, Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT, or Hyper-threading under Intel marketing), and even dedicated Efficiency cores, but SMT wouldn't emerge until 2002, and the first consumer multicore CPUs from AMD and Intel wouldn't be seen until 2005. And, of course, the first-ever multicore was released by IBM for workstation and server use in 2001— the same year they were planning the PS3's Cell processo
    I don't think it's appropriate to compare the Cell architecture to modern CPUs. It's hard to call the SPEs in the Cell additional CPU cores because they're isolated from the rest of the system. That is, they can't access main memory directly and everything has to live on its 256KiB of local storage. Plus they couldn't run the same programs as the main PPE part of the processor. The SPEs were meant to accelerate parts of an application, but not run whole applications themselves.

    The closest thing I'd argue that PCs have with this are AMD's APUs and Intel's CPUs with integrated graphics.
    Reply
  • NeoMorpheus
    jeremyj_83 said:
    Apparently AMD made a play to be the CPU/GPU in the Switch 2 but Nintendo went with Tegra again.
    Evil loves evil.

    m2KV8MHRJlQView: https://youtu.be/m2KV8MHRJlQ
    TheyCallMeContra said:
    Well, do keep in mind that the PS4 dramatically outperformed the Xbox One despite 360's lead in the previous generation. If we only look at console sales within the scope of the manufacturer alone, Nintendo and Sony definitely peaked with Nintendo DS and PlayStation 2, respectively.

    Also, good catch on Arm involvement! Will submit an edit for that one soon.
    The real reason why the PS4 overtook the Xbox One (stupid name) was the forced kinect, higher price due to the kinect and some really stupid comments from the then head of Xbox.

    By the time they corrected those mistakes, it was too late.
    Reply