While fans of the Playstation 3 love to talk about the power of the Cell processor, according to the leading man behind both (PS3 and 360) system's CPU's, they are equals!
(PS3, Tech, Xbox 360)
Hmm 8 Cores...or 3 Cores.... yea that sounds very equal...ok example here, soo your telling me that 3 core AMD is as powerful as a intel Quad core stupid article
Interesting...... 8 cores-1 for os means 7 cores... or (3) dual cores (that mean 2 cores) that means 6 core. Those are actually processors, not supplementary processors.
Wow i accidentally agreed with you. Do you understand what Hyper Threading is? Look it up. Your CPU uses it everyday and it greatly improves performance.
your an idiot most newer core 2 duos are more powerful than most amd quads. all I can say is more dosent alyways mean better. and I guess the man who worked on both processors dont know as much as you DA fanboys.
When asked, 'which one was the more effective or powerful,' he gave this reply; "I think they are fairly equal. The interesting thing is that the PowerPC that's common in both is used in completely different ways. If you look at the CPU chip for the 360 and PS3, and the programming models and architecture, they came up with completely different solutions. And yet they use this same common core."
The only thing this guy said is that they share a common core. The Cell is and has always outperformed the Xenon.
Xbox 360 - 115.2 GB/s theoretical peak performance
Playstation - 204.8 GB/s theoretical peak performance
@ Eleven 6 What are you even talking about of Course the Cell has 8 Cores Toshiba and Sony developed it and it has 8 Cores.
what i find ironic though is that Toshiba and SOny Competed on HD DVD and Blu Ray but they Both Worked Together with IBM on the CELL and if you Open up the PS3 Controller the Chip inside it even Has Toshiba On it it Doesn't really make much sense to me but what even i think Toshiba and Sony should Just merge and Create a Super Powerful Company.
@ altimako02 lol your r truly a fan boy. Your so blind to see what people wrote. Some 1 bashing any console ? No, Second some 1 above 6th grade would be smart enough to know that having 7 cores if a lot better than having 2 cores because they can run diff things at the same time. Y do u think killzone 2 can have all those light effects ? You call fan boy to any 1 who doesn't agree with u about the 360, now that's being a fan boy. I have looked at ur comments and u obviously love your box. SO go back to Bill's arms. BTW what new core 2 duos are you talking about ? because from what i know. They stopped making newer core 2 duos when they released core 2 extreme then came quad core, then they went to i7.
xwabbit look up the info for games before you make an uneducated kindergarten comment. intels core 2 duos do consistently outperform amds quads. so more cores dont always make it better, even at the same clock speeds. so your kindegarden education has served you very well.e8400 e8500 outperform most amd quads
When did i say anything about that lol ? When did i talk about amd quads ? when did i say that some core 2 duos didn't outperform some amd's quad cores? Some people r just 2 smart this days
pennywise your /yʊər, yɔr, yoʊr; unstressed yər/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [yoor, yawr, yohr; unstressed yer] Show IPA Pronunciation
–pronoun 1. (a form of the possessive case of you used as an attributive adjective): Your jacket is in that closet. I like your idea. Compare yours.
2. one's (used to indicate that one belonging to oneself or to any person): The consulate is your best source of information. As you go down the hill, the library is on your left.
3. (used informally to indicate all members of a group, occupation, etc., or things of a particular type): Take your factory worker, for instance. Your power brakes don't need that much servicing. AND BUY THE WAY IM NOT A 360 FANBOY BECAUSE ALL I HAVE IS A PC
LOOK IT UP! ARE YOU AN ENGLISH TEACHER ?
8 cores... Well, 8 SPUs, 1 disabled, 1 OS, 1 PPU. What I haven't figured out yet, why the Xenon can refer to 2 HW threads and then simply multiply the cores by two, while the CELL using the same powerpc core can't. Or can it. So, what, means the CELL has two ppu cores, too. No ?
As far what I read, the core was the exact same for the CELL and the Xenon, except the VMX units. But I haven't seen anything which says Xenon has hyperthreading and CELL (PPU) does not. In fact, both do issue two instructions in parallel. Haven't seen any details, though. Some say it must be integer + float, but not two ints. So, 6 HW threads on the 360 only if the compiler can generate code (optimizes instructions in a way they can be reordered and issued in parallel). If it can't, no 6 threads. CELL: 6 HW vector units (no matter how bad the compiler is - unless you feed scalar code into the SPU), plus a hyper threaded scalar core. I also would like to know the raw vector performance compared between (Xenon) VMX core and SPU. SPU ISA was designed from scratch, and had all bottlenecks removed. It also can operate in SRAM and can issues full bandwidth waterfall DMA within the CELL using the EIB only (no RAM access).
I don't know. I just can't see how the Xenon can keep up. But I don't know enough about this in a real world case, to be honest.
Amazing It is unbelievably amazing how much knowledge your typical gamers on N4G has, yet they sit at home playing on the PS3s, 360s, and Wiis.
Here we have a man that is directly involved in the technology, of both the Cell and 360 processors (According to the article). Yet these brilliant gamers on N4G call him a liar that doesn't know what he is talking about. Some people even go as far as to tell you what the article is talking about clearly without that information being given. Wow, incredible intelligence.
The funny thing is, two comments later you read the same gamers telling a friend that they are only going to be able to buy one game this month because they can't afford the 120 bucks to buy two.
With the knowledge they possess one would think that they would be somewhere creating new CPU technology.
the cell is NOT 8 cores! It is a single core power pc chip with 8 spe's (not cores), one which is disables for more yield and another is used by the system os so in general they have one power pc core with 6 spe's to work with. The Xenos has three identical cores with DUAL THREADING EACH CORE which is essentially 6 PROCESSORS at work with more memory to transfer the data. So now you have more even horsepower although the cell has a little more power. The Xenos has better general purpose power as the cell has more floating point power.
I mean if the cell was all that and a bag of potato chips, why hasn't IBM make PC's or macs out of the cell? Why hasn't Toshiba place them in their electronics? Just some food for thought.
Kind of like the new battle between Core i7 and the Phenom 2.
I think the main reason why Apple doesn't use this chip is because IBM ditched OOE. But I doubt they would have used the CELL, more likely a version like the Xenons with multiple cores.
But why are the SPUs no cores ? Well, they got no memory controller, like the ppu, and don't map the system ram into their address space, and they got no cache logic. They got a sophisticated DMA system though and they can issue transfers on their own without the PPU involved, they can run on a full 32 address space, though (AFAIK, its 32 bit addressing). Pretty much looks like a CPU core to me, heck, I have simply run a common C code thru the spu-gcc and that runs on an SPU - incl. C runtime lib (well, it was a scalar png decoder - not even vectorized). I don't know why it wouldn't qualify as a fully functioning cpu if it can run code designed for a standard cpu.
Not coherent cores, sure, and thus not like a traditional multi core processor. BTW, and even if you say, it has only 6 usable SPUs, there's still a PPU in there.
And I stick to my question. I am serious about this. I have not read anything which states the hyperthreading in the CELLs PPU is any different then the hyperthreading in the Xenon. If there is, maybe someone can point me to that source. But it raises the question for me, why is the Xenon fully 6 HW threads, but the PPU in the CELL is not 2 ?
BTW, one more. I don't think people say Shippy is a liar. He certainly is not. He knows his stuff for sure (and more). He might even be right. I just don't think he is seeing the whole picture.
@Playa You are basing your opinion off of general PC knowledge, which applies, but not entirely. PC processors are made so they can fit in almost any PC. A processor for a console is like those, but is custom made to whatever specs the company wants, in order to draw out power and handle the different functions that will be the main DNA of the console.
very interesting posts Ju, I had my suspicions about the Cell's EIB being crucial to achieving real time rendering speeds through and SPU pipeline. The question is wether this is a consecutive or concurrent pipeline meaning you could have two SPU's rendering the scene and the next two doing post processing. There's really all sorts of ways you can go with this and thats without even handing off to the RSX's internal shaders and vector cores. A properly designed engine utilizing both the Cell's and RSX's shading,lighting,vector processing can produce visuals we have yet to see. This is what took Guerilla 4 years to perfect to a playable and presentable form. The exciting part is the room for optimization is as high as the sky.
NOTHING AND NO ONE is touching the Cell for quite sometime, get used to it fanboys.
I traded a ONE quarter for FOUR nickels... yay me, more coins! First, that's seven cores... the chips that come off with eight working cores go to aerospace and medical equipment.
Second, could you possibly believe that 7 vastly slower cores COULD as a whole be slower than 3 faster cores? 7 might be bigger than 3... until you multiply them by their actual clock speeds.
I'm not saying that's true or not... I don't know the actual clock speeds for each core... but don't try and talk about what you don't know.
Gflops will get you no where.... @40cal do you even know what that performance can be used for?
I mean that's a big number right? If the PS3 is that much more powerful then why has it not really out preformed the xbox 360 with multiplatform games?
Seriously you should excuse some thing just because it's new or different. If it can't get the job done in two years some thing is wrong. I mean find our what people use floating point performance for before you hand over the crown as most powerful.
To save you some head ache it is used for security, and web servers mostly to stream stuff. Now if you think a web serve even has a chance at beating the 360 then put your money where your mouth is.
Now blue ray needs both of these- Security so the torrent kids don't hack it and streaming data slowly and sequentially off a large optical disk.
Another thing is find out how many Gflops are in most video cards along.... You will see the cell is really out preformed.
Oyeah IBM was paid to make this chip, yes it cost a lot of money but this is what SONY wanted. Had IBM had more of a say so the chip would have been better yet would have cost even more.
The cell. Has a total of 9 cores on it. 1 PPE core, and 8 SPE cores. All PS3's use only 7 of the SPE cores because it allowed for higher yields for the console market, which ultimately reduces the price of the cell processors used in the PS3. PS3's have a total of 8 cores 1 PPE and 7 SPE. A SPE is a core as it can process specific tasks given to it; however, it is not a general purpose core like the PPE unit. Just because a SPE is not a general purpose core does not mean it isn't a core at all as some people seem to be trying to suggest. I hope this helps clarify why people are saying the PS3 has 8 cores in it.
scissor_runner "If the PS3 is that much more powerful then why has it not really out preformed the xbox 360 with multiplatform games?"
HaHaHaHa, did you really just ask that? Come on bro, multiplatform games are made for, you guessed it, multiple platforms. Devs would have to put the development time in to get the extra performance out of the cell. And if they did that, then we would have more 3rd party exclusives only possible on the PS3.
You can go to a vast number of sources to get performance test results out of these two chips. The cell just outperforms the Xeon. You can start at IBMs site.
LOLLOLOLOLOLOLOL lol lmao 3 plus years and the best the 360 as is gears 1 and 2 with way easier to develop for system lmao funny how just two days till killzone2 gets release world wide sh*t news like this comes up
@40cal.... Then why are Core duos in Apple laptop right now? Do you even know what you are talking about? Apple only put the best in their systems.
Those cell PC you speak of have opterons in them, Yep go look them up... the opterons are there for general purpose code LOL. Also every one knows opteron where AMD's last stand for chip market in servers.
Try running crysis on that system and then get back to me ok? What is funny is each platform has it's own library of compilers you can optimize for different code or build the code for different set ups. The truth is PS3 can not handle 360 code at all because SONY though it was smart to hype a blu ray encoder LOL rather than a CPU that could actually get the job done.
Every CPU that has came out preformed the way it was suppose to with in two years time... The fact that you guys are waiting for the cell to get better is hilarious. Keep on hoping but the hype will kill your system. Remember the xbox 360 has a whole extra processor that developer can not use because of MS. Then on top of this only art choices will be the thing that makes each game different now.... the ceiling has pretty much been reached... just go look at PC GPU cards from 6 years ago... your console lacks ram no matter how fast it is!
I don't remember any one saying the SPE where not a core... yet they are not well suited for gaming code or graphics as in the kind that run in modern games.
You can say the core are general purpose but that does not mean they will run the code any better. No type of coding can replace stuff like branch prediction. This is why intel consistently kills lots of developers of chips. Their kit was so good that it simple had what it needed in the cache with out dumping and having to re-read a certain memory address. If you do that a 1,000 times that adds up to a way faster speed.
Then on top of that you don't really have enough to do real coding on the cells cache. Some thing like this would have been great for PS2 ear graphics yet the HD stuff need way more.
Their are a number of Cores and extra processing units that where added to chips to make them more powerful but none of those chips out did or replaced the true core of the general CPU chip.
By the standards of the PS3 fans the Cell could easly be put into the PSP right? The Cell should be able to out do an arm processor right? Why hasn't SONY done this? Will the PSP2 have a cell in it?
Or better yet why hasn't SONY released a PC GPU with the cell on it for me to buy since it is so powerful? I mean seriously they need the money and I would happily go and pick up one.
So if the cell is so powerful why is it not competing with the current chips on the market? Why has it not be incorporated into PC parts? This is a potential revenue stream SONY is missing?
Maybe the answer is that the cell was a great idea that was not executed as well as it should have been. The cell was suppose to be the HD4780 or Nvidia new chip with less ram. this is why I say if the next playstation does come out maybe they can actually do the name justice, yet MS is sure to use the same idea since they actually make graphics API for this type of tech.
The cell was a good try but it's flawed to the point it will never out shine the 360 in most multi-platform games. You can move your code and write it differently all you want but you will never get what the fans are believing the PS3 can do.
I am glad people are impressed with killzone2 but what if you don't see any more games that go higher than this game? At that point hype will kill your system as it did PC gaming...... So be careful what you hype!
oohhh well look at this, you guys must be programmers and game devs to really know which CPU is better, right? i mean you just know because you favor a console over the other huh? Bunch of retards
scissor_runner Way to go way out into left field buddy. Its real simple bro, the test have been done, the results are in, and the Cell is more powerful then the Xenon.
I am going to choose to believe IBMs test results that place the Cell at almost twice as fast as the Xenon.
Either way bro I really don't care, I was just stating the results of the research that someone else did.
I refuse to get involved in this but some people are spouting an awful lot of waffle. Many struggle to push the spell check button let alone know what they are typing about. My advice, don't read crap articles that have no detail in them even if they are written by 'experts'. Go find the answers yourselves...
That is like saying... That tomato is red and someone else saying that tomato is pink. Funny. I equal and fairly equal is within the same ballpark.
I do think you guys have a good point. How can more cores equal the same power? Dave (the IBM guy) must be looking at the independent features of each CPU and coming up with his statement.
Umm yeah. It's so misleading, I mean they wished that the 360 was right up there with the ps3 in terms of raw processing power, but it's not. They need to face it
Cell = 4-5 times faster than 2xQUAD CPU single percision
the article is taking the architecture of the two chips out of context...period...
he is referring to the PowerPC based core of the 360 and Cell CPUs...and that they are fairly equal, but designed to do different things...
that is irrelevant to the SPE's of the cell...there is not one shred of evidence showing the 360's CPU being able to crunch calculations like that of the Cell...they are both pretty equal at base code sets, as they share the same PPE...
what this guy is saying is that the PPE of each processor is nearly identical...however the Xenos processor lacks the 7 SPE's of the Cell...while the two processes are nearly identical at general purpose code, the Cell will absolutely murder it at specific calculations...
not the best place for info, but half way down the page under the descriptions of the PPE's, it clearly shows what this guy is referring to...and it has nothing to do with the processors overall...
remember...40% of a single killzone 2 frame was said to be rendered entirely by the Cell processor at any given time; confirmed by the tech director at GG...the CPU in the PS3 is a beast at specific tasks...but pretty normal at base instruction sets...
Wow..that was the most incredibly informative paragraph i've ever seen...
""I think they are fairly equal. The interesting thing is that the PowerPC that's common in both is used in completely different ways. If you look at the CPU chip for the 360 and PS3, and the programming models and architecture, they came up with completely different solutions. And yet they use this same common core."
Man..i wish i knew about this before...this is seriously high-tech stuff...
I would comment also but I am too busy snickering. As soon as developers grasped the PS3 architecture and parallel processing, any sort of equality went out the window.
It is laughable as we enter the first season of the PS3 stretching it's legs and beginning to EASILY out perform the 360, the MS backers will grasp at any blade of grass as they head over the inevitable cliff.
Multiplatform titles are the last hope 360 fans have left and fairly soon developers will stop crippling the PS3 versions of such games for the idiotic sake of equality.
The CPU's are equal but the PS3 has 7 SPU's that are multi-purpose and can be used for all sorts of processing. There are bottlenecks elsewhere however on both systems.
Ugh, I hate this power of the cell/power of Xenon crap. The results are what matters and right now MS needs to step up its game.
The SPU is not general purpose. It is meant for floating point operations (hence it being a math beast...) and the PPE is general purpose (the processor that controls all the SPE's).
I wouldn't say, the SPUs are not general purpose. It all depends how you define this. If you say scalar code with tons of branching, well, then possibly. But even this code runs on the SPUs. Just not very efficient (its not, that the SPUs would be some kind of signal processor which cannot execute certain instructions like branches and conditions. It can.)
But it was designed for SIMD operations. Moving large data and apply operations to those data on the fly. Like a streaming CPU. A LOT of data in and out and manipulated in realtime. Like pixels, or geometry, for example.
Sometimes, general purpose task can be designed in a way, the code produced is not strictly scalar. SW can work around those things. Means, generic logistic problems, fed thru the correct algorithm can be very efficient on the CELL.
One example. The SPUs use single precision floating point registers (or ops). The DP performance was lacking. That's why the developed the PowerCELL/XI (I think that's what they call it). Same as the CELL, but DP SPUs. Well, turns out, with proper programming the standard single precision CELL can almost come close to the PowerCELL using DP (!!). Thereretical, and from a HW design perspective this was unthinkable, when the CELL released. However, a couple of years down the road, and proper algorithms, the CELL can keep up. (You can google that, one example is here: http://www.netlib.org/utk/p... I would be lying if I would say I would understand half of what they are talking about).
This certainly applies to a lot of algorithmic problems now a days. It'll require some brain juice to really make this work, but it is certainly possible.
oh I know, I have been programming for a living for 7 years and I have an overall knowledge of the what the cell does. Digging into this puppy and its architecture has already become a college course in most schools.
They may very well be equals BUT! The 360 hasn't proven itself to be equal to the PS3's 8 processors. I mean, cmon, look at Resistance 2. It has amazing draw distances and so much going on at once. Killzone 2 seems to even take that one step further.
8 SPE's and a PPE.. one is for security (pretty much useless to anyone except the highest developers of sony), one is for XMB, and the last six is for games and whatnot.. the PPE is multipurpose.. all running at 3.2GHz
ok then... now as I said before I love my 360, even though its currently not working (It's gone blind but can still speak) and I'm waiting on a opportunity to buy another one, but let's be real here. I do feel that DVD is holding it back, as I said in another post, but it can't be as powerful as the ps3. It impossible. 8 processors vs 3 I think we know who wins. A bigger storage medium (BD or HDDVD) would only serve to have them both looking equal for about a year or two more than they will as they are now, but ps3 would eventually blast ahead of 360 games in terms of graphics and physics.
But then again, if this IBM guy is saying this, then there is a possibility that what he says is true. We'll see. Now I'm even more curious about Alan Wake and the 360 version of FFXIII.
Central Processing Unit Basically the more powerful it is, the more that can go on at once. It's the difference between having 40 men on the screen at once in a game and having 80 men on the screen at once with massive explosions
lol ummm no Sorry but as we are seeing those little SPU's can handle a lot more. It was definitely harder to achieve but id imagine killzone 3 will look a lot better than 2 later in the ps3 life cycle.
I still have yet to see anything better than Gears on the 360.
then we should expect games like killzone 2 god of war 3 uncharted 2 heavy rain and grand turismo 5 games out for the 360 in no time...after all, their CPU can take it just like the ps3 can...just ask all those JRPGs on the 360...lol it cant even run a rpg battle
You can tell it's 'KillZone 2' week!!! ;-D I was right - "Sony Cell and 360 CPU are Equals"
+
"360 Challenges the PS3's Cell Processor Power with Alan Wake"
;-D ;-D ;-D
Top 2 Article/Stories on this site!!! ;-D
Pathetic really, oh well they both made me Laugh out Loud!!! ;-D
lol lmao 3 plus years and the best the 360 as is gears 1 and 2 with way easier to develop for system lmao funny how just two days till killzone2 gets release world wide sh*t news like this comes up
so.. i guess the SPUs in the ps3 are useless? oh well, and like Bad_Karma mentioned, if they are equal, why didnt a university use the 360 for research, i mean it is cheaper..oh well i just let the games do the talking, and right now Sev is saying: STFU AND PLAY THE F##KING GAMES!!!
probably liscensing issues with microsoft. Just because one is 'cheaper' out right doesn't mean it is for an institute. Both consoles are used extensively by companies, Remedy uses about 9 xboxes attached for it's config and compiling.
I'm not offended. I just wanted people to know that the guy being trotted out to make goofy claims is not the guy he is supposed to be. Anyway, in case anybody didn't get a chance to see it before 360 fanboys got it pulled.
The research and development team is listed on the lower right in the link.
I was actually surprise you comment was deleted. It wasn't spam, offensive or even off topic. You had a argument and you back it up with facts via a link to the researchers.
Yeah, what kind of douches are these mods? They deleted my freakin' comment, #1.5
What a bunch of asshats, why can't they come up with a good argument to support their hate?
I mean come on, at least give me a reason.
As much as I would love to engage in fellow computer-talk, N4G is hardly the place for such talk. Most people here don't even know about the PowerPC diagram: much less what PPE really stands for.
He tried to over simplify it for gamers And was very unsuccessful, fairly equal cpus maybe, but one has 7 spus, and one doesn't, so guess which one can be used for more calculations than the other.
Outside of sites like this most people really can't tell the differences - a lot of people on here don't have a clue either of course when shouting their ignorant comments about tech stuff they can't ever hope to grasp
And does anyone here honestly think the 360 is shown up somehow by the Lost Planet's graphics for example
I'm perfectly happy with the standards these days from games.All this talk of superiority from the PS3 while fair enough if purely about how technically much better something may be, is something entirely different if talking about if you can honestly see the differences
Certainly the average gamer wont be able to, and yet that wont stop people on sites like this preaching about stuff they themselves wont even notice
Also i have a feeling his words were cut short, or taken out of context As people's words usually are, we'll see when the 360 never even comes close in graphic quality though eh.
What people are missing is he is talking about the processors being similar BEFORE they added multiple cores to each. That is what he means when he says they used them in different ways with MS being conservative. That is like saying two cars are similar before one gets a 4 cylinder engine and the other gets a supercharged V8 with DOHC.
what... is going on today on N4G? Nothing but crap flame articles, granted this was an attempt to put out some flames, but it never works, it just instigates more crap.
Be like me max power Learn to love it and get involve... Like this.. I can see why kids defend the xbots , don't see why grown folks would unless there dumb
yeap they are the same thats why no 360 game can come close to uncharted or killzone 2 ... and thats why they use the ps3 as a super computer and they use the ps3 for computing proceses... and the 360 is used to blow up things and burn down houses :)
I own a 360 and a PS3 and even if this is true, PS3 still has the edge with Blu-ray being implimented... but I guess 360 games could get on par possibly with a handful of discs per game.
This is why Im awaiting Alan Wake so much, I bet it WILL be freaking breath taking... but Im also betting the compression will be kept minimal and it might be more discs, just to maintain the quality of the game. But it would be a hit on manufacture costs of the title obviously!
I read the full article, he said they are fairly close AFTER you take the gpu, and all of the procedures involved in development. Even so, the ps3 is capable of a lot more than the 360 graphically, read on.
The ps3's cell is definitely more powerful on it's own, but all factors on the 360 considered, including the video card. they are almost equal, they use completely different types of programming code though, ps3 is harder to understand, but if you get intelligent people working on it, it can push the limit to what can be made on a gaming console, much further than the 360.
And this quote
"I think some of the bigger game houses that will write more high-level code would really prefer an Xbox 360 -- right out of the chute, it's easier to write code for. I think you can really leverage the Cell hardware technology -- but it is harder to get your head around."
why don't they link the actual story?
Put simply for people, the cell is capable of a lot more because of it's design, the power of the cpu isn't everything, learn to read. Hence this quote
"The real hardcore coders would argue that, once you do understand it and can program to it, you absolutely get the most out of the hardware, and really write some fairly low-level code that's really high performance," he adds."
Yes the quotes in this post are ALL from the same article, but for flaming purposes, they obviously didn't include these parts of the story.
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Stupid IBM?
8 cores-1 for os means 7 cores... or (3) dual cores (that mean 2 cores) that means 6 core. Those are actually processors, not supplementary processors.
most newer core 2 duos are more powerful than most amd quads. all I can say is more dosent alyways mean better. and I guess the man who worked on both processors dont know as much as you DA fanboys.
"I think they are fairly equal. The interesting thing is that the PowerPC that's common in both is used in completely different ways. If you look at the CPU chip for the 360 and PS3, and the programming models and architecture, they came up with completely different solutions. And yet they use this same common core."
The only thing this guy said is that they share a common core. The Cell is and has always outperformed the Xenon.
Xbox 360 - 115.2 GB/s theoretical peak performance
Playstation - 204.8 GB/s theoretical peak performance
Those are the numbers from IBM.
What are you even talking about of Course the Cell has 8 Cores Toshiba and Sony developed it and it has 8 Cores.
what i find ironic though is that Toshiba and SOny Competed on HD DVD and Blu Ray but they Both Worked Together with IBM on the CELL and if you Open up the PS3 Controller the Chip inside it even Has Toshiba On it it Doesn't really make much sense to me but what even i think Toshiba and Sony should Just merge and Create a Super Powerful Company.
lol your r truly a fan boy. Your so blind to see what people wrote. Some 1 bashing any console ? No, Second some 1 above 6th grade would be smart enough to know that having 7 cores if a lot better than having 2 cores because they can run diff things at the same time. Y do u think killzone 2 can have all those light effects ? You call fan boy to any 1 who doesn't agree with u about the 360, now that's being a fan boy. I have looked at ur comments and u obviously love your box. SO go back to Bill's arms. BTW what new core 2 duos are you talking about ? because from what i know. They stopped making newer core 2 duos when they released core 2 extreme then came quad core, then they went to i7.
look up the info for games before you make an uneducated kindergarten comment. intels core 2 duos do consistently outperform amds quads. so more cores dont always make it better, even at the same clock speeds. so your kindegarden education has served you very well.e8400 e8500 outperform most amd quads
Anyways people can preach all night about sales and metacritic.... I want to hear about the GAMES.
your /yʊər, yɔr, yoʊr; unstressed yər/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [yoor, yawr, yohr; unstressed yer] Show IPA Pronunciation
–pronoun 1. (a form of the possessive case of you used as an attributive adjective): Your jacket is in that closet. I like your idea. Compare yours.
2. one's (used to indicate that one belonging to oneself or to any person): The consulate is your best source of information. As you go down the hill, the library is on your left.
3. (used informally to indicate all members of a group, occupation, etc., or things of a particular type): Take your factory worker, for instance. Your power brakes don't need that much servicing. AND BUY THE WAY IM NOT A 360 FANBOY BECAUSE ALL I HAVE IS A PC
LOOK IT UP! ARE YOU AN ENGLISH TEACHER ?
As far what I read, the core was the exact same for the CELL and the Xenon, except the VMX units. But I haven't seen anything which says Xenon has hyperthreading and CELL (PPU) does not. In fact, both do issue two instructions in parallel. Haven't seen any details, though. Some say it must be integer + float, but not two ints. So, 6 HW threads on the 360 only if the compiler can generate code (optimizes instructions in a way they can be reordered and issued in parallel). If it can't, no 6 threads. CELL: 6 HW vector units (no matter how bad the compiler is - unless you feed scalar code into the SPU), plus a hyper threaded scalar core. I also would like to know the raw vector performance compared between (Xenon) VMX core and SPU. SPU ISA was designed from scratch, and had all bottlenecks removed. It also can operate in SRAM and can issues full bandwidth waterfall DMA within the CELL using the EIB only (no RAM access).
I don't know. I just can't see how the Xenon can keep up. But I don't know enough about this in a real world case, to be honest.
It is unbelievably amazing how much knowledge your typical gamers on N4G has, yet they sit at home playing on the PS3s, 360s, and Wiis.
Here we have a man that is directly involved in the technology, of both the Cell and 360 processors (According to the article). Yet these brilliant gamers on N4G call him a liar that doesn't know what he is talking about. Some people even go as far as to tell you what the article is talking about clearly without that information being given. Wow, incredible intelligence.
The funny thing is, two comments later you read the same gamers telling a friend that they are only going to be able to buy one game this month because they can't afford the 120 bucks to buy two.
With the knowledge they possess one would think that they would be somewhere creating new CPU technology.
OH THE IRONY!
I mean if the cell was all that and a bag of potato chips, why hasn't IBM make PC's or macs out of the cell? Why hasn't Toshiba place them in their electronics? Just some food for thought.
Kind of like the new battle between Core i7 and the Phenom 2.
But why are the SPUs no cores ? Well, they got no memory controller, like the ppu, and don't map the system ram into their address space, and they got no cache logic. They got a sophisticated DMA system though and they can issue transfers on their own without the PPU involved, they can run on a full 32 address space, though (AFAIK, its 32 bit addressing). Pretty much looks like a CPU core to me, heck, I have simply run a common C code thru the spu-gcc and that runs on an SPU - incl. C runtime lib (well, it was a scalar png decoder - not even vectorized). I don't know why it wouldn't qualify as a fully functioning cpu if it can run code designed for a standard cpu.
Not coherent cores, sure, and thus not like a traditional multi core processor. BTW, and even if you say, it has only 6 usable SPUs, there's still a PPU in there.
And I stick to my question. I am serious about this. I have not read anything which states the hyperthreading in the CELLs PPU is any different then the hyperthreading in the Xenon. If there is, maybe someone can point me to that source. But it raises the question for me, why is the Xenon fully 6 HW threads, but the PPU in the CELL is not 2 ?
BTW, one more. I don't think people say Shippy is a liar. He certainly is not. He knows his stuff for sure (and more). He might even be right. I just don't think he is seeing the whole picture.
You are basing your opinion off of general PC knowledge, which applies, but not entirely. PC processors are made so they can fit in almost any PC. A processor for a console is like those, but is custom made to whatever specs the company wants, in order to draw out power and handle the different functions that will be the main DNA of the console.
NOTHING AND NO ONE is touching the Cell for quite sometime, get used to it fanboys.
First, that's seven cores... the chips that come off with eight working cores go to aerospace and medical equipment.
Second, could you possibly believe that 7 vastly slower cores COULD as a whole be slower than 3 faster cores? 7 might be bigger than 3... until you multiply them by their actual clock speeds.
I'm not saying that's true or not... I don't know the actual clock speeds for each core... but don't try and talk about what you don't know.
@40cal do you even know what that performance can be used for?
I mean that's a big number right? If the PS3 is that much more powerful then why has it not really out preformed the xbox 360 with multiplatform games?
Seriously you should excuse some thing just because it's new or different. If it can't get the job done in two years some thing is wrong. I mean find our what people use floating point performance for before you hand over the crown as most powerful.
To save you some head ache it is used for security, and web servers mostly to stream stuff. Now if you think a web serve even has a chance at beating the 360 then put your money where your mouth is.
Now blue ray needs both of these- Security so the torrent kids don't hack it and streaming data slowly and sequentially off a large optical disk.
Another thing is find out how many Gflops are in most video cards along.... You will see the cell is really out preformed.
Oyeah IBM was paid to make this chip, yes it cost a lot of money but this is what SONY wanted. Had IBM had more of a say so the chip would have been better yet would have cost even more.
Has a total of 9 cores on it. 1 PPE core, and 8 SPE cores. All PS3's use only 7 of the SPE cores because it allowed for higher yields for the console market, which ultimately reduces the price of the cell processors used in the PS3. PS3's have a total of 8 cores 1 PPE and 7 SPE. A SPE is a core as it can process specific tasks given to it; however, it is not a general purpose core like the PPE unit. Just because a SPE is not a general purpose core does not mean it isn't a core at all as some people seem to be trying to suggest. I hope this helps clarify why people are saying the PS3 has 8 cores in it.
"If the PS3 is that much more powerful then why has it not really out preformed the xbox 360 with multiplatform games?"
HaHaHaHa, did you really just ask that? Come on bro, multiplatform games are made for, you guessed it, multiple platforms. Devs would have to put the development time in to get the extra performance out of the cell. And if they did that, then we would have more 3rd party exclusives only possible on the PS3.
You can go to a vast number of sources to get performance test results out of these two chips. The cell just outperforms the Xeon. You can start at IBMs site.
lol lmao 3 plus years and the best the 360 as is gears 1 and 2 with way easier to develop for system
lmao funny how just two days till killzone2 gets release world wide sh*t news like this comes up
Those cell PC you speak of have opterons in them, Yep go look them up... the opterons are there for general purpose code LOL. Also every one knows opteron where AMD's last stand for chip market in servers.
http://rian.s26.xrea.com/ni...
lol
Try running crysis on that system and then get back to me ok? What is funny is each platform has it's own library of compilers you can optimize for different code or build the code for different set ups. The truth is PS3 can not handle 360 code at all because SONY though it was smart to hype a blu ray encoder LOL rather than a CPU that could actually get the job done.
Every CPU that has came out preformed the way it was suppose to with in two years time... The fact that you guys are waiting for the cell to get better is hilarious. Keep on hoping but the hype will kill your system. Remember the xbox 360 has a whole extra processor that developer can not use because of MS. Then on top of this only art choices will be the thing that makes each game different now.... the ceiling has pretty much been reached... just go look at PC GPU cards from 6 years ago... your console lacks ram no matter how fast it is!
I don't remember any one saying the SPE where not a core... yet they are not well suited for gaming code or graphics as in the kind that run in modern games.
You can say the core are general purpose but that does not mean they will run the code any better. No type of coding can replace stuff like branch prediction. This is why intel consistently kills lots of developers of chips. Their kit was so good that it simple had what it needed in the cache with out dumping and having to re-read a certain memory address. If you do that a 1,000 times that adds up to a way faster speed.
Then on top of that you don't really have enough to do real coding on the cells cache. Some thing like this would have been great for PS2 ear graphics yet the HD stuff need way more.
Their are a number of Cores and extra processing units that where added to chips to make them more powerful but none of those chips out did or replaced the true core of the general CPU chip.
By the standards of the PS3 fans the Cell could easly be put into the PSP right? The Cell should be able to out do an arm processor right? Why hasn't SONY done this? Will the PSP2 have a cell in it?
Or better yet why hasn't SONY released a PC GPU with the cell on it for me to buy since it is so powerful? I mean seriously they need the money and I would happily go and pick up one.
So if the cell is so powerful why is it not competing with the current chips on the market? Why has it not be incorporated into PC parts? This is a potential revenue stream SONY is missing?
Maybe the answer is that the cell was a great idea that was not executed as well as it should have been. The cell was suppose to be the HD4780 or Nvidia new chip with less ram. this is why I say if the next playstation does come out maybe they can actually do the name justice, yet MS is sure to use the same idea since they actually make graphics API for this type of tech.
The cell was a good try but it's flawed to the point it will never out shine the 360 in most multi-platform games. You can move your code and write it differently all you want but you will never get what the fans are believing the PS3 can do.
I am glad people are impressed with killzone2 but what if you don't see any more games that go higher than this game? At that point hype will kill your system as it did PC gaming...... So be careful what you hype!
Way to go way out into left field buddy. Its real simple bro, the test have been done, the results are in, and the Cell is more powerful then the Xenon.
I am going to choose to believe IBMs test results that place the Cell at almost twice as fast as the Xenon.
Either way bro I really don't care, I was just stating the results of the research that someone else did.
He said they were fairly equal, he didn't say they were equal.
That tomato is red and someone else saying that tomato is pink. Funny. I equal and fairly equal is within the same ballpark.
I do think you guys have a good point. How can more cores equal the same power? Dave (the IBM guy) must be looking at the independent features of each CPU and coming up with his statement.
Interesting none-the-less!
Cell = 4-5 times faster than 2xQUAD CPU single percision
http://www.psu.com/forums/s...
hyper threading, clock speeds, even position with one another can all speed up a system.
he is referring to the PowerPC based core of the 360 and Cell CPUs...and that they are fairly equal, but designed to do different things...
that is irrelevant to the SPE's of the cell...there is not one shred of evidence showing the 360's CPU being able to crunch calculations like that of the Cell...they are both pretty equal at base code sets, as they share the same PPE...
what this guy is saying is that the PPE of each processor is nearly identical...however the Xenos processor lacks the 7 SPE's of the Cell...while the two processes are nearly identical at general purpose code, the Cell will absolutely murder it at specific calculations...
not the best place for info, but half way down the page under the descriptions of the PPE's, it clearly shows what this guy is referring to...and it has nothing to do with the processors overall...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...
remember...40% of a single killzone 2 frame was said to be rendered entirely by the Cell processor at any given time; confirmed by the tech director at GG...the CPU in the PS3 is a beast at specific tasks...but pretty normal at base instruction sets...
He said the PowerPC cores are fairly equal. The Cell chip has been shown (by IBM) to massively outperform the Xenon chip.
This article is meant to create controversy and confusion. How did it make it to N4G?
"This article is meant to create controversy and confusion. How did it make it to N4G?"
Reread the first part of your statement.."This article is meant to create controversy and confusion."
Thats how.
Who is this "They"? What do "they need to face"?
Your ARGUINING against a man who was the lead designer on BOTH projects? What *the heck* are you talking about?
He's not the marketing department at Sony, he's an Engineer at IBM. What is your malfunction?
He knows what the hell he's talking about.
LOL!!! That's what "THEY" want you to believe!
""I think they are fairly equal. The interesting thing is that the PowerPC that's common in both is used in completely different ways. If you look at the CPU chip for the 360 and PS3, and the programming models and architecture, they came up with completely different solutions. And yet they use this same common core."
Man..i wish i knew about this before...this is seriously high-tech stuff...
/sarcasm
It is laughable as we enter the first season of the PS3 stretching it's legs and beginning to EASILY out perform the 360, the MS backers will grasp at any blade of grass as they head over the inevitable cliff.
Multiplatform titles are the last hope 360 fans have left and fairly soon developers will stop crippling the PS3 versions of such games for the idiotic sake of equality.
Ugh, I hate this power of the cell/power of Xenon crap. The results are what matters and right now MS needs to step up its game.
But it was designed for SIMD operations. Moving large data and apply operations to those data on the fly. Like a streaming CPU. A LOT of data in and out and manipulated in realtime. Like pixels, or geometry, for example.
Sometimes, general purpose task can be designed in a way, the code produced is not strictly scalar. SW can work around those things. Means, generic logistic problems, fed thru the correct algorithm can be very efficient on the CELL.
One example. The SPUs use single precision floating point registers (or ops). The DP performance was lacking. That's why the developed the PowerCELL/XI (I think that's what they call it). Same as the CELL, but DP SPUs. Well, turns out, with proper programming the standard single precision CELL can almost come close to the PowerCELL using DP (!!). Thereretical, and from a HW design perspective this was unthinkable, when the CELL released. However, a couple of years down the road, and proper algorithms, the CELL can keep up. (You can google that, one example is here: http://www.netlib.org/utk/p... I would be lying if I would say I would understand half of what they are talking about).
This certainly applies to a lot of algorithmic problems now a days. It'll require some brain juice to really make this work, but it is certainly possible.
BUT! The 360 hasn't proven itself to be equal to the PS3's 8 processors. I mean, cmon, look at Resistance 2. It has amazing draw distances and so much going on at once. Killzone 2 seems to even take that one step further.
now as I said before I love my 360, even though its currently not working (It's gone blind but can still speak) and I'm waiting on a opportunity to buy another one, but let's be real here. I do feel that DVD is holding it back, as I said in another post, but it can't be as powerful as the ps3. It impossible. 8 processors vs 3 I think we know who wins. A bigger storage medium (BD or HDDVD) would only serve to have them both looking equal for about a year or two more than they will as they are now, but ps3 would eventually blast ahead of 360 games in terms of graphics and physics.
But then again, if this IBM guy is saying this, then there is a possibility that what he says is true. We'll see. Now I'm even more curious about Alan Wake and the 360 version of FFXIII.
wow
Basically the more powerful it is, the more that can go on at once. It's the difference between having 40 men on the screen at once in a game and having 80 men on the screen at once with massive explosions
indeed
this guy was "the leading man behind both"
LOL
Why daisy chain any why not just use 1 PS3 right. Hell if you daisy chain enough commadore 64s you get the power your looking for. Point not take.
@above, that's funny because you have a pvssy in plain site also...lol
No one does that because they'd set the campus on fire. lol..
say that ones console cpu is stronger than the others if he gets busines from Micro and Sony.
Think about it....
Now stop thinking and give me bubbles
Sorry but as we are seeing those little SPU's can handle a lot more. It was definitely harder to achieve but id imagine killzone 3 will look a lot better than 2 later in the ps3 life cycle.
I still have yet to see anything better than Gears on the 360.
"Sony Cell and 360 CPU are Equals"
+
"360 Challenges the PS3's Cell Processor Power with Alan Wake"
;-D ;-D ;-D
Top 2 Article/Stories on this site!!! ;-D
Pathetic really, oh well they both made me Laugh out Loud!!! ;-D
lmao funny how just two days till killzone2 gets release world wide sh*t news like this comes up
i guess the SPUs in the ps3 are useless? oh well, and like Bad_Karma mentioned, if they are equal, why didnt a university use the 360 for research, i mean it is cheaper..oh well i just let the games do the talking, and right now Sev is saying: STFU AND PLAY THE F##KING GAMES!!!
happy gaming!!!
uncharted ftw!!!
Just because one is 'cheaper' out right doesn't mean it is for an institute. Both consoles are used extensively by companies, Remedy uses about 9 xboxes attached for it's config and compiling.
UNCHARTED FTW!!!!
but you cant steal my sh!t..if you check my commment history i end it with this:
happy gaming
uncharted2 ftw!!
i should get a patent for that
The truth was deleted by the mods.
I'm not offended. I just wanted people to know that the guy being trotted out to make goofy claims is not the guy he is supposed to be. Anyway, in case anybody didn't get a chance to see it before 360 fanboys got it pulled.
The research and development team is listed on the lower right in the link.
http://domino.research.ibm....
What a bunch of asshats, why can't they come up with a good argument to support their hate?
I mean come on, at least give me a reason.
Sounds like fascism to me. xP
And was very unsuccessful, fairly equal cpus maybe, but one has 7 spus, and one doesn't, so guess which one can be used for more calculations than the other.
And does anyone here honestly think the 360 is shown up somehow by the Lost Planet's graphics for example
I'm perfectly happy with the standards these days from games.All this talk of superiority from the PS3 while fair enough if purely about how technically much better something may be, is something entirely different if talking about if you can honestly see the differences
Certainly the average gamer wont be able to, and yet that wont stop people on sites like this preaching about stuff they themselves wont even notice
As people's words usually are, we'll see when the 360 never even comes close in graphic quality though eh.
What people are missing is he is talking about the processors being similar BEFORE they added multiple cores to each. That is what he means when he says they used them in different ways with MS being conservative. That is like saying two cars are similar before one gets a 4 cylinder engine and the other gets a supercharged V8 with DOHC.
and there way off topic
is going on today on N4G? Nothing but crap flame articles, granted this was an attempt to put out some flames, but it never works, it just instigates more crap.
Learn to love it and get involve... Like this.. I can see why kids defend the xbots , don't see why grown folks would unless there dumb
and even if this is true, PS3 still has the edge with Blu-ray being implimented... but I guess 360 games could get on par possibly with a handful of discs per game.
This is why Im awaiting Alan Wake so much, I bet it WILL be freaking breath taking... but Im also betting the compression will be kept minimal and it might be more discs, just to maintain the quality of the game. But it would be a hit on manufacture costs of the title obviously!
as always with Alan Wake, wait and see!!!
AFTER you take the gpu, and all of the procedures involved in development. Even so, the ps3 is capable of a lot more than the 360 graphically, read on.
The ps3's cell is definitely more powerful on it's own, but all factors on the 360 considered, including the video card. they are almost equal, they use completely different types of programming code though, ps3 is harder to understand, but if you get intelligent people working on it, it can push the limit to what can be made on a gaming console, much further than the 360.
And this quote
"I think some of the bigger game houses that will write more high-level code would really prefer an Xbox 360 -- right out of the chute, it's easier to write code for. I think you can really leverage the Cell hardware technology -- but it is harder to get your head around."
why don't they link the actual story?
Put simply for people, the cell is capable of a lot more because of it's design, the power of the cpu isn't everything, learn to read.
Hence this quote
"The real hardcore coders would argue that, once you do understand it and can program to it, you absolutely get the most out of the hardware, and really write some fairly low-level code that's really high performance," he adds."
Yes the quotes in this post are ALL from the same article, but for flaming purposes, they obviously didn't include these parts of the story.