I wouldn't say that the architecture of the PS3 or XBox 360 was any more rushed than the designs of previous consoles as much as Sony and Microsoft have moved away from the traditional position (technically) most consoles have existed in ...

Videogame consoles have traditionally been moderately modified somewhat outdated hardware that because of the lower overhead of running a game on a console, the focus on low level development for the physical hardware of a system, and the lower resolution of images produced videogame console gave the impression of being high end hardware when they were released.

Sony's mistake in my opinion was that they decided to go for very expensive exotic hardware under the assumption that the system would sell so well that hardware costs would come down rapidly, the entire focus of the industry would be on getting decent performance out of their system, and (with effort) the performance benefit of the PS3 would be realized. Unfortunately, the sales of the PS3 are slow enough that it has seen price drops at a rate which preven them from recovering hardware losses, third party publishers are focused entirely on multiplatform games, and even Sony's first party development teams after 3 or 4 years of work and tens of Millions of dollars are not demonstrating much of an advantage over what is being produced on the XBox 360.

And you've lost me, now.  You basically state that cores are cores, then you spend a page describing how the Cell's cores are different.  It's not a question of whether the Cell's cores are "worthy" to be called cores, it's a question of whether or not they're useful in the same way as the cores of a general-purpose CPU.  Yes, technically they are cores.  Yes, they can be used for "general purpose" CPU work.  Etc. Etc.  But they're not *designed* to be used that way.   At least from what I understand from reading information about the Cell development project, and from what you just stated above.

An intel 4-core CPU is designed so that an SMP-supporting OS can treat each core in a very similar fashion and spread processing load across the cores in a sane way.  Using the Cell like that would be terribly underutilizing it's specialized features, as well as the relative performance hit that would result compared using the intel chip in that way.

Again, I'm not saying the Cell isn't a great chip... but calling it an 8-core CPU is misleading as most people will mentally compare it to other 8-core CPUs that are designed for SMP-supporting OSes.

Should we not mention the clock speed of CPUs, for fear that people would compare equivalent AMD and Intel processors and think one is way faster when it's not true?

Actually, the RAM you mentioned is actually the system memory, not the graphics memory.
XBOX 360: 512 internal memory
PS3: 256 combined, I think with another 256 mb of ram

Good point... clock speed, mips, fips, etc. have all been used by companies to mislead consumers.  Benchmarks have even been terribly twisted by hardware vendors who have intentionally tweaked CPUs to perform well when running the benchmark software.

But you wouldn't compare the clock speed of a GPU and a CPU to try and determine which was faster.  CPUs can do GPU-like tasks, and GPUs can do CPU-like tasks, but it doesn't mean that a 3-GHz CPU would make a better GPU than a 1 GHz GPU card.

Here's an example... I run a company with 50 employees, and we use Linux servers.  Someone says, "replace those Intel 2-core machines with  AMD 4-core machines, both running at approximately the same clock speed, and your Linux users will experience improved performance."  This is very likely a true statement.

Then someone says to me, "replace your Intel 4-core machines with Cell 8-core machines and your Linux users will experience improved performance."  This isn't necessary true.

So, what can generally be said about adding more cores on an SMP-aware machine (Linux, Windows, OS X), can't necessarily be equivalent when talking about the Cell as an "8-core" processor.  It would depend largely on the OS, hardware support, etc.

I admit that for those who understand processors, saying the Cell is an 8-core CPU makes sense.  But for end-users of the machines, I still believe it is misleading.  I don't believe a 3 GHz "8-core" Cell general purpose machine would be necessarily faster than a 3 GHz 4-core Intel machine for general purpose computing tasks.  But calling the Cell an 8-core CPU would likely lead a lot of end-users to that conclusion.

I'm just put off by the attitude of "you can't HANDLE the truth!" that (IMO) lies at the bottom of your impulse to hide these facts.

It's better, I think, to just say (when you think someone uninformed will be looking), "You can't directly compare two different types of processor by looking at the GHz, cores, etc. You have to look at performance. That's true of AMD vs. Intel, and extra double true of AMD/Intel vs. Cell."

It's simple, it's true (right?), and it doesn't treat people like children.

Crumas2 is merely looking at the comparison from a more abstract, more "common user" based viewpoint. I actually stated in my post that a quadcore general purpose processor would be far superior to the Cell for general purpose computing, because its running widely varying tasks in parallel, as opposed to trying to accomplish a single task with parallelism.

But we're not talking about general purpose computing. We're talking about games, which are often realtime simulations, with a lot of embarrassingly parallel ("embarrassingly parallel" is a computer science term for algorithms which are blatently made parallel... I'm not trying to make any feel bad here) work to be had.

Thus, the Cell is clearly a good selection for such a use, once the hurdles of understanding how it works are behind you. Presumably, you could have a 8 core cell, and a 4-core general purpose CPU, which cost about the same to make (in identical mass-produced circumstances), but the Cell would beat the socks off the quad core for gaming purposes. That's my point, and its the only one I'm trying to make.

Crumas, as I said, is approaching it from a more practical business standpoint, which I think is totally valid, in this day and age. I don't think that those ideas will necessarily hold true in the future, however, as performance parallel computing concepts become more mainstream.

I never said people couldn't handle the truth.  I said it was misleading for those who aren't software/hardware engineers to call the Cell an "8-core" CPU, when it's a very different animal compared to traditional consumer-level multi-core CPUs.  Just as it's misleading for companies to state that a 22" monitor is "HD", even though it doesn't really support 720p or 1080i/p... just something "almost" 720p.

I even stated that you made a good point, i.e. - that the "numbers" of supposedly similar products could be misleading.

I guess I'm just put off by the attitude that the motivation of others can be uncovered by inference, i.e. - that I "treat people like children", have an impulse to "hide facts", etc.

EDIT: removing angry statement at the end.

This is a very good post.  As I've stated time and again in this thread, I believe the Cell is a very powerful (and I'll add groundbreaking) CPU... I just think the buzz words people use to describe it sometimes don't accurately reflect what the Cell is really about.

That was apparently more offensive than I meant it to be.  Sorry. 

But you ARE implying, by claiming that people will be mislead, that those people are not readily able to comprehend that "more cores ≠ better performance".  If not, then why shouldn't we mention the fact that it has 8 cores? 

The MERITS of this argument are your reasons for wanting people to not talk about the Cell having 8 cores where non-expert people can hear them (or that's what it sounded like to me). 

So I asked, 'Why refrain from mentioning (if you object to "hide") pertinent facts, when a simple disclaimer will do?' 

Or, alternatively, if you're only talking to people about performance, why mention the stats of the processor at all, instead of picking out things in particular that we shouldn't mention?  (At least, that's what it seemed to me that you were doing.  Was that impression mistaken?)