| Jo21 said:
wait wat? the fail palm its for you. a quadcore maybe but a 1.6ghz dual core isn't. and the SPE are cpu, they even have 256kb of cache EACH. from IBM: All things considered the theoretic 204.8 GB/s number most often cited is the best one to bear in mind. The IBM Systems Performance group has demonstrated SPU-centric data flows achieving 197 GB/s on a Cell processor running at 3.2 GHz so this number is a fair reflection on practice as well. The kernel and scheduling is distributed across the SPEs. Tasks are synchronized using mutexes or semaphores as in a conventional operating system. Ready-to-run tasks wait in a queue for an SPE to execute them. The SPEs use shared memory for all tasks in this configuration. in comparison to the 360 CPU: from IBM: 115.2 GFLOPS theoretical peak performance Xenon is a Tri-Core CPU PowerPC based better than intel x86 cpus, by force a very high clocked intel x86 or quadcore cpu is needed to match ps3 or even 360 cpu. |
SPEs/SPUs are not general purpose CPU cores. They're specialized execution units that are very good for manipulating large amounts of similar data in useful and interesting ways. Think bit-blitter or DSP on steroids. They're very good at pre-processing video information before sending it to a GPU.
This is one of the reasons they're difficult to program, because it's not like programing a traditional CPU core.
They're better suited than a CPU for same tasks, and worse suited for others.
And I wouldn't invest too much energy in IBM's promotional "tech" literature... they will always try to paint their architecture in the best light by pointing out where a specific theoretical spec is better than the competition's. The reality of what the system can be used for is almost always more complicated.
This all said, yes the PS3's architecture (not just the Cell) is very powerful in many ways, but it still doesn't have 8 cores.
