Objective and factual look at Cell in PS3 and it's REAL capablities.

[stephen700]

All CPU Gflops ratings are theoretical Maximum's and generally as noted you will be very lucky to get 50% of this actual figure in most cases ! .
As for the Xenon vs Cell being dramatically easier to use - Game software even on the PC where dual/quad core is now common is rarely using more than 1 cpu fully ! - it's not easy at all - parallelisim adds complexity - but once you do good parallel code the number of cores will provide a linear speedup in execution - 2 cores is twice as fast as one and 4 is twice as fast a 2 and 8 is twice as fast as 4 - this is how GPU's are so fast but so limited by design usually - it's difficult to write good parallel code even for simple repeditive calaculation of graphics - but once you can do it 7 cores is as easy do as 3 or 4.

"When physically tested however for theoretical peak performance, only 155.5 GFLOP’s were actually achieved (see Table 4) with a total efficiency rate of 75.9%.
Because of manufacturing yield issues, the PS3 only uses 7 SPE’s with the theoretical peak for the PS3’s Cell processor being reduced to 176 GFLOP’s, each running at 25.12 GFLOP’s. Utilizing the same 75.9% efficiency, it is easily interpolated that the PS3’s Cell CPU will only be capable of 133.6 GFLOP’s.
The Xbox 360 has 3 general-purpose 2-threaded CPU's, which generates a proven 115.2 GFLOP’s which is dramatically easier for developers to utilize."

Yes the 115.2G figure is also a theoretical Maximum ( is the post author that gullable or just a fanboy ?) - and unlike the cell the efficinecy of the Xenon is even lower than 75.9% - Cell efficiency is generall higher than other CPU's.
Xenon probably manages around 50G actual (being generous here) - thats assuming all 3 cores - 6 threads are being used - And a carefull balanced mix of Altivec and Floating processor code on 6 threads - which i doubt would be the case -It's just as difficult as using the multicore Cell SPU's to get peak performance from the Xenon like this.

All up IBM do pretty good CPU's for all 3 current consoles (Wii,360,Ps3) - but the Cell is the pick of the Bunch - if only Sony were as good as MS with software support .