360 CPU and Cell are fairly equal according to Dave Shippy

[Ascended_Saiyan3]

Procrastinato said:

@NJ5

Anyone who uses most animation middleware packages, or physics middleware, etc. can and will use all 6 available SPEs (the 7ths is not usable by games). There's no reason not to. You just are going to have trouble using them all the time, because not all game tasks are covered by middleware, and not everything is embarrassingly parallel.  Its not impossible to use them more, however -- as KZ2 demonstrates.  Why they don't use 6 is beyond me... its possible that the graph is outdated, or that the other 2 SPEs are off doing something uninteresting in the background, but in real-time (like audio, or streaming work), and that they didn't care to show it on the graph.

Like any parallel system, anything that can be done in parallel (like animation processing, a very commonplace example) can be shotgunned on the SPEs, via middleware at the very least.  Therein lies the Cell's advantage over the Xenon.  Which is better, double-barrel shotgun (or up to 5 slow-RoF barrels, not 6, because one of the Xenon processor threads needs to manage the operation), or 6-barrel, high-speed minigun (the PPU thread managing them is different, and I suppose there is one more PPU thread to spare as well)?

Beer says that these operations are frickin' fast, esp. 3D vector math stuff (hence some previous posters' "GPU" comparisons), when done on all 6 SPEs in parallel. Beer is good for you, and never wrong.

Actually, Killzone 2 developers (GG) decided to use all 6 SPEs at CERTAIN TIMES.  Killzone 2 MOSTLY uses 2 to 3 SPEs. GG determined that it was better, for stable framerates, to use a MAX of 60% of 6 SPEs than a MAX of 100% of 4 SPEs.  The only times that 60% of the 6 SPEs are used are in 32 player online with lots of explosions and gunfire and near the end of the SP campaign.