My XBox 360 vs PS3 comparison (mostly technical)

[fazz]

Ok... where to begin...

-8 SPE processor Units (of which 1 is disabled, available only as a backup if something happened to one of the other SPEs).

Wrong, the disabled SPE is not for backup. It is disabled entirely to improve yields. It CAN'T be activated.

-The Cell has a very high internal bandwidth to allow the design to be effective (over 300 GB/s).

That's theoretical, the actual bandwidth that can be achieved AT MAX is 204GB/s. Source: IBM.

-Proven performance test: Over 200 GFlops for 8 SPEs
-According to IBM: Peak performance, 77 GFlops.
-Often it is claimed the Xenon's peak performance is actually 115.2 GFlops, this appears to be a very common misconception...

You are using the Cell's strictly theoretical figures under perfect conditon performance figures versus supposed real world Xenon numbers. How is that fair? The Cell can do around 200GFLOPS using ALL 8 SPU's+PPE+Matrix Multiplication at max. A link to prove that Xenon uses non-arithmetic calculations on the 115 GFLOPS figure would be nice.

-But according to for example memory experts Rambus the PS3 still has the Edge as the PS3 has a dedicated bus for its GPU while the 360’s GPU needs to share the bus with the CPU when accessing the RAM.

Rambus, the manufacturers of the PS3's XDR RAM. How un-biased... and still wrong. Obviously ignoring the 256GB/s of the eDRAm to the GPU, the bandwidth to the RAM is 22.4GB/s... exactly the same as the PS3. In that case, why we won't consider that the RSX has less RAM directly available? As to access the other 256MB of XDR the GPU must go through a 20GB/s read and 15GB/s write bandwidth to the Cell to have access to it (latency). And are we forgetting that the Xenos has the priority for RAM access on the 360?

-the RSX has the advantage of the Cell as its additional aid and higher bandwidths throughout the system

Covered above.

-The PS3 design seems less bottlenecked when compared to the Xbox 360’s design (about memory)

The PS3 is as bottlenecked as the 360. Why? You'll see: let's say that the RSX needs the other 192MB of available RAM that are sticked to the Cell, ok? Now, to write something on that RAM the RSX must go to the Cell first (write), those are 15GB/s, less than the VRAM... and now to read it, go (again) through the Cell... those are 20GB/s... what's the meaning of all this stuff? Higher latency, as the write and read are quite different speeds, and both are slower than the VRAM bandwidth. A bottleneck.

If you love the PS3, it's your opinion and is well respected. What I don't like is the unaccuracy of the examples and the twisting of the numbers. Also, if you wanted to say "PS3 FTW" you can easily add it to your signature without all the superlong posts, wrong facts and the fanboyism.