My XBox 360 vs PS3 comparison (mostly technical)

[MikeB]

@ erikguy

The 8th SPE in the PS3 is NOT disabled by default. It is a REDUNDANCY backup which means it is REDUNDANTLY checking the work of the other processors in case an error is made. It would then fix the error and send the data along to the next channel.

The SPEs are often referred to as a system on a chip, one of these "systems" on the PS3 is allowed to be defunct and won't matter to the rest of the platform (doesn't mean one SPE has to be broken though).

The 360's triple core Power PC processor: each core is HYPER-THREADED essentially giving you 6 CPUs.

Not really, it's still just one triple core,CPU. Multithreading is a similar in concept to preemptive multitasking (being able to shedule more than one task, on modern CPUs switching between tasks so quickly the user experience is that multiple programs are running simultaneously on just one single core processor), but is implemented at the thread level of execution in modern processors. Execution perfomance is still divided over simultanously running threads.