MikeB on 06 June 2009
@ Stan85
The CELL has 8 threads-> 1 is disabled/not working,1 is for the OS,while the other 6 are for games,just like 360`s CPU.
The PS3 Cell has 9 enabled hardware threads. 2 hardware threads on the 3.2 GHz PPU, 7 hardware threads on 7 3.2 GHz SPUs.
You can easily create as many software threads you require, so you could have various threads on a single SPU with great performance as well.
Regarding the OS, both XBox 360's OS and PS3's OS draw resources from their CPUs. If one does more in the background than the other, it will draw more CPU cycles. However having a core or CPU fully dedicated to background OS stuff (like is done for Windows, which can easily take up the resources of a full CPU core by itself), this is very elegant and powerful as you can then assume the OS (including future additions) won't intervene with the required resources for running the games.
So it's basically 8 processors on the Cell (each SPU with fast dedicated memory) vs a 3 core architecture for the Xenon (all 3 cores sharing L2 cache). Regarding hardware threads, it's 9 vs 6, but requiring even more threads provides no roadblock.
