Squilliam said:
Procrastinato said:
These specs are completely reasonable, actually.
The claim about a 6-core Xenon having as many flops as the Cell is silly, but I think the architecture is respectable. The Xenon cores all share a L2 cache, and unless you make the cache downright titanic, the thrashing from 6 cores/12 threads doing any serious parallel tasks would never compare to the independant cache-miss-free architecture of the Cell SPU system.
For that matter, trying to keep 6 cores equally busy is also something of a problem, except during embarrassingly parallel operations, where thrashing becomes an issue with a shared cache resource, as I mentioned above. The Cell is not actually a poor gaming architecture at all, despite the relative difficulty in using it well. Having 8, 12, etc cores really won't do anything but hike the cost of the next XBox.
On the other hand, a 600 MHz GPU may be downright phenominal -- the number of pipelines isn't mentioned at all... it could be like 128 for all we know.
You could argue that the amount of memory that a console has is directly related to its resource-induced development expense, and that having more than 1GB of memory may actually be a waste of money for MS, as well as a resource that devs just plain won't want to use...
Take a step back, and realize what very little has been said here, before you jump up and call it a fake (even though it may very well be).
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I would say a better solution would be to improve the single thread performance of the CPU and specialise it for tasks that a compute shader equiped GPU couldn't do just as well or better. I don't see the need for any more than 3 Cores personally and considering we're talking about Microsoft here and giving them an excuse to spend money on Directx compute it makes perfect sense from their perspective as well. It also parellals many of the developments in the PC world. I would say that in the end better cores > more cores. Since it would be a specialised processor it probably wouldn't need more than 100mm^2 die area anyway.
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Maybe they don't want to change the architecture too much to simplify compatibility with the X360 and that's why they just decided to add more cores? Just speculating here.
