| pastro243 said: I dont know why I get into these threads when I cant understand anything xD |
Sorry, I tried to simplify it with the notebook explanation, but I should have done that with the whole post, in terms of parallelism, as well.
In short, the Xenon is 3 (to 6) pens, all having to share the same notebook. The notebook fills up pretty fast when doing problems of the same type (actually its always full, and you're just replacing stuff, line by line, and the real problem is other pens trying to write on a line that *looks* like yours, but isn't... okay, that was unnecessary detail, just ignore that), and thus it has to run to the basement a lot, and you often end up waiting on it.
The Cell has 8 or 9 pens writing into 8 (albeit smaller) notebooks (well actually 7 or 8, into 7, in practice), and on top of that, all but one of those notebooks can be used in such a way such that you never, ever have to wait on it returning from your basement with new info. The PPE processor can, and often does have two threads running, but usually they aren't similar, in terms of cache coherency, so they don't clobber the shared notebook much.
Most games have large portions which are inherently parallel... hence the innate advantage of the Cell in those games, in theory. The theory, sadly, involves having skill and time to develop being relatively unconstrained -- and that's the PS3's biggest downfall. Until developer experience makes the skill/time problem a lesser issue, the business of making games on time will tend to favor the 360.
Hence, typical crossplat 360 > PS3 issues, and because experience lessens the difference, from a business perspective, the difference in crossplat performance and quality has also decreased over time. The fundamental differences between the two consoles basically means that crossplats will often tend to be similar or higher quality on the 360, and exclusives will almost always be better on the PS3. 360 fans hate to hear "PS3 exclsuives are better", and PS3 fans hate to hear "360 crossplats are better", but the fact of the matter is that, at the heart of the issue is hardware that makes both of those statements tend to be true in the end. The differences are not significant enough to really matter, IMO, though. Both consoles have a crippling member in their CPU/GPU pair, that basically brings them to the same level, as in one case, the awesome CPU must support the GPU, and in the other, the awesome GPU must support the CPU.
@Squilliam: You realize that GPUs are basically Cell-esque processors, right, only without any sort of cache whatsoever? If anything, GPUs will evolve toward the Cell, if they are to accomplish anything serious outside of the embarrassingly parallel task of rendering. All GPUs are, are a load of specialized CISC instructions, in a large number of pipelines that are not co-dependant (as processor pipes usually have to be). Imagining that the Cell can evolve to have dozens of SPEs, and do the work of a GPU is reasonable. Imagining that GPUs can accomplish the work of the Cell, without a large caching mechanism, or a dependant ordering in their instruction pipeline, is folly. GPUs are specialized hardware. Removing that specialization only turns them into a processor much more like the Cell.
