It's amazing how effective Sony's "PS3 power" PR has been.

[Procrastinato]

Squilliam said:

Procrastinato said:

Umm.. actually, the original Cell (like the one used in the PS3) is faster than any i7 in existance, when it comes to raw parallel performance, for apps requiring en-masse parallel problem solving.

Your i7 is way better at running Excel, Word, iTunes, and any game not requiring serious parallism from the CPU at the same time than the Cell, however.

The Cell really is a pretty advanced processor for what it does well, which is parallelism.  If you were to compare the performance of Stanford's protein folding app, Folding@Home, on a Cell, vs any i7, the Cell would still win by a landslide.  Most other things computers are used for... you're gonna want an i7 for sure.

As with many things, it really depends on the app in question.  Games can have a lot of parallel problems to solve, if you weren't aware.

The average PPD on the PS3 doing folding @ home is 900:

I wasn't aware that the i7's were performing so well, although you do have to take into account that the *vast* majority of PS3 F@H users don't know that you can free up ~10% more horsepower by checking some optimization options (like disabling the music, and disabling the graphics, which frees the PPU for work), AND that PS3s only have 6 usable SPUs (one is reserved by the OS at all times, and one is disabled at the factory).

Let's recalculate what the approximate PPD performance of an actual 8 SPU Cell processor would be:

900 base

+33% (2 more SPUs) of 900 base == +300

+10% (PPU freed up) of 900 base == +90

-----------------

900 + 300 + 90 = ~1290 PPD for a processor from 2006.

So its not as fast as all the i7s, its true.  Ah well.  I guess Sony's claims of it being years ahead meant only 2 years, not 3. ;)