PS3 Tech Demo

[Jack]

sieanr said: Here is what I originally said Sieanr And the SPEs in cell. CANT do branching worth a damn. From arstechnica; At any rate, Playstation 3 fanboys shouldn't get all flush over the idea that the Xenon will struggle on non-graphics code. However bad off Xenon will be in that department, the PS3's Cell will probably be worse. The Cell has only one PPE to the Xenon's three, which means that developers will have to cram all their game control, AI, and physics code into at most two threads that are sharing a very narrow execution core with no instruction window. (Don't bother suggesting that the PS3 can use its SPEs for branch-intensive code, because the SPEs lack branch prediction entirely.) Furthermore, the PS3's L2 is only 512K, which is half the size of the Xenon's L2. So the PS3 doesn't get much help with branches in the cache department. In short, the PS3 may fare a bit worse than the Xenon on non-graphics code, but on the upside it will probably fare a bit better on graphics code because of the seven SPEs. Link: http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/xbox360-2.ars/7 BTW: I know you said the SPE's can handle branch hints, the part I highlighted is just to illustrate how SPE's cant do real branch prediction.(which is what I said) You misinterpreted what I posted. Regardless, Kwaad never responded to this, he just changed topic......

The article is a year and a half old. That is too old of an article to say what is going on as of now. You would need to should me an article since Nov '06 that says something to the same effect but not regurgitate this same article which many do. With branch hinting the SPE can "branch" as fast as branch prediction in the PPE. I did not misinterpreted what you posted you said "branching" not branch prediction. They are two different things. I may have not understood what you meant being that you have no idea what your talking about.