ps3 as powerful as sandia lab's asci red supercomputer

[slowmo]

dahuman said:

Onibaka said:

Cell is not THAT good in GPU. They went from the 2xCell PS3 in 2004/2005 to the  Cell RSX in 2006. They realized that Cell doesn't surpass even a cheap GPU in some tasks. Its a waste for a CPU, with can process complex codes, to only perform simple tasks that only requires brutal force, like a GPU.

What I find funny is that all the experience that IBM gained by developing the Cell was used to make the Xenos(x360's processor). There are even rumours about some secrets of Cell being revealed for the development of Xenos, like while Sony IBM Toshiba were developing the Cell, some workers from IBM worked in both projects. Xenos have 3 PPUs almost identical of the Cell one. Both have 3.2GHz. I think that Microsoft wanted to make a console easy to make ports from. By releasing X360 early, MS pretty much assured that would have a very good support for their plataform. For the very loyal developers, there is nothing that money can't buy...

 

Actually, I think that if the PS3 didn't have a Blu-Ray, but instead a 8800GTX as GPU, they could have outsold Xbox360by a larger margin at today.

You have one thing in reverse, The 360 Xeno came before the Cell in the experimental cycle, it's just a Tri-Core PowerPC, it's no different than any multicore CPUs we see today in it's basic design form. The current Cell and Power PC CPUs are on a completely different level in the computing world of course. Cell is really a different design and I can't say it was the best option as a dev friendly gaming only CPU but it's really efficient at pretty much everything if you can code for it correctly, fortunately, we are already there after years of criticism. HD consoels suffer the same problems, not enough memory, and outdated video chipsets, though PS3 is not suffering as badly if you make games exclusively for it in an overall sense.

The Cell was in the works for over a year before Microsoft went to IBM requesting their chip design.  In the end the core they decided upon for their CPU was the top secret one being designed for Sony.  Microsoft then started working alongside IBM on the quiet as IBM knew Sony wouldn't be happy finding their technology in the enemies hands (although IBM as partners over the rights had every right to use it).

The 360 is indeed similar to a Power PC CPU but it still isn't "just a Tri-Core PowerPC", in performance terms it buried every PowerPC CPU made up to that point in terms of performance and power consumption. 

Both chips were finished around the same time ultimately and both could have been even faster if some small contraints weren't made in the core that occasionally benefitted one design more than the other.