| HappySqurriel said: rocketpig, Many Sony fans believe in the propaganda about the Cell processor without even understanding what the propaganda is saying. The comment about their being "some math that the PS3 is 20 to 30 times more powerful than the XBox 360" was in reference to an annoucement that was made that the PS3 was 20 times more powerful than a single threaded (intel) CPU per cycle when performing a fast fourier transform; the two important facts are that the XBox 360 is not a single threaded intel CPU, and the fast fourier transform has (almost) no use in game development.
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Well, the PS3 is extraordinarily good at some kinds of processing, which is probably where a lot of these people get these claims. It's basically a server chip, after all. Unfortunately, it's damned near impossible to utilize the SPEs to anything close to their maximum for gaming purposes. There is bound to be idle time because not everything in a game will be processing to its max at any given moment and it's not like you can just turn one SPE off for one function and have it do something else in the meantime (unlike server computing) because at any time, that first thread may be needed again and there may not be an available SPE to process the information. It also doesn't help that the bottle neck of a single core SPU hinders the overall design (which is why it was originally intended to be a dual core SPU).
Hell, I doubt that most people here know that the Xenon and the Cell are based on the same damn architecture. While the 360 went tri-core, the PS3 has SPEs instead. I even think they're the same clock speed (though I'm not sure about L1 or L2 cache levels for each, those could be different).
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