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snowdog on 29 November 2012
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Kynes said:
snowdog said:
gigantor21 said:
If that's the case, it's no wonder they didn't want to talk about it. XD

Seriously, though, that's ridiculous.

Actually it's pretty good if true. The Broadway in the Wii is clocked at around 750MHz if I remember correctly and beats the Xenon, the CPU in the 360, at general processing tasks. The only thing it's not too hot at is floating point work, but then that's what the GPU is for. Three Broadways duct-taped together is not a bad thing by any means, and most certainly isn't ridiculous.


Can you provide more info about this? A link would be very appreciated.

It was just something that someone on Gaf pointed out. The thing with the Xenon and the Cell is that they're In-Order processors and that they have to handle a great deal more than the Broadway such as IO and sound. And every process has to be run in the order that they come in. If there's a process that needs doing is waiting for conditions to be met the CPU remains idle until the conditions are right.

With the Broadway (and the Gecko in the Gamecube and now the Expresso in the Wii U) the Wii has dedicated silicon to handle sound called a DSP (Digital Signal Processor) and the CPU is an Out-Of-Order execution processor. If there's a process is waiting for conditions to be met the CPU switches to other processes that can be worked on until the condition is met, meaning you get less idle cycles. An OOOE CPU is more efficient.

And having a DSP is a major advantage, developers have to have at least 1 thread out of 6 for the 360 and 1 SPE out of 7 for the PS3 reserved exclusively to handle sound. For sound intensive games such as racing games developers often have two threads handling sound - that's a third of the 360's processing power. :Oo

It basically beats the 360 at general processing due to a combination of it being more efficient thanks to OOOE and having dedicated silicon to handle sound, it basically has less work to do and the work it does do is more efficient.