The PS3 not performing as bad as some claim?

[MikeB]

@ stewacide

E.g. a PowerPC G5, which these chips are often erroneously compared to, absolutely *DWARFS* these chips. They're not in the same order of magnitude. And that goes for performance as well.

To quote Mintaor (Nicholas Blanchford) from AmigaWorld.net: "There are some early PS3 benchmarks here. The PPE comes out with a score almost identical to a 1.6GHz G5. That's nothing spectacular but do bear in mind that's that's using only 1 core (which happens to be the weakest), it appears to be completely unoptimised and doesn't use AltiVec. It's also Geekbench which is a bit dodgy anyway... A quick port of OS4 to the PS3 should run faster than any A1 or Peg II." "A port to the PPE should be trivial, certainly no more difficult than a port to the G5 (they are binary compatible). Adding support to the SPEs is more difficult but there is a reference implementation and the docs are all available. It's not a traditional SMP system so adding support may not be that difficult." "The real point of Cell though is the SPEs, any real work should be done on them. Getting stuff to work on one of them should be pretty easy as the instruction set is very similar to AltiVec. Altivec is dead easy, I got an app to speed up 20X in less than 3 days last week - with no prior experience of AltiVec. Parallel programming is notoriously complex though so running on multiple SPEs will be rather more difficult." So if we only take into account the PPE, an equivalent to a 1.6 Ghz G5 would be a lot faster than the platforms (called A1s or AmigaOnes, which were only ever sold together with a developer pre-release) AmigaOS4 currently runs on, and it's already very fast! A video showing off AmigaOS4 on a 800 Mhz G3 with 256MB and an old graphics card: http://youtube.com/watch?v=qSA-q1qniMY Nicholas (Minator) wrote quite a few in depth Cell articles, you can find a link on the frontpage here: http://www.cellsupercomputer.com/ Regarding the SPEs here some info from Mikael Haglunds (technical specialist of IBM Sweden) at an Amiga event in 2005: "IBM is still leading in terms of the Watts/Performance ratio with regard to their processors compared to available x86 technology and he believes this will likely continue to be so for the foreseeable future. He also explained that the new Cell processor technology includes a simple yet highly clocked PPC compatible processing core, but for software to really take full advantage of the new Cell technology, software needs to be optimized for using the specialized SPEs. He compared the Cell to how the classic Amigas operated, as the more impressive Amiga software took full advantage of its specialized custom chips. He wasn’t only thinking about complex Playstation3 games taking advantage of such technology (for instance dealing with lots more complex and more quantitive collisions), but also with regard to possible desktop orientated usages, like for instance for enhancing the performance of multimedia software or for advanced spreadsheet calculations." Article here