Pemalite said:
SvennoJ said:
Yeah I was just thinking that. Original XBox had a good cpu too, as well as XBox 360, heck even the ps2 was no slouch. It's not easy to emulate XBox 360 games even though the architecture isn't all that different. It's this gen that introduced rather weak cpus pared with much more powerful gpus. And true, ps3 orginally wasn't even meant to have a gpu, 2 cell processors instead.
xbox cpu 3 gflops
ps2 cpu 6.2 gflops
XBox360 cpu 115 gflops
ps3 cpu 230 gflops
XBoxOne cpu 112 gflops (147 scorpio)
ps4 cpu 102 gflops (136 pro)
It's different processors ofcourse, yet this gen wasn't any real step forward cpu wise. Ofcourse last gen consoles were sold at a loss and engineered to be close to the cutting edge while this gen consoles had to be cheaper and sold at par.
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Using flops within that context doesn't tell us the performance of those chips.
Think about it: If the Cell had 230+ Gflop of real-world performance and the GPU had 400+ Gflop...
Then why does the Switch which clearly has a CPU with less flops and a GPU with less flops, have it's games look significantly superior? Think about it. Please. And stop using flops in the context you are using it in.
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The original Xbox's CPU was trending towards the low-end.
It had a coppermine based core with half the cache.
Intel had already moved onto Tualatin by the time the Xbox had released and had CPU's with almost twice the clock speed. (1.4Ghz verses 733mhz)
4x the amount of cache, prefetching etc'.
Intel also had Willamatte Pentium 4 chips operating at 2Ghz+
And AMD had it's Palomino based Athlon XP's on the market with PR ratings of 2100+ based on the amazing K7 core, this was the fastest chip at the time.
So whilst the original Xbox was beastly for a console, it paled in comparison to what the PC was offering in 2001, let-alone in 2004.
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As for Cell. The only time that CPU showed any kind of decent performance is when using iterative refinement floating point. Otherwise it was terrible. It performed terrible. It was terrible to program for.
The Cell was never going to be a GPU replacement either. It doesn't even have hints of the appropriate silicon to replace the task of a GPU, nor does it even have a fraction of the performance for it either.
The Cell processor was 234~ million transistors at 221mm2 at 90nm SOI.
Roughly comparable to intels Pentium D which released before the Cell.
However, Sony had to disable a SPE for yield reasons. It would have likely been cheaper to manufacture than the Pentium D for that very reason.
Can't forget that Core 2 released around the time of the Playstation 3 either... And that was a superior CPU uArch.
The Cell was also shit at integers. Games and game engines don't just using floating point you know.
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The Xbox 360's CPU isn't anything special either. Sure, 3x cores operating at 3.2Ghz all those years ago might have sounded flashy to the uneducated, but it's an in-order design like the original Intel Atom in phones and tablets.
It had a long pipeline, not much in the way of prefetching or branch prediction and only 8-way associative cache, with that cache running at only half the CPU clock rate where-as most x86 CPU's since the Pentium 3 era, the cache runs at the same speed as the CPU clock.
PowerPC hasn't really been a contender against x86 for a very very long time. IBM tends to go for extremely wide core designs which appeals to professional markets, for everyone else, it's not ideal.
... And I could go on. But I think I have made my point.
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Yes I said it's different processors, but it's no secret emulating 360 games is tricky. Unless MS is deliberately pacing BC games to gain more attention? :)
Anyway how would you rate the increase of CPU capabilities. From Gen 6 to Gen 7 is a theoretical max performence increase of 38x. How much did the move to powerPC limit that? How much more capable would you rate gen 8 cpus over gen 7. Keeping in mind only 6 cores (and now a bit of the 7th) are used for gaming.
But true, ps3 was a beast at folding@home. Not so much for games. Although it still managed to surpass 360 in 1st party titles.
