| Vor said: Isn't the 360's CPU just a modified Cell processor? If so what's the difference between them? |
Kind of. The cores in Xenon were designed originally as the Cell's PPE, and IBM made the Xenon for Microsoft when Microsoft asked for a more powerful CPU than was originally planned. The Cell's PPE is pretty much the same as the cores found in the 360. The cell has 1 PPE (Power Processsor Element) and 8 SPEs (Synegeristic Processor Element). So basically the cell has one general core like the three found in the Xbox 360, and a bunch of synergistic processing elements designed to perform very specific number crunching tasks. The architecture had a lot of bottenecks with respect to memory management though and was a pain to program for.
Sony's intent was to prevent multiplatform games by having a confusing architecture. Their idea was that if the PS3 just takes off like the PS2 then developers wouldn't want to port games to the 360 because it would be too hard, just like what happened in the PS2/XB era. However, this backfired on Sony big time.
"On topic since IIRC the Wii U CPU are based on the outdated PowerPC 750 chip from 1997 so the PS360 CPUs are way better than the Wii U."
The CPU was actually updated quite a bit. Expresso has much better IPC than the Xenon and Cell's PPE. The only reason the PS360 outperformed it was because of the raw clock-speed. While it is based on the Gekko, the architecture of the Gekko was actually ahead of its time, and it was updated quite a bit for Expresso.
For more information see:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=58036908&postcount=714
