| Cursayer2 said: The Cell is like the Emotion Engine ~ an overhyped piece of garbage. |
The problem is that the Cell cost a lot of time and money to reseach and design, and it turned out that its purpose changed considerably by the time development was over (a lot of the work the SPEs would like to have done are now handled by the GPU). So, basically, they've taken 1 PPC970 processor (1/3rd as many as are on the 360) and attached a bunch of SPEs to it that turned out to go largely unused now.
The Cell is very powerful for some purposes (decoding MPEG streams and other embarrassingly parallel floating point operations, for example), but it's not a very good central processor for gaming. It just isn't. For the purposes of most games, the 360 has more power.
I haven't programmed on a cell but I've taken several computer engineering / processor architecture courses on my way to earning my computer science degree. I've even programmed a game engine with fairly advanced techniques such as pixel shaders and it employeed Carmack's reverse to generate shadow volumes. I think I have a basis by which to understand the Cell processor.
Even if someone didn't have any credentials beyond being a gamer, they can still observe the PS3 running similar games more poorly than the 360. When hardware is fairly closely matched, especially when the difference is in number of threads that can be run, there will always be a lot of games that look and run similarly or slightly better on one platform or another, but the games that stress the CPU will likely run more poorly on the PS3. And right now, a lot of games do.
