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HappySqurriel on 22 June 2008
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MikeB said:
HappySqurriel said:
NJ5 said:
MikeB said:

(...) The Cell provides more perfomance than ordinary PC CPUs can deliver with regard to gaming (...)

 

Which ordinary CPUs might those be? Do you also belong to the "MGS4 has better graphics than Crysis" club?

 

Don't bother, MikeB favours hypothetical scenerios where the Cell processor breaks moore's law because in certain benchmarks it outperforms 8 year old PowerPC based processors 20 to 1. The fact that a PC can run the same game as the PS3, with higher quality textures, higher detailed models, at a (dramatically) higher resolution, and with 4 times the framerate will not make him concede that the PC is dramatically more powerful than the PS3.

 

Moore's law just regards the amount of chip transistors. It's not an exact scientific "law" and mass R&D could easily break this "law" or you can just make bigger chips.

Thank you for demonstrating your lack of understanding ...

You can't really double the size of a chip and retain a marketable consumer processor. The first problem with this approach is that it is impossible to produce a wafer that is error free, and by doubling the size of a process you more than double the cost because your yeild per wafer is much lower than 1/2.

The second problem is that the available processing power on a chip is directly related to the number of transistors on the chip times the clock speed of the chip; and this is also directly proportionate to the ammount of energy used by the chip, and the ammount of heat given off by the chip. This means that when you double the chip size you either have to run it at a lower speed (eliminating the benefit of the larger size) or use some sort of advanced cooling method (potentially at high expense) to prevent the chip from overheating.

Now, if you don't understand what this means, two well designed chips produced with similar manufacturing process' that have similar energy usage tend to have similar theoritical performance. Certainly, processors that are designed to take advantage of specific traits of a task (like GPUs) can outperform other processors in those tasks when those other processors were not designed to handle those tasks; but this doesn't mean that one processor is more powerful than the other.

New CPUs have more transistors than the cell processor, run at higher clock rates, use a smaller manufacturing process, and in both theoritical and real world performance shatter the Cell processor. This is an unquestionable fact ... The Cell processor may be one of the most powerful processors ever put into a gaming console, but it is far from being one of the most powerful processors on the market.