Xenon vs Cell Which one really is better ??

[Fei-Hung]

xenon is the 360 processor and cell is the ps3 processor.

i have put down the specs below:

360 Specifications

*165 million transistors
*Three symmetrical cores, each two way SMT-capable and clocked at 3.2 GHz[2]
*SIMD: VMX128 with 2× (128×128 bit) register files for each core.[2]
*1 MiB L2 cache[2] (lockable by the GPU) running at half-speed (1.6 GHz) with a 256-bit bus
*51.2 gigabytes per second of L2 memory bandwidth (256 bit × 1600 MHz)
*21.6 GB/s Front-Side Bus[2]
*Dot product performance: 9.6 billion per second
*115.2 GFLOPS theoretical peak performance



PS3 Cell specifications

*PowerPC-base Core @3.2GHz
*512KB L2 cache
*7 x SPE @3.2GHz
*7 x 128b 128 SIMD GPRs
*7 x 256KB SRAM for SPE
* 1 of 8 SPEs reserved for redundancy total floating point performance: 218 GFLOPS
*1.8 TFLOPS floating point performance


To simplify the jargon. The cell has 4 more processors which theoretically means it should be able to perform at least twice as efficiently.

Although the xenon is in theory half as powerful, it is far more simpler to program with and it is easier to assign tasks to the different spe's. This allows 3rd party publishers and designers to be fairly comfortable with the Xenon and make games far easier then for the ps3.

The Cell is very complicated in its architecture and it won't be until maybe 4-5 years from the ps3 shipping that we see the cell being fully utilised. However, this just means that at the moment we are seeing just the beginning of what the Cell is capable off. The problem is, does anyone have the patience to come to term with it and make the most of it (apart from research scientists and the military who buy ps3's since its the cheapest way to buy a powerhouse processor for high end calculations).

Hope that helps.