Xenon vs Cell Which one really is better ??

[Retrasado]

Fishie said:

MikeB said:

PS3 Cell of course. Much much better (8 independent processors vs 3 cores at same clockspeed, the SPEs can do a much better job than the PPE or a 360 can at well designed tasks for them to accomplish) and not only that, the way it's implemented in the PS3 architecture counts also. The Xenon has to share its L2 cache amongst all three cores and access to main memory provides far less bandwidth as it has to share the bus with the GPU and the PS3's XDR Ram provides much lower latencies.

 

Here you go again talking shit about stuff you dont understand. The SPE`s are NOT 8 independant processors, they are instead part of the processor and furthermore there might be 8 of em but only 7 of em work and only 6 are available for the games.

Mike. he's right. Although the Cell has 8 SPEs, for the PS3, they manufacture the chips with one SPE designed to not work. (the reason for this is if one of the SPEs doesn't work, they don't have to manufacture an entire new chip.) And one of the other SPEs is reserved for the OS at all times.

Also, check out the following from Wikipedia: (quoted because I really can't say it much better in my own words.)

The PPE, which is capable of running a conventional operating system, has control over the SPEs and can start, stop, interrupt, and schedule processes running on the SPEs. To this end the PPE has additional instructions relating to control of the SPEs. Unlike SPEs, the PPE can read and write the main memory and the local memories of SPEs through the standard load/store instructions. Despite having Turing complete architectures, the SPEs are not fully autonomous and require the PPE to prime them before they can do any useful work.

Thus, while the SPEs do give the Cell a powerful computing capability, the increase is not nearly as great as it would be if each SPE was a complete processor in the way a dual or quad-core processor has two or four complete processors.