PS-She said: takeru51 said: Now all I have to do is use the power of t3h c3ll to travel back in time, so that I can be the one who cracks the Japanese code and be famous for winning WW2. Thank you PS3. I hear Sony will be adding time travel to the list of the PS3's capabilities in an upcoming firmware update.  Of course, the same source also said Nintendo would start making good games too so I'm thinking that source may be a little unreliable.

Was that some sort of feeble attempt at being clever?

MikeB said: @ Crashman even a perfectly implemented game design, there will be waiting by the cell processor Yes, there are always delays involved but also with regard to game designed for a single CPU solution. The fun is really that the SPEs each have memory available to them which can operate as fast as cache, it's design (systems on a chip) is potentially more powerful than just an ordinary multi-core CPU setup.

And I am not arguing that point, I am just saying your comparison comes across as very biased.  You really need some real world data, not best case, as it is completely inapplicable to games.

PS-She said: takeru51 said: Now all I have to do is use the power of t3h c3ll to travel back in time, so that I can be the one who cracks the Japanese code and be famous for winning WW2. Thank you PS3. I hear Sony will be adding time travel to the list of the PS3's capabilities in an upcoming firmware update.  Of course, the same source also said Nintendo would start making good games too so I'm thinking that source may be a little unreliable.

... grow up, get boobs

@ Crashman

But the data for specific tasks are realworld data for that specific situation. If you want to talk games, Uncharted is said to use up about 30% of the Cell's potential, but that doesn't mean they couldn't have optimised this down to a lower percentage with the same end result. The only conclusion that can be made, there's a lot of juice left for developers to produce far more demanding games, even the most impressive games currently available (Uncharted: Drakes Fortune and Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction, most impressive games I've seen so far) only scracth the surface of what can be achieved with the PS3.

I think this discussion of best case/worst case is sort of missing the point. What are we comparing the Cell to with regard to gaming? Xenon (360 CPU)? Core 2 Duo/Quad?

@ Entroper

According to IBM the theoretical peak of the Xenon (XBox 360) is 77 GFlops. For the PS3 Cell that's 218 GFlops, real world performance tests also indicated near 100% efficiency is possible for the Cell.

With regard to the Xenon Microsoft revealed no real world testing, there are various potential limitations to get the most out the Xenon, the 3 cores don't have their own own memory to work with and is connected through a shared bus (with the GPU) to slower higher latency RAM, a modern multi-core PC CPU should usually outperform the Xenon (taking out of account OS related performance drainage differences).

Well, a matrix multiply and a game engine are nowhere near comparable in terms of achievable efficiency. If your "real world" application is multiplying 4096x4096 matrices in single-precision floating point, the Cell is extremely well-suited to the task. :)  I don't know many games that do that, though.

@ Entroper

Of course, but that counts for both CPUs. Each game will have different requirements (resolution, effects, things going on simultaneously, optimizations, etc) it's difficult to use games as a benchmark other than statements from developers regarding that specific game (Resistance less than 10%, Uncharted ~30%).

In any case it just shows it is achievable (system bandwidth and general design in the PS3 is efficient enough to get the most out of the Cell).

OK, for the record, i've found this thread quite interesting. Although i originally posted a link on how the PS3 Cell could be used to crack passwords in a fraction of the time, it developed more into a discussion/debate on the abilities of the Cell, which i found very interesting... it made me realise i am probably severly under utilising my PS3!

lets face it - if this thread had remained on the subject of the Cell and it's abilities to crack passwords, it wouldn't have lasted very long at all! but it did develop, into a discussion/debate on the abilities of the Cell for research and gaming.

I'm not so sure about the attacks on MikeB - i thought he had some interesting quotes and links which made me further realise just how useful (perhaps revolutionary) the cell is, giving the opportunities to many in the scientific world further knowledge and empirical research. I learnt a lot anyway.

However, that being said, i've not read that many of MikeB's posts on other threads and can't say whether this posting the same things over and over is a habit of his or not, but i found his posts on the abilities of the Cell interesting and on topic.

as for PS-She and Takeru51- thank you for attempting to lighten the mood!

Kirby007 - you were plain out of order, i think PS-She deserves an apology.

@ Scruff7

I'm glad you found my postings interesting.

A bit exaggerated of course, basically one of the posts in this thread is a collection of things I collected in two other threads.