I would agree that the PS3 cell CPU has a greater theoretical potential than the 3-core CPU used in the 360, and that certain wave effects, etc. can be done better/faster with high-performance bit-blitters such as the cell's SPEs (Krik and I have discussed this at length, and I concur with his assessment regarding what the SPEs are capable of).  However, 20-30 times faster than the 360?  Where did you come up with that? It's quite a leap to say that the cell processor overcomes the 3 general purpose cores in the 360's CPU by such an amazing amount.

Here is my suggestion for you... talk to those who ported Folding-at-Home to the PS3 and ask them if they feel that the PS3 is 20-30 times as powerful as the 360.  My guess is they'll laugh at the suggestion.  It's blazing fast, but in specific, limited ways.

"How long until PS3 overtakes the 360 in total sales?"

Answer: If the latest data holds true for the rest of the consoles' lives, then PS3 outselling 360 at 13.5k a week, that makes 702k in a year. They are still behind 7.26M. This means it will take 10.34 years. :D

ps. don't take it seriously. it's a joke.

How did this turn into which systemis more powerful lol. Anyway as far as the dvd thing goes ms could give the nod and have some games actualy have to use a hard drive. Now I know what some people will say but what about the core gamers. Well how many actually have the core and just use memory cards and havent gone out and bought a hard drive? You know those cards dont hold many games so id say not many just use them. Ms could alos bring the price down for there hard drive to anywhere around the $65 mark for the 20 and $100 for the 120 or somewhere around there. That would solve the disk space problem and prelong the life cycle of the 360. By the time this rolls around the 360 will probably be around 199, 249, 349. Not saying it will happen but not a bad option

As you know, the overall performance of a system is as lot of things, from memory speed, bus design, CPU, GPU, Storage access speed, OS, and many other factors.

In no way am I claiming the 360 is 20-30 times faster than the 360. I am claiming at very specific things, it can be as much as 20-30 times faster.

Nothing might ever come out of that speed (as rocketpig says with his “ifs”, and can very well be right).

But when people say it can’t be done, is where I step in. There is a lot of untapped power in the PS3 that a lot of people (including me) have no clue how to harness. That does not mean it won’t be utilized by someone smarter than I am.

BTW: Here is an example of getting more than 20x the speed of the PPC in the CELL with utilizing 1 SPU (it’s for the medical industry). The PPC in the cell is on par with a single core in the 360. So if the 360 is 3x faster than the CELL’s PPC, then the CELL’s SPU’s are collectively 46x faster than the 360 at this type of calculation. ((20x7)/3). Grated this is just a rough estimate, and other things would have to be taken into account in order to use all 7 SPU’s, and I realize you would never actually get 46x the usage due to overhead, but it’s evidence that what we are looking at in the CELL is far faster, at specific things, then the 360.

http://www-01.ibm.com/chips/techlib/techlib.nsf/techdocs/5B1968BDD8D11639872570AB005A3A39/$file/GSPx2005paper%20for%20sdk.pdf

Updated:My thoughts

If Sony cant catch MS before 2010, then they have lost this generation. The PS3 and Xbox360 market share is not to relevant after 2010 as the manufactures will be looking at their next machine to take market share, while its the early market share which will drive game development.

So the race is on:Sony needs 7.26 million extra sales over MS to Beat them by the end of 2010 which is 154 weeks away. This means Sony needs to outsell MS by a minimum of 47.1K/ week average.

PREDICTION: Next week this number will be higher @ around 47.3K

You said "At specific types of math (not all), the PS3 is 20-30 times faster than the 360."  It's a bit more limited than that.  Specifically, the PS3 is 20-30 times as fast at performing bit-blit operations on arrays, i.e. - serialized equations won't benefit.  I think you'll find that specific texture pre-processing being offloaded from the GPU will be much faster, but decision tree work (deciding how a blade of grass should move against a background or how an enemy's AI will respond) isn't helped by this, and modern GPUs do a lot of the texture work themselves.  In that case, I would rather have 3 general-purpose cores.

So, the PS3's exclusive game can feature incredibly pretty, dumb combatants while the 360's exclusive game can feature less pretty, but smarter combatants.  This could really give the PS3 a leg up on games that have clueless, very detailed characters splashing around in very realisting waves.  

Double post;

i need to step into this thread and call for peace!