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Forums - Nintendo Discussion - Clearing up a major misconception about PowerPC

fatslob-:O on 29 January 2015
WolfpackN64 said:


That's where the PS4 and Xbox One bit themselves in the tail. The Xbox One isn't powerful enough to emulate the 360 without cloud support and the PS3's Cell Processor actually outperforms the PS4's CPU.

In terms of what ? 



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Kerotan on 29 January 2015
fleischr said:
Good post.

Every time this topic comes around, there's always some moron who spouts a bunch of nonsense and puts out the myth that the WiiU's internals are exactly the same as the GameCube's.


So because they're ill informed they are morons?  I think you guys need to calm down. 



ghost_of_fazz on 29 January 2015
WolfpackN64 said:
ghost_of_fazz said:
I think that today it's not that much about power and efficiency. It's about production costs. Nintendo is using an extremely custom chip, one that probably cost them quite a bit in R&D, and is costing them quite a bit to manufacture because most probably they're the only ones producing it and buying it... Only to keep hardware backwards compatibility. A backwards compatibility that is pretty easy to achieve via software on x86 and x64 PC's.

Certainly not the point of your topic, but eh.


That's where the PS4 and Xbox One bit themselves in the tail. The Xbox One isn't powerful enough to emulate the 360 without cloud support and the PS3's Cell Processor actually outperforms the PS4's CPU.


But then again, not much people care about that it seems.



Tachikoma on 29 January 2015
WolfpackN64 said:


That's where the PS4 and Xbox One bit themselves in the tail. The Xbox One isn't powerful enough to emulate the 360 without cloud support and the PS3's Cell Processor actually outperforms the PS4's CPU.

You realize, that the cell was handling both cpu instruction AND most of the heavy gpu functions right?
Split them up, like theyre meant to be, have the gpu handle gpu tasks and cpu do cpu tasks and the PS4 walks all over the PS3, perfornance wise.

I suspect you went headlong in to this thread with only googlesmarts and trendy nintendo forum soundbytes..



curl-6 on 29 January 2015
SJReiter said:
fleischr said:
Good post.

Every time this topic comes around, there's always some moron who spouts a bunch of nonsense and puts out the myth that the WiiU's internals are exactly the same as the GameCube's.


The way I've always heard it described is:

Wii processor is an overclocked GameCube processor, Wii U processor is a reconfigured Wii processor, therefore the Wii U processor is an overclocked, reconfigured GameCube.

Gamecube, Wii, and Wii U all use PowerPC 750 based CPUs. The difference is:

Gekko: 485 MHz, 256kb of L2 cache, 1 core

Broadway: 729 MHz, 256kb of  L2 cache, 1 core

Espresso: 1.24 GHz, 3MB of L2 cache, 3 cores.



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walsufnir on 30 January 2015

Ppc itself is still used by IBM in super computers but this doesn't mean anything for wiiu. This is like saying x86 isn't old and modern but you are still using a Pentium 4.



vivster on 30 January 2015

Well, using it for software development is a dated approach. If this gen has told us anything, then that consoles should use OC, i.e. x86, architecture.



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WolfpackN64 on 30 January 2015
Tachikoma said:
WolfpackN64 said:


That's where the PS4 and Xbox One bit themselves in the tail. The Xbox One isn't powerful enough to emulate the 360 without cloud support and the PS3's Cell Processor actually outperforms the PS4's CPU.

You realize, that the cell was handling both cpu instruction AND most of the heavy gpu functions right?
Split them up, like theyre meant to be, have the gpu handle gpu tasks and cpu do cpu tasks and the PS4 walks all over the PS3, perfornance wise.

I suspect you went headlong in to this thread with only googlesmarts and trendy nintendo forum soundbytes..


That's the point of the Cell, it could handle both tasks. In pure CPU performance, the cell outperforms the PS4 CPU. It's the 18 GPU compute cores that make the PS4 so powerfull, ehile the Nvidia GPU included in the PS3 was even for its time, rather weak



curl-6 on 30 January 2015
WolfpackN64 said:
Tachikoma said:

You realize, that the cell was handling both cpu instruction AND most of the heavy gpu functions right?
Split them up, like theyre meant to be, have the gpu handle gpu tasks and cpu do cpu tasks and the PS4 walks all over the PS3, perfornance wise.

I suspect you went headlong in to this thread with only googlesmarts and trendy nintendo forum soundbytes..


That's the point of the Cell, it could handle both tasks. In pure CPU performance, the cell outperforms the PS4 CPU. It's the 18 GPU compute cores that make the PS4 so powerfull, ehile the Nvidia GPU included in the PS3 was even for its time, rather weak

Kind of funny how PS3 and Wii U/PS4 are almost opposites; in PS3 a beefy CPU picks up the slack for a less than ideal GPU, while Wii U/PS4 emphasize more robust GPUs to make up for lightweight CPUs.



Tachikoma on 30 January 2015
WolfpackN64 said:
Tachikoma said:

You realize, that the cell was handling both cpu instruction AND most of the heavy gpu functions right?
Split them up, like theyre meant to be, have the gpu handle gpu tasks and cpu do cpu tasks and the PS4 walks all over the PS3, perfornance wise.

I suspect you went headlong in to this thread with only googlesmarts and trendy nintendo forum soundbytes..


That's the point of the Cell, it could handle both tasks. In pure CPU performance, the cell outperforms the PS4 CPU. It's the 18 GPU compute cores that make the PS4 so powerfull, ehile the Nvidia GPU included in the PS3 was even for its time, rather weak

But thats a completely unrelated issue,  and doesn't support what youre saying at all,  and cell wasnt designed to be "cpu"  it was designed to be a multitasking processor that combines the two,  so its only natural that it would outperform,  in numbers,  a cpu designed only to do one thing,  but the real kicker is,  as far as x86 instruction sets go,  the ps4 cpu outperforms the cell completely.