i put this thread because some of the vga cards have more power than the other but when u compare both the one with the less power win ?? so its not about ho have more power its about ho technically process better.

Wow do we need this discussion again?

Basically the Xenon is three PowerPC cores taped together. The CELL is one PowerPC core and 6(+1) SPUs that are very powerful floating point computation units with some limitations regarding the worktypes they can do.

Or in other words the CELL is theoretically much more powerful than the XENON. But its easier for developers to max out the Xenon.

If developers have no clue about parallel execution both are identical.
If developers use threads but are not fit for CELL development, the XENON is better.
If developers know how to write tasks for the CELL, the CELL is much more powerful, depending on the computation type this may be hard though, because algorithms that heavily depend on branching are really bad on CELL.

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.

i still dont believe the SONY hype, so i dont give my vote...

see this for example:

see this link: http://www.guru3d.com/article/amd-ati-radeon-3850--3870-review/3

Are we talking about "better" as "more powerful"?
And do we mean "Cell" as "the Cell in PS3" or "the Cell as it was designed"?

Cell, which is a giant DSP (to put it short), is maybe the best processor at the moment for handling multiple tasks simultanously. Sure the Xenon can do that too, but the shared cache limits it more than Cell.
Then getting the best out of the processor, apparently is easier with Xenon. Although, if i remember it correctly, PS3:s Cell should be 10-15% more powerful than Xenon, but all its power can't be used in games (not quite sure can the Xenons power be fully used too).
Then if we compare 360 and PS3 CPU:s, next thing which we run into, is the developent tools and their efficiency. Etc...

So, to answer to your question, at best it depends whose view are we taking and how the processors are used. Without taking the previous into account, i think it is impossible to say which one is better.

but isnt this thread about xenon and cell rather then geforce and radeon?

the question which one is better is all based on opinion. there is no straight answer. It all depends what works better for you as a gamer, what works better for you as a games designer and what works better depending who you have shares with.

Example:

1a) games designers may prefer the xenon due to it being simple to program with.
1b) games designers may prefer the cell since it has more untapped potential and is more challenging to play about with.

2a)gamers may prefer the xenon due to it being cheaper although it may have a shorter life cycle.
2b)gamers may prefer the cell and don't mind waiting till games designers start to get better developing using the cell.

3a)you have shares with MS you will like the xenon more.
3b)if you have shares with Sony you may like the cell more.

see? better is all about what you want from the product and how it will benefit you.

Not if you implement branch hints (more work, but better efficiency). Optimising for the Cell thus has the additional benefit of achieving better cache hits on other CPUs (including the Xenon) as well.

It's important to understand the Cell's SPUs are general purpose processors able to do anything you would do on an ordinary processor core, but they require extra care (only management of the SPEs needs to be done by the PPE). They are really fast at vecor unit, DSP and some GPU related tasks, but they are far more flexible.

For double precision (64-bit) tasks the PS3 Cell is less powerful than for single- (32-bit) and half precision (16-bit) code formats, but research documents still show results that the Cell can outperform the top Quad core x86 CPUs.

What about IBM?

@ bdbdbd