thnx dpot .. this is the most useful post so far .. now from what i read i found that the 3 cores for xenon is PPE & for Cell is 8 PPE/SPE cores ... also some developers found the SPEs utterly useless for executing anything .. but the SPEs is far better in accelerate physics .. this a little from what i read if u want see the link and post ur comment ... maybe i post something wrong .. who knows.

I know, did I say otherwise? , argh... If you want to go real life examples, lets see then the whole picture...

(Lol, you and your super(!) duper(!) CELL examples.)

This is for all!

Lets think those processors as lumberjack companies. Where,

- Programs are project managers

- Cores are workers

- There are two different kind of works,

1. Falling trees

2. Constructing houses

First X360

- All 3 workers are skilled in falling trees and constructing houses.

How does the workflow go?

Project manager tells directly for workers what to do. He can make them fall trees all the day or make one fall trees and two construct houses. Or any order he likes. They do their work equally all the time.

(Project manager can just give any orders for any men in any order or he can even split orders and use all men for constructing or falling trees.)

Then PS3

- 7 workers are skilled in falling trees, but not that skilled with constructing houses.

- 1 worker is skilled in falling trees and constructing houses

How does the workflow go?

Project manager tells the one worker who is skilled in everything which workers must do what work. The one skilled worker then tells those 7 workers exactly what each of them must do and he does this for each of them invidually. If those 7 receive jobs for constucting houses they need those orders exactly how they do it. Project manager can also directly order the one who is skilled in everything, but while hes doing something he can't really give orders for those 7 other workers.

(So basically project manager must figure out which one is doing what, how long, when and when to assign them more work.)

(Heh... Yeah, its very, very simple example. Sorry about engrish, I wrote it in hurry.)

@marty 8370... im not fishy, if you would like i can pull more info on alvatec for you or velocity engine as it was sometimes called or i can get you info on all the stuff they ripped out of powerpc cores to make the spes, they would not work well on their own...

both the cell and the tricore used in the 360 are gimmped powerpc chips when compared to standered power4(what apple called g5) or power5 chips, from which their original architecture was derived they were customised for gaming and graphics, and what chips like that would need.... they would make adiquate, but very week general processors compared to a full spec powerpc chip running at same speed with same cores, or in the cells case one with as many threds. there are some super power5s that have 12 full cores but they are only used in real supercomputers

back to another problem though.

with the cell sony was trying to force programers to work one way, which looked like they could do giving their position in the industry.

it has not panned out. so that leaves sony with a system that though technicaly more powerful in theory or for future programers who work at it, for practical purposes no bonuses yet.

apple had this problem with alvatec on powerpc platform, though a 2 ghz chip could out perform much faster x86 chips when optimized for the alvatec engine, it required significatly more dedicated code than x86. so few companies out side of apple used it (adobe being one of the few). this is one of the maine reasons apple is x86 now

this is the same problem facing sony for cell to make it to the ps4 they must convice developers to code specificly for it, maybe pay them, or discount the license if they take full use of the cell, hold more work shops send out more help. we have seen sony start to do this already.

I doubt though it will be worth it in the end, though multicore is the future, cell requires too much extra work to get the results, i for see in the ps4 some sort of comprimise based on ppc arch maybe a 8-core, with one spe per core preprogramed for either vector or floating point. or far more likly some other ppc customized processor with no spe....

the reason i feel spes are doomed, is because you have not seen aroll out by ibm or freescale, both of whom make majority of the ppc chips that are used in everything form tvs to cars

I don't think game developers have the patience to deal with Sony's junky tech. The Xenon is much easier and can be made even better with time. Maybe in time the Cell might be worth it.

Obviously the Wii's Broadway CPU

No ricoh 2a03 is so much better.

It actually doesnt matter how fast the cell is, It still has to take it's data from the Memory. Check the figures yourself(they are all over the net), the cell and RSX can simultaniously access the memory together. But the 360's CPU and GPU access it one at a time. However look at the speed that the 2 consoles read and write from the memory. In the same time it takes the PS3 to read and write once from the memory, the 360 can either have the cpu read and write twice with the GPU 3 times or GPU twice and the CPU 3 times. So for Ps3 to do 2 read and writes from the memory (thats 1 cpu and GPU) in the same time the 360 has done 5(2 cpu and 3 GPU). Although people say that the cell is powerful it is held back by it's bandwidth. Sony would have been better having similar bandwidth speeds to the 360 because then they could have done 10 read and writes. 5 cpu and 5 GPU in the time the 360 takes to do it's 5. M$ were smart on this. I guess thats what being in the PC market helps you with. Knowledge.

Are you telling us the PS3 has reached peak performance and is maxxed out already now and that it will take a while for the 360 to be maxxed out?

Sounds like it going by the text I just quoted and strangely that is exactly the opposite of what you claimed previously.

The EE, the hyperbole for that was just as big as the one for CELL.