Mifely said: Fishie said: Marty8370 said: NNN2004 said: i dont want to add fuel on fire but .. before in one site i read that the Cell have one main Core & 7 virtual .. idont know if this is true but maybe someone here know what this is mean.   The PS3 Cell has 8 cores(1 PPE & 8 SPE's). 1 SPE has been disabled too improve yeilds when making the Cell chip. So the PS3 has 1 PPE & 7 SPE's that are useable to the PS3 as a whole   SPE`s are not cores, we went trough that shit already. A core can work independantly, the SPE`s cannot as they NEED feeder data from the PPC core.   Um, actually, they can feed themselves with their own DMAs, as long as their localstore code knows where to look. They are independant processors. They could even feed themselves new instructions if they wanted -- that's not really something that's going to happen very often, but they could do it. They are no less indepedant than the "secondary" cores of the Xenon -- they just operate in a very different manner from the PPU, unlike the Xenon's extra cores do from its primary. They are capable of independant operation -- in fact, if they weren't, the cell would be horribly slow, as asynchronous processing wouldn't really be possible. Claiming that they are "co-processors", or not independant cores... is just plain incorrect. They are capable of independant operation, without question.  As a matter of fact, having a SPU feed itself data is one of the best ways to get awe-inspiring performance out of it, as no intervention from the PPU is required.

 

 Oh so they can fetch their own stuff and manage their own game data without any instructions from the PPC core and fit it al in the 256kb they have acces to?

 

Quick tell the SCEI peeps how to do that because they would kill for that info.

goddog said: 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 wrote an article about what IBM did, how Sony and Apple were screwed over etcetera long before apple switched to Intel and details of CELL became public.

Sadly nobody dared publish it or wanted to fund further research for the article and since you seem to be pretty into this feel free to PM me your email address so I can forward you what I wrote way back.

 

no Professional here to solve this ???!!!

Make MGS4 and then realize cell is underpowered = lots of FMV not much gameplay = Not the big sales needed ...

PS2 the amazing Emotion Engine = couldn't draw backgrounds without fogging or mass pop ups and redraw on roads etc.

Two rubbish Processors with well over the top claims..

Xenon just gets out and does it's job......

To solve what? There have been lots of correct and some bullshit answers in this thread.

You won't get a one processor is "better" than the other answer. They are two different approaches. The CELL has more theoretical power the XENON is more general purpose.

For the GUI the GPU is more important anyway.

Kyros said: no Professional here to solve this ???!!! To solve what? There have been lots of correct and some bullshit answers in this thread. You won't get a one processor is "better" than the other answer. They are two different approaches. The CELL has more theoretical power the XENON is more general purpose. For the GUI the GPU is more important anyway.

half answer.

 

To what? What do you want to know? Exactly?

If you want to encode/decode video files the CELL will kill the XENON.

You can use the CELL as a very flexible shader which you cannot with the XENON.

If you have algorithms with lots of branching the XENON will be better unless you rewrite the algorithms.

if you have algorithms that do not have lots of branching the CELL will be multiple times faster than the XENON.

So what exactly do you want to know? There is no "better" in this topic. Only "better at a given task".

@NNN2004 - Please note these articles are old and they made some assumptions regarding performance that we are not seeing in the real world.  Microsoft claimed that the spe's would be glorified DSPs and useless for game design.  It was part of their pre-launch anti-PS3 viral campaign.  You see a lot of MS originated information in threads like these.  The SPE's are not the equivalent of a stand alone processor cores but they are much more valuable than DSPs.  The article discusses the best use for the SPEs in the engine architecture.  Some of the design choices that Epic made with UE3 did not pan out and thus the PS3 has problems with some UE3 based games.  (I think they corrected most of these issues with Sony's assistance prior to the launch of Unreal Tournament 3).  The answer to your question of Xenon vs Cell is somewhat irrelevant to which system is better for gaming.  You need to look at the overall system architecture processor, memory, hard drive, Blu-ray/Dvd...

 

have any of you guys actually created or made programs for the ps3 (cell) or the 360 (xenon). Logically speaking the lot of you guys are throwing your theories around this thread and none of them mean anything because theories are nothing but opinions until proven fact.

having read over this thread it seems as if Fishie, Deneidez and NJ5 root for the 360 and according to your theories the ps3 should have died by now and won't be able to accomplish much and pretty much is doomed (we all know it is not and if anything sales and forcasts show it's picking up momentum)

MikeB seems to be rooting for the ps3 and he believes the ps3 is the most powerful from the lot by a great margin and if this is the case then we have to wait and see how much better the titles get over the life cycle of the ps3 compared to the 360.

The bottom line is everything you guys have said is pointless. the lot off you are claiming your opposition to be considerably weaker yet both consoles have proven both parties (sony and ms supporters in here) that they can achieve greatness. Look at GoW 1+2 and Killzone2 and MGS4. If either of you were right (which clearly you aren't!) then these games would have not been possible.

Stop whining like little children and agony aunts, it's embarrassing to see this. It's the kind of thing you would expect in playgrounds in a kindergarden. Pretty much you have all given biased opinions (apart from the odd few) which are totally worthless. Why not be honest with yourselves since none of you can read or see the future and let time tell which system can perform better.

@fei-hung,

I believe, its mainly a difrence in design philosophies. sony went down the road with ibm in the ppc branch that specific sets for specific task can bring more power, more percicly. xbox went with ibm down the general core more flexable, but at top end performance cost.

the power that comes out of either will never reach theorectical peaks due to lack of ram, and motherboard bottlenecks

the specific sets, has been shown in the past to provide vast benifits (adobe products on mac platform), but most developers avoid, or seem not willing to pay for it. (one of the major reasons for apple abandoning powerpc)

Ms went with a general core, as they had seen benfit from that in the world of x86, so seemed to make scence for the same with powerpc make acesing power easy (they stripped the powerpc core they use from most of its complex functions ) the down side is their core has fewer tricks to bring more power out

to add to this nintendo, uses a solution very similer to ms, their core is a power3 powerpc base (sony and ms use power5 and power4 respectivly ). it also has the higher functions ripped out. very good chip though that has gone through many refinements

none of the chips used by these companies meets tue powerpc spec though too much ripped out, and would suck as a general cpu ... efficentcy would not work well in personal computers