plz for one time dont be a sony fan and accept the truth .... for me i think both equal but Cell have abit more power.

@Mike B: Whether they are GPP:s or not, the number of transistors per SPE limits their ability to work as GPP, which makes them work as specialized (where name implies too, if i recall) work more efficiently. Actually, if they wouldn't need to work as specialized, you wouldn't need the PPE to control the SPE:s.

@ NNN2004

 wait man .. i dont mean to make u angry ... afterall its ur opinion.

The place the PPE takes within the Cell, the PPE is needed to do this management. IBM could build a full system with only one SPE, acting as its CPU.

To quote a friend:

"There has been a lot of debate about how the Cell will perform on general purpose code with many saying it will not do well as it is a “specialised processor”.  This is not correct, the Cell was designed as a general purpose processor, but optimised for high compute tasks.  The PPE is a conventional processor and will act like one.  The big difference will be in the SPEs as they were designed to accelerate specific types of code and will be notably better in some areas than others, however even the SPEs are general purpose.  The Cell has in essence traded running everything at moderate speed for the ability to run certain types of code at high speed."

Read his articles, they are informative:

http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cell/Cell4_v2.html

The Cell is a faster CPU, all things considered.   That doesn't mean "PS3 games are faster than X360 games" -- that's dependant on so many factors, as to make CPU speed almost immaterial, unless its *really* different... which it isn't, unless you're running a relatively pure mathematical simulation... in which case the Cell is basically untouchable. Games... are not pure mathematics.

The Xenon is easier to develop for, and not really much slower than the Cell, as far as general 3rd party game development is considered... at this point anyway.

Faster game does NOT mean Faster CPU or GPU, except in extreme cases (think "1st-party exclusives"). It tends to mean "better dev team" or "more support for one platform over another".

To answer the question posed, however... which one is "better" -- that's totally dependant on what you're trying to do, what resources you have, what your schedule is, etc. etc. etc.   That question is totally unanswerable.

The Cell is just PR.

Sure it is powerfull, but not in a way Sony wants you to believe.

So many developers say, it is very hard to develop games for it and THAT is what matters to me. I don't give a **** if the Cell is the personalized power in theory.

Xenon is very solid and easy to handle. Developers continue making their games for it. That is important. Nothing else.

^^ as mentioned earlier- all depends on what console you support^^

All I need to do is to quote myself,

@Fei-Hung

Where did you get those numbers? :)

"The first optimization for the SPE architecture was to take advantage of the four way-SIMD using 32-bit multiply-and-add operations to perform up to eight single-precision floating point operations per cycle."

...

"Using eight SPUs, the parallel version of matrix multiplication achieves 201GFLOPS, very close to the theoretical maximum of 204.8GFLOPS."

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/power/library/pa-cellperf/

(Plus PS3 has only 7 SPUs and its has lower clocks.)

@NNN2004

RSX is more 7600GT than 8600GT.

according to nvidia is a 7900 but much faster
from what i read they are clocked at 3.2ghz