@ Deneidez

In any case the article is accurate, only your conclusions are wrong. The main thing to take notice of in that article is really that the Cell is able to achieve near its full potential, unlike most other CPUs.

I would say trading ease of development for theoritical processing power which may never be obtained is a poor trade-off ... Developers have been working with both processors long enough that they're approaching the maximum performance that they will ever see, and both processors are performing in a similar range.

@ deneidez

got it from ign 

http://uk.ps3.ign.com/articles/614/614682p1.html

but i wonder ... why people talk about Cell power more than xenon power ???

I read it somewhere. In either case MikeB is pretty spot on with his layout of the cell. (most of it anyhow)

I've read a lot about the cell to dig in why it has so much hype, but it's because like with the PS2, the PS3's design is so that you can extract more and more power from it the more familiar you are with the arcitecture. Sure it does mean bad ports at first, but once it sets off, it's miles ahead of anything else.

I could easily imagine the PS4 (if using a new version of cell) not having a GPU and simply running everything on the Cell.

Peak performance Xenon, 77 GFlops. Source: Forbes/IBM

Microsoft once claimed the Xenon's peak performance is actually 115.2 GFlops, this appears to be a very common misconception. The Amiga community buddy who wrote that Cell article linked to aboves, provides the following explanation:

"The 115.2 figure is the theoretical peak if you include non-arithmetic instructions such as permute. These are not normally included in *any* measure of FLOPs."

"If you want to count non-arithemitic peak figures, the usable Cell components in the PS3 will get 268 Gflops (6 SPEs + PPE) - over twice that of the 360."

Note the 268 GFlops figure does not take into account the GFlops SPE used by the PS3's CellOS. (which isn't available under Linux)

i think we will see the true power of Cell in Killzone 2.

"GPU: RSX @550MHz

1.8 TFLOPS floating point performance"

o.O

I think thats based on hype which sony made one time. RSX can't do even theoretically 1.8TFLOPS. Afaik newest video cards can do about 1TFLOPS theoretically.

@MikeB

Sorry, my bad. I assumed that it was 4.0GHz as its usually in BroadBand.

No, as research documents show the real world performance of the cell can be very close to its theoretical peak. Developers are not yet done with moving their code which runs on the PPE over to the SPEs, this will yield good performance boosts and when done there's still a lot of headroom.

The Xenon is reaching levels you can't expect more major gains. Gears of War 2 will be just about as good as it gets, Gears 3 will have to find other ways to impress other than processing potential, maybe like tapping into a harddrive more efficiently to move data around quicker.

The burden of extra work on the Cell is an advantage to the 360, by developing for the SPEs developers will achieve better performance from the Xenon's 3 cores using their game engine, however the Cell has 8 processors, so there's just more potential when developers decide to fuly tap more processors than there are available on the 360.

the only cards that have a 1 TFLOPS is the new radeon 4800 series ... from where the hell u get this number @MikeB ??!!!