what i say that other processors are capable to do what Cell can do ... so thats mean they are equal but sony tell us its far more powerful than any processor .. i hate it when sony lie to us... but also know that i see that Cell have some advantages and a bit better than xenon ( not like what sony want us to think ).

@ NJ5

The PS3 'Cell' CPU is better by a huge margin. And your all wrong when you say 'SPE's' arn't 'Cores'. They are as they can run independent of the PPE.With each SPE having it's own kernel, also own memory. SPE's are connected by a very fast inter-connect data bus, capable of transfering data between SPE's at upto 400Gb/s. SPE's are the raw power of 'Cell'. Each SPE alone can out perform a 360 core, by a huge margin.

@ NJ5

No idea myself but

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7443557.stm

Now, it's not the best of facts I guess but notice it doesn't say "built with components designed for Microsoft's X-box 360".

My genuinely bogus crap which is even proven by an accurate reading of the quotes you post? I still laugh every time I remember your claims about dynamic branch hints. This thread was quite enlightening about your modus operandi:

http://www.vgchartz.com/forum/thread.php?start=100&id=29781

This post in particular, will tell any programmer all they need to know about your knowledge:

http://www.vgchartz.com/forum/post.php?id=872071

Especially when followed by our exchange about your misunderstanding of the quote in that post. You seriously thought dynamic branch hints are the be all end all solution to flushed pipelines due to branches.

calm down guys we are here to discuss no to fight.

The worst thing about these arguments is how meaningless it really is ...

Suppose MikeB is correct and there still is a lot of untapped potential in the Cell processor which will (slowly) be exposed over the rest of this generation. This will ammount to (maybe) 25% to 50% more performance ... which may sound like a pretty big boost but in reality is a smaller gain than what the Gamecube or XBox had over the PS2 at a time when diminishing returns mean that you need dramatically more processing power to see the same improvement.

MikeB you are alive. good good and with ur last post, it is best to leave it as that since only time can tell.

As for sony's emotion engine, i agree with NJ5 to an extant and the reason is the xbox offered so much more then the ps2. it had a better graphics card, had a hard drive and was faster. however, the ps3 this time seems to have the better hardware this time around. whether its by a small margin or a large one. Yet it is pointless to brag about it if no one can make any use of it.

No 3rd party multi platform developer would want to to bee to bias and take sides. for business it wouldn't be good to slate the company who pays you by favoring their competitor.

What i do know is having played both, mgs4 and GoW, that mgs4 does have better graphics and with the amount of details and things happening at once on the screen it is truly an accomplishment that i haven't seen to on any other console or game except killzone2. But even with Killzone2, until they have proven it really is in game and it really does exist, it don't mean anything. Even GoW2 doesn't compare to mgs4 in terms of graphics AND action taking place around it. maybe this is where the cell does come into play with its multiple SPU's coming in handy to process various different things at the same time. The a.i is just unbelievable in mgs4 along withe the Enemy a.i, coding for buildings, obstacles etc, a.i. for the other relevant characters and all those other things that happen in the game during play.

games like GoW may have great graphics but so little else happens at the same time it just fails in comparison to something like mgs4. It has to be seen in action in person to be believed. Please dont get me wrong, i love GoW and i will buy and play the sequel when it is released but mgs4 has raised the bar and i'm sure other exclusives will carry on to do so with games made specifically and exclusively for the cell in mind.

If you're talking about pure raw power, the Cell wins. To back up this fact, this page shows that the Cell is capable, at least under certain circumstances (in this case, an average double precision Linpack 4096x4096 matrix), of attaining performance equivalent to 100 GFLOPS in a real-life situation. In contrast, the Xenon's theoretical peak performance is only 115.2 GFLOPS.

However, if you're talking about how much can be realistically utilized using today's dev tools and programming languages, well, I'm not really sure. I think the Cell is more powerful by a small amount by itself, but I don't know enough about programming for multiple processors to fashion an informed answer. I do know that in a video game console it can give programmers an advantage by using the SPEs to take some of the "grunt work" (such as physics calculations) off the GPU.