No, it's not. It's much more powerful for certain applications (for example, embarassingly parallel problems which games are not). It's less powerful or equally powerful for some other applications (for example, an application which can't take advantage of more than two threads and which needs double-precision floating-point arithmetic; the Xenon would beat it there).

As for games (which should be our only concern here), the Cell is yet to be proven to be significantly more powerful. Then there are of course the PS3's other elements which can't be ignored (RAM size, GPU, etc.). The bottom line is that an absolute proof of the PS3's power must come in the form of a fantastically advanced game. While I don't think we've yet seen PS3's power peak, I don't think we'll see fantastic advances (even if we do it will be in very few games).

If the Cell was fundamentally more powerful, it would be significantly better for every single problem you could throw at it. At least that's my notion of "fundamentally more powerful". This is clearly and provably not the case due to defining properties of the Cell's architecture.

PS: There are also other desired attributes besides power as you know, but I'll leave that alone now.

 

@ NJ5

Modern games are excellently suited for multi-threaded processing, there are so many different things going on in games that are well suited to be split across many different processing units. Far more so than for other kinds of programs.



Why?

Once you have an advanced game engine, why wouldn't it be possible to create many different games based on the same game engine?



It is. Even if handling a double precision format. (Although half and single precision formats make much more sense)

Issues mainly relate to breaking down game engines into separate pieces of code and manually optimising your code to some extend.

Depends on What a person wants when you think about it :S

There are dependencies between them though. Once you posted a nice diagram of Killzone 2's engine which showed SPEs waiting for other SPEs for quite a high percentage of available CPU time. This inevitably means the engine is wasting CPU cycles (as would be expected in a non-embarassingly parallel problem).

EDIT - I just found it:

The more optimized an engine is, the less flexible and more expensive it gets. The best PS3 engines aren't getting used outside of the companies they were made at as far as I know. That should tell us something.



You yourself have posted a paper which proves I'm right regarding this. The PS3's Cell is weak at double-precision (unlike the newer versions of the Cell). Let's not go there again please.

 

@ NJ5

You misunderstand the diagram:



The black areas are spare CPU time which can be used for other things (the used areas can be made smaller even, though efficiency optimisation). It may well be obsolete by now, SPU 4 and SPU5 if they would have been included in this diagram would be completely empty.



Naughty Dog and Insomniac are sharing engine code, Ratchet & Clank, Resistance 2 and Uncharted are very different games. 1st and 2nd party developers are sharing more and more code with 3rd parties, but of course there should be competition to some extend. They can't give everything away for free without getting something back as well.



It's relatively weak at double precision code compared to single precision, but it's still very fast at double precision, it's just that the Cell is uber fast at processing single and half precision code formats.

DS: Cheapest and best game library.

@ CGI-Quality

The PS3's XDR Ram can be used for the RSX to rely on, this would not only increase graphics RAM but also increase potential bandwidth. 256 MB for graphics alone is a lot though, so it probably makes more sense for most games to not go for this approach as the Cell really needs low latency RAM to get the most out of its potential in most cases.

Spare CPU time equals wasted CPU cycles (you're just putting what I said in different words). Do you think they're wasting cpu cycles to let the Cell catch its breath? No, they're wasting cycles because they have to. Smart engine design can decrease the amount of wasted cycles, but look at how much is still wasted even on KZ2's engine which is the product of so many years of work. Game engines aren't fully parallelizable, because rendering a game frame is a complex process with interdependent phases. Some of them have to be run sequentially and that means wasted CPU cycles.

Two rough examples for illustration (details may vary between engines):

1- You can't start rendering an object before you know where it is (i.e. before physics run). If the object is an AI-controlled NPC, the AI routine has to run first in order to decide where it is and what animation it's performing.

2- Objects often interact with each other in the physics engine, which means there are interdependent calculations taking place.

Sharing code doesn't mean using the same engine, and it doesn't mean each of their engines are flexible and general enough for easy usage in other games.

No, but if they have a truly great and flexible PS3 engine they can sell it (like Epic does).

And also compared to other CPUs, as it gets about 1 GFLOP/s/core at 3.2 GHz. That's not impressive. It's OK if your code is parallelizable though.

 

Mike everything that you’re spinning here now; the theoretical technical vast superiority means nothing if I can play a game on a system that costs half the price and the graphics and performance are better. Maybe you should type all this up and send it as a memo to the developers because they obviously didn’t get it.

NJ5 said: Value is subjective. /thread

 

If this truth was so significant then the mass market wouldn't exist , no it couldn't exist.

 

It has little to no impact on the OP.

 

People complain about how Wi-Fi isn't used by many and how it's incredibly slow both of wich is untrue in my experiences , I have at least 5 devices connected through Wi-FI to my router at any one time in my household it's essential that I have it and we've never had an issue with one device using too much bandwith unless some one is downloading a large file or something.