The PS3 had more graphics power than 90 percent of the PC's on the market when that trailer was released two years ago. The 8800 series from Nvidia was not even released back then.

We're going down this eternal argument about which one is better between the PS3 and 360...

The Cell has not proven yet that it's far superior to the 360 architecture, so what's the point to have this argument AGAIN?

"The 360 could run MGS4" "No it can't" "It could" "No it can't"

Please...

The OT was already pretty pointless, couldn't we avoid that pointless argument?

People seem to miss completely one important thing, which is that PS3 was designed for multiple tasks, in which Cell is definately at its best. It can handle multiple tasks at a time, with none to little loss in performance.
Then, Cell is designed for another use than just PS3, so PS3 was a good trojan horse for the Cell to enter the market. The devs would become familiar with programming the Cell and the price of the processor would also drop significantly.

The PS3 Cell processor is a chip with 8 processors. The PPE which is similar to other processor(/cores) and more interesting 7 SPEs. 1 SPE is dedicated to the operating system, so the resources the OS takes from this SPE to do things in the background don't take resources from the other processors.

Some early PS3 games did not use the SPEs at all. Ideally nearly all code is run on the SPEs instead of on the PPE, due to being different this takes some effort. Adjusting code from the PPE for the SPEs is a gradual and time consuming process but results into huge processing gains and headroom. Any enhancement developers make to their game engine all their follow-up games will benefit.

The PS3 hardware is intended to last a decade, so this approach which would not make sense on a PC (where hardware specs change all of the time) does absolutely make sense in this case. It's worthwhile to release innovative new hardware like the Cell processor for a longlasting console, as developers have enough time to figure out ways to adapt and develop their game engines accordingly.

Thank you! I wouldn't have said it better.

it's the foundation of our very own existence ;)

I agree, it was Sony using their gaming division  R&D dollars to further themself with a processor which would excel in HD tv's etc. Kind of like how they also forced blu-ray on their playstation customers.

So you're saying that not only did they sacrifice/risk the Playstation brand for a disc format, but also for a CPU?

I don't think Sony hates their gaming division that much.

You are asking strange questions. You are saying that is not be better than what pc? is not better than mine, is it better than the blue gene? No. You don’t seem to know much about pc's.

 A pc has a flexible CPU that is not as powerful as the specific purpose GPU because that's how electronics work. For example analog circuits are instantaneous in their result, an analog differentiation or derivation circuit outputs instantaneous result(time zero response), an micro processor on the other hand need an algorithms and take several processor cycles to get a response that is not as accurate, the advantage of digital circuits is that you can change it purpose. There is also another example, ASIC( Application Specific Intergraded Circuits) are faster than microprocessor but as the name implies they are application specific, this takes us to GPU vs CPU. GPU are very fast because they are designed for a specific purpose, on the other hand the CPU can manage many different applications.

Processor’s performance does no depends on clock speed alone, the number of instructions per cycle, the word size and other thing have more impact on performance than clock speed. What happens is that clock speed is what Intel advertises and that’s all that people now about, for ages hi end processor where around 900mHz and they could output higher flops( mathematical operations per second) than more commercial CPUs, this bring us to flops. Flops it the real measure for processors, for example if one processor is very fats but can only add numbers in pairs it take longer for it to get to one million that a processor that can add numbers in groups of ten and so the processor with lower clock speed could have higher flops, so the slowest one has faster results. 

Anyway when you say PS3 or cell are not better than a PC, I don’t know what you mean, do you mean a Alienware ALX X-58 with  cores Extreme,  dual 2GB GDDR5 ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 with CrossFireX and Quad GPU Technology and 12GB DDR3 SDRAM at 1600MHz - 6 x 2048MB? well you are right but that is a US$4,199.00 PC.

@radha: Your post was going well until you said this: