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Forums - Gaming Discussion - 360 CPU and Cell are fairly equal according to Dave Shippy

Cueil on 24 February 2009
BrayanA said:
haxxiy said:
Yeah, 165 million transistors, 1MB of cache and 3 cores are indeed very similar to 300 million transistors, 2,5MB of cache and 9 cores. That's why everybody uses X360 as cluster supercomputers like PS3.

No seriously, at its very best the X360's CPU is 3,2 GHz x 8 FLOPS/clock cycle (as any IBM PPE) x 3 cores = 76,2 GFLOPS of peak performance.

PS3 has nine cores (1 PPE, 8 SPEs) at 3.2 GHz which means 230,4 GFLOPS of peak performance or 179,2 in-game processing power avaliable.

Oh and btw the RSX is also a bit stronger than the Xenos (4 alus x 2 madds x 24 pipelines + 5 alus x 8 pipelines x 550 MHz = 255 GFLOPS verse 5 alus x 48 pipelines x 500 MHz = 240 GFLOPS)

X360 multiplats look better most of time because X360 has more memory avaliable (more memory = bigger textures and frame buffer) and PS3 is harder to work. Plus most PS3 multiplats do not even work with the whole Cell at all (only its single general purpose core).

Your haterboxes.

Cell's claimed advantage is on streaming floating point work which is done on its seven DSP processors and is x2 of what 360 CPU can do, but Xbox 360's CPU has x3 general purpose processing power because it has three general purpose cores.

BTW 360 GPU totals 332 million transistors

http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/617/617951p1.html

 

 That's a theoretical point they will never reach since one of those SPEs is tied up with the OS effectively reducing the number of SPEs used for the actual games to 6.  And while I'm not absolutely sure I think that Sony's numbers are for a fully running 8spe Cell.  The PS3 is a wonder peice of hardware, but it's not a step ahead of the 360 as a game machine. 



 
Get your Portable ID!

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joeorc on 24 February 2009

 

@

Cueil

No one needs to read past your ignorant 9 core statement to know that you don't even have the slightest clue as to what you're talking about. How about doing some research on the Cell before spewing out number some idiot post on the official PlayStation forums. SPEs are not cores and they most certainly don't all run at 3.2 ghz the Cell is an asynchronous processor. If your ignorance was any greater you would choke and die on it. Multiplats look better on the 360 because the system was designed as a gaming platform first and formost and was build with developers wishes in mind.

 

your a very funny guy..IF you would have done research your self , you would have indeed known that the SPU's are indeed CORES

I GUESS you know more about it than

Dr. H. Peter Hofstee, Cell Chief Scientist and Cell Synergistic Processor Chief Architect

"The use of multi-core processors, such as the IBM Cell Processor" you can't be a multi-core processor with only one Core

One of the Multi-Core sessions will be led by Dr. H. Peter Hofstee, Cell Chief Scientist and Cell Synergistic Processor Chief Architect, with the IBM Systems and Technology Group. Hofstee joined the IBM Austin Research Laboratory in 1996 where he worked on the world's first 1GHz CMOS integer microprocessor. In 2001, he was one of the founding members of the joint Sony-Toshiba-IBM design center in Austin to develop the next generation of microprocessors for the broadband era. Dr. Hofstee received his Ph.D. in computer science from Caltech in 1995 and was on the faculty there through 1996.

"Dr. Hofstee's participation in the conference is a huge plus for the industry," said Dr. Winthrop Smith, leader of the Multi-Core Processor Tutorial. "The cell processor will affect all players in the digital entertainment, enterprise computing and semiconductor industry sectors. Dr. Hofstee will be able to share his unique insight with conference attendees."

 

dr. Hofstee say's they are Core's..hmm who is right you or the:

Dr. H. Peter Hofstee, Cell Chief Scientist and Cell Synergistic Processor Chief Architect

 

 

 



I AM BOLO

100% lover "nothing else matter's" after that...

ps:

Proud psOne/2/3/p owner.  I survived Aplcalyps3 and all I got was this lousy Signature.

joeorc on 24 February 2009

and for people slamming the Cell, keep doing it..because the Cell will just keep showing great result's
since the Cell processor is a (CPU/GPU) combo chip. it's good that the PS3 has (2) GPU's...what you don't think so..want a bet...ban for a week..don't cry if you loose...lol, because i am going to win that bet..why because it's a FACT..not a OPINION, the Cell Processor is a CPU/GPU combo chip.



I AM BOLO

100% lover "nothing else matter's" after that...

ps:

Proud psOne/2/3/p owner.  I survived Aplcalyps3 and all I got was this lousy Signature.

ChichiriMuyo on 24 February 2009
Sardauk said:
nen-suer said:

 

Thats the point, if u want something different and unique u have to pay money and work hard, it may come as a surprise to u but most great game makers care about the games more than the profit.

 

 

Well that is new to me: the video gaming industry which generates more money than movies btw... is about .. ART ? Not money ?

On your remark about the """"outdated UR3""": We are not talking about fundamental science here.... iterative development are the best way to obtain a good results. Making a new big bang from scratch is expensive and generally not worth the investment, if you cannot recycle it later.

The video game industry makes more money than box-office sales.  It's got nothing on DVD sales.

http://www.gamedaily.com/articles/news/video-games-explode-global-revenues-now-on-par-with-box-office/?biz=1

Also, that's revenue, not profit.  The movie industry is still far, far more profitable.



You do not have the right to never be offended.

Stan85 on 24 February 2009
haxxiy said:
Yeah, 165 million transistors, 1MB of cache and 3 cores are indeed very similar to 300 million transistors, 2,5MB of cache and 9 cores. That's why everybody uses X360 as cluster supercomputers like PS3.

No seriously, at its very best the X360's CPU is 3,2 GHz x 8 FLOPS/clock cycle (as any IBM PPE) x 3 cores = 76,2 GFLOPS of peak performance.

PS3 has nine cores (1 PPE, 8 SPEs) at 3.2 GHz which means 230,4 GFLOPS of peak performance or 179,2 in-game processing power avaliable.

Oh and btw the RSX is also a bit stronger than the Xenos (4 alus x 2 madds x 24 pipelines + 5 alus x 8 pipelines x 550 MHz = 255 GFLOPS verse 5 alus x 48 pipelines x 500 MHz = 240 GFLOPS)

X360 multiplats look better most of time because X360 has more memory avaliable (more memory = bigger textures and frame buffer) and PS3 is harder to work. Plus most PS3 multiplats do not even work with the whole Cell at all (only its single general purpose core).

Your haterboxes.

If you must know,the CELL is not that great for games,but great for...what Sony was thinking it will be great for.

The CELL is hard/very hard to work with,depending on your studio development budget.

The CELL is more expensive to make that the 360 CPU.

The CELL,even if it was more powerfull than 360`s CPU,the ps3`s memory bandwidth will just hold the performance down (and it is holding the ps3 down,btw).

Now,you have to give it to MS...cheaper,very developer friendly (it`s a Pc actually),same as powerfull as the CELL...yup,bravo MS.

 



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joeorc on 24 February 2009

Yea the Cell Processor is not good for Game's..O' brother....lol /end Sarcasm

Formula One Championship Edition

"We don't really use the concept of reserving certain SPUs for specific tasks. Instead we employ the concept of prioritized job lists that are executed by the SPUs whenever one is available. We use the SPUs for the following jobs: audio effects, particle system, physics (landscape collision, narrow phase and collision resolution), rain effects (rain droplets and rain splashes) and various render side jobs. The game logic is driven largely by the PPU. We use the SPUs together to collaborate on working through each frame that's displayed by the game. The SPUs are extremely versatile so they can be used to accelerate any in-game system."

The SPUs are heavily involved in the graphics pipeline and do an enormous amount of work to eliminate inefficiency before anything arrives at the PPU and RSX. For example, the SPUs are powerful enough to decompress and check every triangle [polygon] before passing it on to the RSX. Triangles that are facing away from the player, or that are not on the screen can be 'trimmed' away by the SPUs, which hugely reduces the amount of redundant work sent to the RSX. This in turn lets the RSX get on with what it does best--drawing stuff on screen.

The SPUs can also be used to augment the RSX vertex shaders, making far more vertex-heavy tasks possible which is very useful for character animation. Additionally, the SPUs can be used to implement behavior very similar to geometry shaders--F1 CE uses them in this way to render seamless interpolated levels of detail for some scene elements. So in answer to the question "Do the Cell and RSX work together?" the answer is a resounding "Yes," and I think this is one of the real strengths of Playstation 3 that we'll see increasingly exploited by development teams going forward.

Source: Newsweek



I AM BOLO

100% lover "nothing else matter's" after that...

ps:

Proud psOne/2/3/p owner.  I survived Aplcalyps3 and all I got was this lousy Signature.

haxxiy on 24 February 2009
Cueil said:
haxxiy said:
Yeah, 165 million transistors, 1MB of cache and 3 cores are indeed very similar to 300 million transistors, 2,5MB of cache and 9 cores. That's why everybody uses X360 as cluster supercomputers like PS3.

No seriously, at its very best the X360's CPU is 3,2 GHz x 8 FLOPS/clock cycle (as any IBM PPE) x 3 cores = 76,2 GFLOPS of peak performance.

PS3 has nine cores (1 PPE, 8 SPEs) at 3.2 GHz which means 230,4 GFLOPS of peak performance or 179,2 in-game processing power avaliable.

Oh and btw the RSX is also a bit stronger than the Xenos (4 alus x 2 madds x 24 pipelines + 5 alus x 8 pipelines x 550 MHz = 255 GFLOPS verse 5 alus x 48 pipelines x 500 MHz = 240 GFLOPS)

X360 multiplats look better most of time because X360 has more memory avaliable (more memory = bigger textures and frame buffer) and PS3 is harder to work. Plus most PS3 multiplats do not even work with the whole Cell at all (only its single general purpose core).

Your haterboxes.

No one needs to read past your ignorant 9 core statement to know that you don't even have the slightest clue as to what you're talking about.  How about doing some research on the Cell before spewing out number some idiot post on the official PlayStation forums.  SPEs are not cores and they most certainly don't all run at 3.2 ghz the Cell is an asynchronous processor.  If your ignorance was any greater you would choke and die on it.  Multiplats look better on the 360 because the system was designed as a gaming platform first and formost and was build with developers wishes in mind.

 

A core is a functional unit in a processor capable of independent execution. Since each SPE contains a thread, by that definition, yes, they are separate cores, as is the X360's CPU, giving nine total cores, your moron xbot.

And the Cell features asynchronous direct memory acess to achieve cache coherency since the SPEs cache does not work on the conventional way ( they are not transparent to software nor contain hardware structures that predict which data to load).



 

 

 

 

 

haxxiy on 24 February 2009
BrayanA said:
haxxiy said:
Yeah, 165 million transistors, 1MB of cache and 3 cores are indeed very similar to 300 million transistors, 2,5MB of cache and 9 cores. That's why everybody uses X360 as cluster supercomputers like PS3.

No seriously, at its very best the X360's CPU is 3,2 GHz x 8 FLOPS/clock cycle (as any IBM PPE) x 3 cores = 76,2 GFLOPS of peak performance.

PS3 has nine cores (1 PPE, 8 SPEs) at 3.2 GHz which means 230,4 GFLOPS of peak performance or 179,2 in-game processing power avaliable.

Oh and btw the RSX is also a bit stronger than the Xenos (4 alus x 2 madds x 24 pipelines + 5 alus x 8 pipelines x 550 MHz = 255 GFLOPS verse 5 alus x 48 pipelines x 500 MHz = 240 GFLOPS)

X360 multiplats look better most of time because X360 has more memory avaliable (more memory = bigger textures and frame buffer) and PS3 is harder to work. Plus most PS3 multiplats do not even work with the whole Cell at all (only its single general purpose core).

Your haterboxes.

Cell's claimed advantage is on streaming floating point work which is done on its seven DSP processors and is x2 of what 360 CPU can do, but Xbox 360's CPU has x3 general purpose processing power.

BTW 360 GPU totals 332 million transistors

http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/617/617951p1.html

 

 A three year old link to a X360 site... very nice.

The X360's CPU advantage shows up only when one is assuming the Cell will work on it's conventional way (chaining the SPEs together, each handling a step on a complex operation and using the PPE to start, stop, interrupt, and schedule the processes running on the SPEs). Otherwise the PS3 outperforms the X360 since it has more threads working on the very same AltiVec base.

 

And the X360's GPU totals only 232 million transistors or the like. Since the EDRAM is localized on a separate die is bullshit to merge its transistor count (around 100 million) together with the X360's gpu. Is nothing, for instance, like the GC chip which had its embedded memory and GPU on the same die.



 

 

 

 

 

joeorc on 24 February 2009
Stan85 said:
haxxiy said:
Yeah, 165 million transistors, 1MB of cache and 3 cores are indeed very similar to 300 million transistors, 2,5MB of cache and 9 cores. That's why everybody uses X360 as cluster supercomputers like PS3.

No seriously, at its very best the X360's CPU is 3,2 GHz x 8 FLOPS/clock cycle (as any IBM PPE) x 3 cores = 76,2 GFLOPS of peak performance.

PS3 has nine cores (1 PPE, 8 SPEs) at 3.2 GHz which means 230,4 GFLOPS of peak performance or 179,2 in-game processing power avaliable.

Oh and btw the RSX is also a bit stronger than the Xenos (4 alus x 2 madds x 24 pipelines + 5 alus x 8 pipelines x 550 MHz = 255 GFLOPS verse 5 alus x 48 pipelines x 500 MHz = 240 GFLOPS)

X360 multiplats look better most of time because X360 has more memory avaliable (more memory = bigger textures and frame buffer) and PS3 is harder to work. Plus most PS3 multiplats do not even work with the whole Cell at all (only its single general purpose core).

Your haterboxes.

If you must know,the CELL is not that great for games,but great for...what Sony was thinking it will be great for.

The CELL is hard/very hard to work with,depending on your studio development budget.

The CELL is more expensive to make that the 360 CPU.

The CELL,even if it was more powerfull than 360`s CPU,the ps3`s memory bandwidth will just hold the performance down (and it is holding the ps3 down,btw).

Now,you have to give it to MS...cheaper,very developer friendly (it`s a Pc actually),same as powerfull as the CELL...yup,bravo MS.

 

 

did you not read what theOP's article stated he was pointing out "HOW you use that hardware"

and Since the Cell Processor is a CPU/GPU combo chip, i think it's well suited for Game's, and of course the memory bandwidth problem , that everyone who like's to squeese every ounce of performance out of the XBOX360 in hope's to off set any and all advantages that the PS3 has over the xbox360, just so they can make the xbox360 alway's look better in the eye's of the game community...O'l brother

the xbox360 is a fine game system, "when there is no problem's, with the hardware" that is. the game's are very cool. i play some of the GAME's that the xbox360 has on PC.

but the truth of the matter is developer's are just getting started with the PS3.

why, you may ask:

think about this for a sec:

when was the Cell Processor released to the Development community...the Cell Processor
was unvailed : 2004

"STI". The architectural design and first implementation were carried out at the STI Design Center in Austin, Texas over a four-year period beginning March 2001 on a budget reported by IBM as approaching US$400 million

so look when the Development kits for the playstation 3 was released...mid to late 2005 the first development kits were very few and released in limited #'s , and even then some developers did not get one until spring 2006.

if it takes Epic as an Example to make the Unreal Engine III for the PC/x360 3 to 4 years to develop that Engine prior to even had the chance to get a hold of a Cell Processor, than they now have a New type of Processor to add to that bunch its no wonder developers are just getting out the more mature Engines for the Playstation 3

and if you would know the Cell processor is designed to attack the "Memory Wall" problem.

http://www.gamezero.com/team-0/articles/interviews/dr_h_peter_hofstee/

And as for Multi-Platform game's nearly alway's look better and play better on the XBOX360:

since the Cell Processor is a CPU/GPU... its that dedicated GPU part of the chip. Is it being used in majority of the Multiplatform game ENGINES right now...?

thats the point..if it did, what do you think would happen with the results...One only has to look at KZ2, UNCHARTED to see some of the results they are getting right now.



I AM BOLO

100% lover "nothing else matter's" after that...

ps:

Proud psOne/2/3/p owner.  I survived Aplcalyps3 and all I got was this lousy Signature.

Loud_Hot_White_Box on 24 February 2009
BrayanA said:
nen-suer said:
Lets see best graphics on console
Metal Gear Solid 4, Killzone 2, Uncharted 2 , GOW 3 , Heavy Rain (All unique engines)

so i don't get it if xbox360 is FAIRLY close to ps3 but easier to program for, and yet its biggest achievement is games using the out dated UR3 engine...hmm....what?

Building unique engine for every single game is not a smart move. It cost extra money and time.

 

Once they are built, though, they have a lot of value if used in subsequent games.  I think that's what we're going to see increasingly from PS3 games.  These great engines are going to get more use, more polish, and in a number of cases get shared between devs.