I have a friend on another forum which does sales, he is a developer. Obvious reasons I cant say the site. This post makes me laugh. I'll tell him to join this. Cause it's like talking to a brick wall.

selnor said: I have a friend on another forum which does sales, he is a developer. Obvious reasons I cant say the site. This post makes me laugh. I'll tell him to join this. Cause it's like talking to a brick wall.

You know, I wasn't going to say anything, but the curiosity is overwhelming:  What is so funny about your post?  (Or my post? if that's what you meant to say.)

And I don't think I'm dimwitted, but the reasons why you can't name this other forum are not at all obvious to me.   

Wrong again, friend. A processor doesnt have to be broken to produce an error. And true modern processors are so fast that you can run simultaneous applications (multitask) and the user is unaware of the burden on the processor. But from a technical perspective IT IS slowing down. I'm going to focus on 1 core to simply this example....

 

You have a hyper-threaded single core processor. And either 2 applications or a dual-threaded one. The software "sees" 2 processors and therefore offsets workload accordingly. As long as they are using different resources of the processor (execution units) the processor wont slow down. A NON-multithreaded processor (like the SPEs) WOULD slow down. The human eye might not be able to tell but benchmarking would reveal the difference. The hyper-threaded CPU would finish the work quicker, dont deny this.

 

I will admit.... you do seem pretty technically oriented. But for someone so technically oriented you are sure quick to compare the clock rates of the memory of the two machines. I might point out that it is foolish for you to do this as you are comparing apples to oranges. The clock rates dont really matter that much. I read somewhere that XDR is more or less equivalent to GDDR3 and thus it's its major competitor. I rememeber when the first Pentium 4s appeared on the scene...... clock rate equivalent to P3s and Athlons of the time but performance equal or inferior to said CPUs. It didnt matter that the MHz rating was higher.

 

To all the 360 fanboys..... it's true the PS3 DOESNT use DirectX. It's actually based off of OpenGL (more commonly seen in Linux). And dont be so quick to dismiss OpenGL just because it's the underdog. There's a classic little PC game called HALF-LIFE that actually runs BETTER in OpenGL than DX..... 

@ Final-Fan

"The command bus streams commands fast enough to support 102.4GB/s for coherent commands, and 204.8GB/s for non-coherent commands. The data rings can sustain 204.8GB/s for some workloads, with transient rates as high as 307.2GB/s."

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/power/library/pa-fpfeib/



The eDram internal logic to its internal memory bandwidth is 256 GB/s, important bottlenecks are eDrams memory size and shared (CPU/GPU) bus.



Correct, in terms of bandwidth the XBox 360 design is bottlenecked.

@ erikguy

Xbox 360 CPU: 3 main threads, and 3 secondary threads.

CELL: 8 main threads, and only 1 secondary thread running on the PPE.

In terms of peak processing potential that's just 3 cores (Xenon, XBox 360) vs 8 processors (Cell, PS3). 2 threads on the PPE and one thread per SPE giving you a total of 9 hardware threads. Software threads are not limited so you can have as many of these as you wish!

A single core CPU allowing for 2 hardware threads does not equal to two of these CPUs running a single thread.

@ selnor

Maybe he can explain to you some of the things I have written in this thread. But to fully understand many things written in this thread he may need to be a low-level game engine developer or a hardware expert to fully understand and appreciate the PS3 design. Developers often use high level programming languages and 3rd party middleware, thus their views are dependent on the functionalities provided to them by 3rd parties.

 An extreme example, as a 10 year old kid I wrote some Basic programs and a game on the c64, but to say I was aware of the inner workings of c64 would be a big mistake.

"A single core CPU allowing for 2 hardware threads does not equal to two of these CPUs running a single thread."

True. And I thought we agreed that the PS3 only has 7 processor cores that are actually processing any new information.

 

From http://hardware.teamxbox.com/articles/xbox/1144/The-Xbox-360-System-Specifications/p1

I'm done arguing with you fello PS3 fan!! k thx

erikguy said: "A single core CPU allowing for 2 hardware threads does not equal to two of these CPUs running a single thread." True. And I thought we agreed that the PS3 only has 7 processor cores that are actually processing any new information.

PS3: 8 processing cores, 1 PPE + 7 SPEs (1 SPE currently used by the OS, taking some workload off the other processing cores, unlike is the case on the XBox 360)

XBox 360: 3 processing cores

The PPE doesnt process any game information. It just distributes processing jobs to the SPEs.

And dont be so quick to dismiss the 3 "virtualized" CPUs on the 360.... they help.