@ Words Of Wisdom

For example there are various people who already have broken more than 10 XBox 360 consoles within this short period of availability. Of course their experience would influence their judgement when they talk about the XBox 360's reliability, then there are others who state they are still on their launch consoles, again influencing their perspectives on the matter.

Let's face it we are all biased to a certain extend, IMO to deny this is just a sign of ignorance.

MikeB said: @ Words Of Wisdom For example there are various people who already have broken more than 10 XBox 360 consoles within this short period of availability. Of course their experience would influence their judgement when they talk about the XBox 360's reliability, then there are others who state they are still on their launch consoles, again influencing their perspectives on the matter. Let's face it we are all biased to a certain extend, IMO to deny this is just a sign of ignorance.

Lets spin your example the other way:  The 360 is so amazing that someone would repurchase it 9 times to have that gaming experience.  10 purchases in all.  Must be one heck of a system to warrent such unbelievable loyalty.  I bet the Wii/PS3 has nothing on that.

The details of the example haven't changed, but there's a different bias in the wording.  Once again, you focus purely on the negative details refusing to look at the other side.

Bias and prejudice serve as blinders that prevent people from objectively examining situations, from "looking at both sides." It's true that everyone is biased (we all have likes/dislikes), however something that sets the wise from the foolish is the ability to recognize bias for what it is and put it aside to make objective decisions.

@ Words Of Wisdom

One problem though with your example, I don't think any of them bought 10 or more XBox 360s, they received refurbished or new units as replacements for failed units.

I think at least when we speak specifically with regard to reliability having broken 10 XBox 360s is bad, I agree that many XBox 360 try to divert such topics off topic by pointing out that some of these people are still loyal XBox 360 fans. I guess most people will give up much earlier after breaking just a couple of consoles.

I'm sorry -- you don't have the technical background required to make a technical comparison. Saying, "here are the theoretical FLOP numbers" says very little about performance. I stopped reading as soon as I read your silly CPU comparison.

For example, the theoretical peak FLOP numbers are about 2x what the PS3 has seen in the optimal case.  This is with an application that can be parallelized across all of the SPEs.  In a the average gaming case, I think the Cell would be unlikely to see more than say, 1/4th to 1/8th its theoretical peak (depending on the game and algorithms used).

I've pasted the following within my prior reply: 

"PS3 SDK 1.80, OS memory reductions, new features

OS reserved memory: 48 MB (main) + 24 MB(vram)"

But reply from Heavenly Sword dev (august 2007 at Beyond3D forum): "1.80 was out absolutely ages ago.. 1.90 has been in developer's hands for a few weeks."

So I don't know the current & future figures, thus I cannot really comment to getter depth. One thing is clear, they are making improvements. It can be they are reserving some memory for future still disabled (under development) features as well.

Ok... where to begin...

-8 SPE processor Units (of which 1 is disabled, available only as a backup if something happened to one of the other SPEs).

Wrong, the disabled SPE is not for backup. It is disabled entirely to improve yields. It CAN'T be activated.

-The Cell has a very high internal bandwidth to allow the design to be effective (over 300 GB/s).

That's theoretical, the actual bandwidth that can be achieved AT MAX is 204GB/s. Source: IBM.

-Proven performance test: Over 200 GFlops for 8 SPEs
-According to IBM: Peak performance, 77 GFlops.
-Often it is claimed the Xenon's peak performance is actually 115.2 GFlops, this appears to be a very common misconception...

You are using the Cell's strictly theoretical figures under perfect conditon performance figures versus supposed real world Xenon numbers. How is that fair? The Cell can do around 200GFLOPS using ALL 8 SPU's+PPE+Matrix Multiplication at max. A link to prove that Xenon uses non-arithmetic calculations on the 115 GFLOPS figure would be nice.

-But according to for example memory experts Rambus the PS3 still has the Edge as the PS3 has a dedicated bus for its GPU while the 360’s GPU needs to share the bus with the CPU when accessing the RAM.

Rambus, the manufacturers of the PS3's XDR RAM. How un-biased... and still wrong. Obviously ignoring the 256GB/s of the eDRAm to the GPU, the bandwidth to the RAM is 22.4GB/s... exactly the same as the PS3. In that case, why we won't consider that the RSX has less RAM directly available? As to access the other 256MB of XDR the GPU must go through a 20GB/s read and 15GB/s write bandwidth to the Cell to have access to it (latency). And are we forgetting that the Xenos has the priority for RAM access on the 360?

-the RSX has the advantage of the Cell as its additional aid and higher bandwidths throughout the system

Covered above.

-The PS3 design seems less bottlenecked when compared to the Xbox 360’s design (about memory)

The PS3 is as bottlenecked as the 360. Why? You'll see: let's say that the RSX needs the other 192MB of available RAM that are sticked to the Cell, ok? Now, to write something on that RAM the RSX must go to the Cell first (write), those are 15GB/s, less than the VRAM... and now to read it, go (again) through the Cell... those are 20GB/s... what's the meaning of all this stuff? Higher latency, as the write and read are quite different speeds, and both are slower than the VRAM bandwidth. A bottleneck.

If you love the PS3, it's your opinion and is well respected. What I don't like is the unaccuracy of the examples and the twisting of the numbers. Also, if you wanted to say "PS3 FTW" you can easily add it to your signature without all the superlong posts, wrong facts and the fanboyism.

We all know power wins console wars

Just lookm at the 64!

MikeB said: @ Words Of Wisdom One problem though with your example, I don't think any of them bought 10 or more XBox 360s, they received refurbished or new units as replacements for failed units. I think at least when we speak specifically with regard to reliability having broken 10 XBox 360s is bad, I agree that many XBox 360 try to divert such topics off topic by pointing out that some of these people are still loyal XBox 360 fans. I guess most people will give up much earlier after breaking just a couple of consoles.

A minor nitpick.  Not having to pay would make the 360 spin weaker and stronger at the same time.

However, the example was not the point of the post.  It is interesting that you chose to focus on it though. 

WTF?

The SPEs are mostly responsible for the flop performance, so the PPE is not going to make up for the disabled SPE and the one.

My XBox 360 vs PS3 comparison (mostly technical)

Where's the technical part? Don't get me wrong but this is just how a PR-spokesman would look at the technical part (and even then).
It is hard enough comparing 2 with only a difference in frequency, two architectures is already a lot harder and if they are from different manifacturers you end up with conclusions bases on assupmtions.

You are comparing 2 just different consoles, that's just insane.