good to know.. any idea how the powerpc in the 360 would perform?

it's a tricore powerpc with some special instructions lol, not much to say about that.

The PS3 Cell is most excellent for multi-tasking, running different tasks on its 8 processors. The Cell is not good for running inefficient badly designed code and single or few threaded software (a lot of legacy Windows stuff).

Windows itself is horrible for multi-tasking from an 80's and early 90's Amiga user perspective, even a 7 Mhz Amiga would immediately respond to any mouse click with user feedback, I was able to multi-task between dozens of applications on my 25 Mhz Amiga 4000, copy an pasting and drag and drop, etc without slowdown. From a multi-tasking perspective Windows IMO is just plain horrible, even with today's GHz processors, fast harddrives, GBs of fast RAM to take advantage of and still I very often have to wait for the OS to even respond to user input or while switching between applications. From an 80s Amigan perspective that was pretty unthinkable to be the case beyond the year 2000.

Badly. As would all traditional CPUs - they suck at FP performance compared to GPUs. The only other CPU that would match Cell in this (highly specialised) application would be Larrabee. Intel is pushing for its inclusion into next-gen consoles for that reason.

all this to play the same game as on the 360... NICE!! (fed up with these C33L threads///

Less than 40% in theory regarding max potential, in reality the Xenon is less efficient as it has to share L2 CPU cache between all three cores, each Cell SPE has super fast dedicated RAM to its disposal, making the design near 100% efficient (other common CPU architectures become increasingly more inefficient by adding more cores). Of course within the 360 design regarding the main RAM the Xenon also has to share bandwidth wth the GPU and using its main RAM it suffers far more from latency.

The 360 CPU is far more like a normal desktop PC CPU than the Cell is, apart from also being an in order processor like the Cell and its cores being nearly identical to the Cell's PPE the general design and layout is very different compared to the Cell. It would yield no performance advantage using it compared to a fast PC processor (only disadvantages).

Read this it may help u understand the ""TECh CELL"" more



http://www.gamezine.co.uk/news/game-types/action/gow-iii-devs-spus-are-faster-than-you-think-$1286294.htm

Obsolete unless it is in the PS4 and Sony pulls a Wii upgrade.

thats awesome!

im glad i own a ps3 hopefully will see devs take advantage of the ps3 more often though

I'm sorry, but this is just wrong.

"Less than 40% in theory regarding max potential, in reality the Xenon is less efficient as it has to share L2 CPU cache between all three cores"

The task is not memory bound. It is FP bound. The Cell's much higher FP performance accounts for the vast majority of the advantage. I don't know where you got that 40% from - are you just counting number of cores? Because the SPUs are wholly different and can't be counted like that.

"each Cell SPE has super fast dedicated RAM to its disposal, making the design near 100% efficient (other common CPU architectures become increasingly more inefficient by adding more cores)"

The current generation of PC CPUs isn't bottlenecked by I/O and scale close to 100% when you add cores. Cell isn't more efficient any more - it lost that advantage when Intel added an IMC with Nehalem (AMD had one since Athlon 64).

"Of course within the 360 design regarding the main RAM the Xenon also has to share bandwidth wth the GPU and using its main RAM it suffers far more from latency."

XDR memory may have a higher max bandwidth but MUCH higher latency than the GDDR3 used in the 360. I imagine for this kind of non-memory-bound task that the two factors balance out. Sharing with the GPU is no problem in this case because it is only the CPU that is being stressed according to the article.

"The 360 CPU is far more like a normal desktop PC CPU than the Cell is"

Yes... mostly in ease of programming and flexibility.

"apart from also being an out of order processor like the Cell"

It's in-order. For a single-purpose program that probably gives it an advantage over a desktop CPU as if the instructions are properly reordered and optimised in the compiler for that CPU (as they should be) then being in-order saves on pipeline length which can increase execution speed (e.g. by reducing the penalty for incorrect branch prediction).