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Cell processor and Xenos

S

sourshishke

Member
Why can you buy a beefed up PC with SLI or Crossfire and the TOP cards,and not
be able to play nextgen games full rez with all toys on,full framerate?
Is PS3 that more advanced
that it only needs ONE GPU and will still give better results?
 
Routers are faster than pcs at routing gigabits of traffic not because they are faster, but becasue they are specialized and desinged to do only a minimal set of tasks and to do them well.

Your average CPU is meant to be able to deal with a LOT of baggage such as old x86 crap, and it needs to be ready for anything, hence the prediction mechanisms that made p4s so slow when they predicted incorrectly and had chuck a bunch of isntructiosn and start all over again.....


[/overcomplciated reply]
 
the PPC core for xbox360 doesn't have a branch predictor. give it normal PC applications to do any it will run like crap. but, give it just games, and it doesn't need all that. the core is extremely simple, which is why IBM can cram 3 of them onto a chip.

xenos is probably DX10 enabled, but beyond that, the coders are probably coding for it. so it'll run better. plus, iirc, the games are only at 720P right now, which isn't that high of a resolution.

additionally, game consoles tend to have a stripped down operating system with far less overhead than what a PC has, but with much lower capabilities.



as for cell, no one is quite sure how well it will work. it's still IBM though.

IBM does the wii too.

IBM might make more money off this generation than any of the console makers themselves.
 
Originally posted by: ElFenix
the PPC core for xbox360 doesn't have a branch predictor. give it normal PC applications to do any it will run like crap. but, give it just games, and it doesn't need all that. the core is extremely simple, which is why IBM can cram 3 of them onto a chip.

xenos is probably DX10 enabled, but beyond that, the coders are probably coding for it. so it'll run better. plus, iirc, the games are only at 720P right now, which isn't that high of a resolution.

additionally, game consoles tend to have a stripped down operating system with far less overhead than what a PC has, but with much lower capabilities.



as for cell, no one is quite sure how well it will work. it's still IBM though.

IBM does the wii too.

IBM might make more money off this generation than any of the console makers themselves.
Click to expand...



Yes it would be smart to invest in IBM,but doesnt being able to render a 1080P scene
on a say 65''HDTV take some mad CPU horsepower.Or can you play on a 65''HDTV
with a PC at 720p with good stuff on full frames.
 
Games are hard-coded for 360 or PS3. PC Games are not hard-coded because they have to deal with a variety of system makeups and core configurations. If you know exactly the system specifications for what you're coding for, you can make a lot of optimizations.

Moreover, Xenos or Cell is not more powerful than a powerful PC CPU, like Conroe/Pentium-4/X2 at peak efficiency. Pentium-4 at peak efficiency is actually incredibly fast.
 
The performance spectrum
A relatively cheap but modern desktop computer using, for example, a Pentium 4 or Athlon 64 CPU, typically runs at a clock frequency in excess of 2 GHz and provides computational performance in the range of a few GFLOPS .

The Xbox 360 has been announced as having CPU floating point performance of around one hundred GFLOPS, while the PS3 has been announced as having a theoretical 1.8 TFLOPS. By comparison, a high-end general-purpose PC would have a FLOPS rating of around ten GFLOPS, if the performance of its CPU alone was considered. The 1 TFLOPS for the Xbox 360 or 2 TFLOPS for the Playstation 3 ratings that were sometimes mentioned regarding the consoles would even appear to class them as supercomputers
 
Also, games for consoles are developed to have the best possible graphics for a system that's been predefined.
PC games are trying to push the envelope on realism, physics and all that stuff.
 
Originally posted by: sourshishke
The performance spectrum
A relatively cheap but modern desktop computer using, for example, a Pentium 4 or Athlon 64 CPU, typically runs at a clock frequency in excess of 2 GHz and provides computational performance in the range of a few GFLOPS .

The Xbox 360 has been announced as having CPU floating point performance of around one hundred GFLOPS, while the PS3 has been announced as having a theoretical 1.8 TFLOPS. By comparison, a high-end general-purpose PC would have a FLOPS rating of around ten GFLOPS, if the performance of its CPU alone was considered. The 1 TFLOPS for the Xbox 360 or 2 TFLOPS for the Playstation 3 ratings that were sometimes mentioned regarding the consoles would even appear to class them as supercomputers
Click to expand...

Those numbers are unbelievably inflated. They took the fillrates of the GPU chips and added them on as FLOPS, more or less. If you did that for a Conroe w/like dual 7950's or something (or a lesser machine even), you'd get retarded FLOP counts too.

In a sense this isn't completely inaccurate, b/c you CAN force a GPU to do numeric operations (like solving an eigenvalue problem)... and if you do it right, it'll be BLAZING fast. But it's not easy, and while ability is theoretically there, nobody does it.

Edit: The P4 suffered when the branch predictor failed largely b/c it's pipeline is huge compared to other CPUs. Pipeline is like an assembly line. When the predictor fails, the whole thing needs to be emptied & you start over, wasting plenty of clock cycles.

Edit2: A good example of GPU 'flops' comes from a research group at UNC that mapped pixel operations to matrix operations & wrote code to do LU-decompositions on a 6800. I think it was like 30-40% faster than a P4 3ghz machine. (I could be quoting the wrong results; I haven't read this thing in a while.)
 
I'm suprised nobody has crapped on the OP yet. I guess its because OT is watched by mods and Video is just out there on its own.

As far as the issue at hand: My system is not even top of the line, and I can run all the latest games with full detail at a much higher resolution than the so-called "hi-rez" your console is limited to, and it will get better framerates.

There is also the issue that console lovers think lots of pretty particle effects qualify as good graphics. The game designers use such cheats to cover up the limitations of the hardware backing up the video. Before a console even launches it is already holding back the developers, but games for Windows (and to a lesser extent, MacOS) are always pushing the limits up and out.

And there is also the FLOP issue, which we've been dealing with since the PS1 days. Folks need to learn that the designers are full of crap when they advertise their new toys.
But its been discussed already on AT and I dont care much anymore.

Alright, FLAME ON! 🙂
 
Originally posted by: sourshishke
The performance spectrum
A relatively cheap but modern desktop computer using, for example, a Pentium 4 or Athlon 64 CPU, typically runs at a clock frequency in excess of 2 GHz and provides computational performance in the range of a few GFLOPS .

The Xbox 360 has been announced as having CPU floating point performance of around one hundred GFLOPS, while the PS3 has been announced as having a theoretical 1.8 TFLOPS. By comparison, a high-end general-purpose PC would have a FLOPS rating of around ten GFLOPS, if the performance of its CPU alone was considered. The 1 TFLOPS for the Xbox 360 or 2 TFLOPS for the Playstation 3 ratings that were sometimes mentioned regarding the consoles would even appear to class them as supercomputers
Click to expand...

1. MS ans Sony are lying about performance.

2. There is no such thing as 'horsepower' in terms of CPU performance. By which I mean, just because one system does well in one benchmark doesn't mean it's more powerful overall. AFAIK, the original ENIAC will give a modern P4 a run for its money at decoding Enigma traffic -- because the ENIAC hardware was designed for that purpose, whereas the P4 was designed to be a general purpose CPU.

So, the PS3 and 360 do well on 'GFLOPS' artifical benchmarks because they have powerful specialized floating point units. They would do poorly on a synthetic office test, or an integer heavy benchmark, when compared to a PC.

It's like how dolpihins have big lungs. They have big lungs to hold lots of air, but just because they have big lungs, it doesn't mean they'd make a good marathon runner, now does it? 😉
 
Originally posted by: shortylickens
I'm suprised nobody has crapped on the OP yet. I guess its because OT is watched by mods and Video is just out there on its own.

As far as the issue at hand: My system is not even top of the line, and I can run all the latest games with full detail at a much higher resolution than the so-called "hi-rez" your console is limited to, and it will get better framerates.

There is also the issue that console lovers think lots of pretty particle effects qualify as good graphics. The game designers use such cheats to cover up the limitations of the hardware backing up the video. Before a console even launches it is already holding back the developers, but games for Windows (and to a lesser extent, MacOS) are always pushing the limits up and out.

And there is also the FLOP issue, which we've been dealing with since the PS1 days. Folks need to learn that the designers are full of crap when they advertise their new toys.
But its been discussed already on AT and I dont care much anymore.

Alright, FLAME ON! 🙂
Click to expand...

And there is also the issue of PC gamers thinking the only things that contribute to good graphics are number of pixels and poly count. Personally, I think even the older consoles still put out decent graphics - while they don't match oblivion on my 7600gt, they are getting the absolute max out of these consoles, and it shows.

I personally think consoles are well suited for games, and playing games on a PC is still an ugly hack, where hardware that can do otherwise much more powerful things is stuck dealing with all the overhead of an entire PC operating system. Alas, there are many PC games that can not even be recreated on a console, but just thinking of the idea of Oblivion with X360 graphics, with a PC centric interface, running in high res, with the Wii controller (one can dream), would just plain make me wet my pants.
 
Originally posted by: sourshishke

Yes it would be smart to invest in IBM,but doesnt being able to render a 1080P scene
on a say 65''HDTV take some mad CPU horsepower.Or can you play on a 65''HDTV
with a PC at 720p with good stuff on full frames.
Click to expand...

720p is either 1280x720 (about 17% larger than 1024x768 and a lot lower than 1280x1024 that a lot of computers can game at) or it's 1368x720 (still 25% lower than 1280x1024). basically, HD gaming at 720p isn't particularly impressive. gaming on a 20" widescreen LCD at full resolution requires almost double the graphics horsepower.

1080p is another story. that's 1920x1080, which is ridiculously large. but sony is known for the BS marketing that comes before their console actually debuts. sony has said it is considered the standard resolution, but if it's just upsampling, the games might actually be rendered at 540p, 1080i, or any other resolution.

as far as GFLOPS, a modern x1900xt graphics processor, if allowed to process as fast as it can (being shader ops with little memory access), will overheat and destroy itself. i bet xbox360's xenos will be the same way. so, the processing power may be there, but it isn't harnessable.

Originally posted by: sourshishke
What about the 1 GPU thing.Doesnt that prove alone that the CPU for PS3 and 360
are really good.
Click to expand...
not really.
 
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