cell vs core 2 duo?

[daemon420]

Which is the faster processor, clock for clock?

 

[Ulfhednar]

Since when did clockspeeds matter?

 

[DrMrLordX]

It depends on the computational task at hand. Cell's design is so different that it is difficult, if not impossible, to make an accurate comparison of its computational power versus Core 2 Duo or any other modern x86 processor. You can try to compare raw integer and floating point capabilities, but you must keep in mind that fully utilizing all of Cell's SPUs isn't very easy.

 

[RichUK]

I think a ham sandwich is faster

 

[MBrown]

I don't even think there is a cell processor for the people to test this on.

 

[Dribble]

Core 2 duo would blow a cell away for ps3 uses - i.e playing games.

I remember reading an Xbox 360 processor core is the equivelent of a P4 w hyperthreading at 1.5Ghz. Xbox has 3 of them, cell only has 1, and a load of SPU's which are essentially very limited processors.

 

[CupCak3]

Originally posted by: Dribble
Core 2 duo would blow a cell away for ps3 uses - i.e playing games.

I remember reading an Xbox 360 processor core is the equivelent of a P4 w hyperthreading at 1.5Ghz. Xbox has 3 of them, cell only has 1, and a load of SPU's which are essentially very limited processors.

can you back this up?

 

[dexvx]

Originally posted by: CupCak3

Originally posted by: Dribble
Core 2 duo would blow a cell away for ps3 uses - i.e playing games.

I remember reading an Xbox 360 processor core is the equivelent of a P4 w hyperthreading at 1.5Ghz. Xbox has 3 of them, cell only has 1, and a load of SPU's which are essentially very limited processors.

can you back this up?

He probably misquoted some Dev about the Xbox360 Xenon. What they probably mean is that they don't know how to code for it yet, and so each PPE is about equal to a 1.5Ghz P4. A Xenon PPE is much weaker than the PPC its derived from, due to lack of OOO, but to my knowledge, a well optimized PPC can be a match for an Athlon64 clock to clock. This is no apples-apples comparison, but I'm roughly estimate a 3.2Ghz PPE to be in the neighborhood of a E6300 single core.

Despite Sony's claims that Cell can due 200 GFLOPS, in reality its much much much less due to the fact you can't feed all PPE's and SPE's at full rate 100% of the time. Its not just a hardware restriction, but also a software one as well, as people don't even KNOW how to feed it at maximum. Right now, the Cell is about as useful as just the lone PPE.

 

[sbuckler]

A quick google of the xbox 360 cpu turns up:
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/xbox360-2.ars/1

"At any rate, Playstation 3 fanboys shouldn't get all flush over the idea that the Xenon will struggle on non-graphics code. However bad off Xenon will be in that department, the PS3's Cell will probably be worse. The Cell has only one PPE to the Xenon's three, which means that developers will have to cram all their game control, AI, and physics code into at most two threads that are sharing a very narrow execution core with no instruction window. (Don't bother suggesting that the PS3 can use its SPEs for branch-intensive code, because the SPEs lack branch prediction entirely.) Furthermore, the PS3's L2 is only 512K, which is half the size of the Xenon's L2. So the PS3 doesn't get much help with branches in the cache department. In short, the PS3 may fare a bit worse than the Xenon on non-graphics code, but on the upside it will probably fare a bit better on graphics code because of the seven SPEs"

Fundimentally PPE's are cut down power pc cores which are no match for say A64's which in turn are slower then core 2 cores. The SPE's are like even more restricted PPE's.

Yes if a cell's main task is to decode 12 high def video streams at once it would rock, and for assisting graphics card to draw fancy graphics it will do ok, but when it comes key things like game control, AI and physics it's weak in comparison to a modern PC processor.

Taken from anandtech article which was pulled because sony/ms didn't like what it said:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050629-5054.html

"The most ironic bit of it all is that according to developers, if either manufacturer had decided to use an Athlon 64 or a Pentium D in their next-gen console, they would be significantly ahead of the competition in terms of CPU performance."

"At another point in the article, Anand claims that the Xbox 360's CPU will deliver only about twice the performance of the original Xbox's 733MHz Intel CPU. Can things really be this bad?"

 

[DrMrLordX]

Interesting. You would think that Cell's SPEs/SPUs/whateveryoucallem would be useful for physics calculations. Am I incorrect in assuming this?

 

[dmens]

absolutely no comparison can be drawn. cell is just a float monster, with no concern for anything else. nice and general machines cannot be compared.

contemporary cores cannot have nearly as many highly pipelined float units as cell because the die/power/design effort budget is prioritized towards balanced computing performance. that requires a design that is geared towards dynamically extracting parallelism out of code, and increasing its ability to absorb as much code as possible without stalling. rigging float units onto a core2 or a k8 would not yield decent returns anyways, for various reasons.

 

[CupCak3]

Originally posted by: dmens
absolutely no comparison can be drawn. cell is just a float monster, with no concern for anything else. nice and general machines cannot be compared.

contemporary cores cannot have nearly as many highly pipelined float units as cell because the die/power/design effort budget is prioritized towards balanced computing performance. that requires a design that is geared towards dynamically extracting parallelism out of code, and increasing its ability to absorb as much code as possible without stalling. rigging float units onto a core2 or a k8 would not yield decent returns anyways, for various reasons.

exactly

 

[dguy6789]

Originally posted by: RichUK
I think a ham sandwich is faster

QFT.

 

[kpc88]

A year ago I had a chance to talk to an IBM engineer about the Cell processor. He said it was designed for the best performance per Watt of power used. The Cell was designed for graphics consoles and scientific applications and wouldn't directly compete against Intel or AMD.

So since the intended use and the design is so much different, it is difficult to compare the Cell to Intel or AMD. From this link, I was able to compare the AMD X2 processors versus the Intel Core 2 Duo processors, using the AMD X2 4400 processor as a 1.0 value in performance, here arw the relative comparisons between AMD X2 and Core 2 Duo:

AMD Athlon 64 X2
5000+ 1.14
4800+ 1.06
4600+ 1.05
4400+ 1.00
4200+ 0.99
3800+ 0.92

Intel Core 2 Duo
E6800 1.49
E6700 1.38
E6600 1.27
E6400 1.15

The ONLY source I could find that had benchmarked a Cell processor to a CPU from either AMD or Intel was this scientific paper. They compared the Cell to an AMD Opteron 248, which has two processors each operating at 2.2 GHz with a 1 Mb L2 cache. I think the Opteron 248 most resembles an Athlon 64 X2 4400+ with two 2.2 GHz cores each with a 1 Mb L2 cache. From the paper, the results on some scientific benchmarks are:

The Cell is X (look in table) times faster than an Opteron 248 (~ X2 4400+)

Benchmark GEMM SPMV Stencil 1D FFT 2D FFT
Single Precision 26.2x 7.5x 61.5x 7.1x 15.6x
Double Precision 3.7x 7.5x 12.7x 3.0x 5.6x

Combining the two tables, the Cell is X (look in table) times faster than an Intel Core 2 Duo E6800

Benchmark GEMM SPMV Stencil 1D FFT 2D FFT
Single Precision 17.6x 5.0x 41.3x 4.7x 10.5x
Double Precision 2.5x 5.0x 8.5x 2.0x 3.7x

The Cell and the traditional PC processors are difficult to compare because they are designed for different applications. To fully utilize the Cell, the code has to be written so it can fully utilize the Cells 8 SPEs.

Additional food for thought can be found at this link. If we could just find a cheap way to use all the processing power in the graphics board!

 

[MrPickins]

Originally posted by: dguy6789

Originally posted by: RichUK
I think a ham sandwich is faster

QFT.

:roll:

Salami is obviously faster than ham.

 

[Cooler]

Cell is an in order CPU meaning it must execute instructions in the order they given. This is unlike AMD and Intel CPUs that check to see what ALU are being used and if the order of the instruction mater. Basily this allows them to not to wait for execution if resources are free thus making them much more efficient.

 

[xtreme26]

Originally posted by: sbuckler
A quick google of the xbox 360 cpu turns up:
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/xbox360-2.ars/1

"At any rate, Playstation 3 fanboys shouldn't get all flush over the idea that the Xenon will struggle on non-graphics code. However bad off Xenon will be in that department, the PS3's Cell will probably be worse. The Cell has only one PPE to the Xenon's three, which means that developers will have to cram all their game control, AI, and physics code into at most two threads that are sharing a very narrow execution core with no instruction window. (Don't bother suggesting that the PS3 can use its SPEs for branch-intensive code, because the SPEs lack branch prediction entirely.) Furthermore, the PS3's L2 is only 512K, which is half the size of the Xenon's L2. So the PS3 doesn't get much help with branches in the cache department. In short, the PS3 may fare a bit worse than the Xenon on non-graphics code, but on the upside it will probably fare a bit better on graphics code because of the seven SPEs"

Fundimentally PPE's are cut down power pc cores which are no match for say A64's which in turn are slower then core 2 cores. The SPE's are like even more restricted PPE's.

Yes if a cell's main task is to decode 12 high def video streams at once it would rock, and for assisting graphics card to draw fancy graphics it will do ok, but when it comes key things like game control, AI and physics it's weak in comparison to a modern PC processor.

Taken from anandtech article which was pulled because sony/ms didn't like what it said:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050629-5054.html

"The most ironic bit of it all is that according to developers, if either manufacturer had decided to use an Athlon 64 or a Pentium D in their next-gen console, they would be significantly ahead of the competition in terms of CPU performance."

"At another point in the article, Anand claims that the Xbox 360's CPU will deliver only about twice the performance of the original Xbox's 733MHz Intel CPU. Can things really be this bad?"

hmm, read this well written post on gamespot link

 

[theteamaqua]

ummm, there r no programs that can run on both of these 2 cpu, so u cant compare them directly

but for u to justify what u spend on upgrading ur pc (since u prolly want to hear that Core 2 Duo is faster n bash PS3 fans) , afaik pc games r much better no hidden fees like oblivion download (u can download without paying ... )

i already have an xbox 360 n rarely plays it, ill when i get my jhands on ps3 its the same

 

[theteamaqua]

also games r 50USD not 60USD or even 70USD for PS3 (speculation)

umm u have mods, u can hack online (like cs, starcraft ...) also u do more with ur comp not just playing games

 

[sbuckler]

Originally posted by: xtreme26
hmm, read this well written post on gamespot link

(only read first page) It says that you can create threads to go to a specific spe - what does basic programming for a cell say about whether it's faster or slower then a core 2 duo? It's countering the "cell is hard to program" argument which is not what the op asked.