Core per core - Xbox 360 CPU vs XBone CPU?

[futurefields]

How much faster is a single 2.0ghz XBone CPU core vs a 3.2ghz Xbox 360 core?

I know the XBone has 8 cores vs 3 on 360 but just wondering how much better XBone is at single thread performance?

 

[Ancalagon44]

They are clocked at 1.6GHz, not 2.

Honestly I dont know, but I do remember reading that one Xbox360 CPU with all 3 cores is about half as fast as a single Core i7 core. In some ideal cases, the Xbox 360 CPU can keep pace with an i7.

 

[exdeath]

They are probably about equal but with 5 more cores and better power/thermal.

Xbox 360 CPU while clocked fast is a very simple in order architecture so the high clock is misleading.

 

[mmntech]

Supposedly the Xenon is capable of 115 GFLOPS maximum theoretical performance. Which puts it in line with the hex core i7s. There's no way an eight year old console CPU can butt heads with brand new, more efficient high performance chips. Probably gets about half that speed in the real world. Since the 360 is a closed platform, it's impossible to run whetstone benchmarks on it. So we'll never really know.

In terms of gaming, CPU performance is becoming less important. The GPU can handle all the graphics, physics processing, and video decoding. Jaguar is a more efficient design than the old PowerPC chips. You don't need as much raw horsepower today to do the same amount of work.

 

[Mushkins]

In terms of gaming, CPU performance is becoming less important. The GPU can handle all the graphics, physics processing, and video decoding. Jaguar is a more efficient design than the old PowerPC chips. You don't need as much raw horsepower today to do the same amount of work.

It very much depends on the game as to whether or not the CPU or the GPU is the real "driving force" behind performance. For example, heavily multiplayer games like Battlefield 3 and any MMORPG are extremely dependent on a powerful CPU to keep up with keeping track of gamestates. You also run into games like Skyrim, where the engine simply isnt designed to offload work to the GPU.

The gap is definitely closing and lower end CPUs can handle a lot more than they used to comparatively, but CPU power is still very relevant.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Well, I dunno how much this is CPU related but BF4 can only do 16 players on Xbox360 while XB1 is getting 64 players to put it on par with the PC. From what I have read, BF3 needed a little more CPU grunt online vs single player. Many of the benchmarks out there are done in the single player campaign and when going into MP the performance doesn't match up.

 

[Mushkins]

Well, I dunno how much this is CPU related but BF4 can only do 16 players on Xbox360 while XB1 is getting 64 players to put it on par with the PC. From what I have read, BF3 needed a little more CPU grunt online vs single player. Many of the benchmarks out there are done in the single player campaign and when going into MP the performance doesn't match up.

Correct, the multiplayer part of the game is what brought performance to its knees. There's *a lot* more going on in the background in that kind of multiplayer, and it's all 100% on the CPU to keep up. The GPU doesnt care if the guy on the screen is a real person or not, it's rendering the same stuff either way. The game itself, however, needs to be interpreting input from an outside source instead of simply telling the game what to do. The difference in processor overhead is considerable.

 

[dguy6789]

Real world the Jaguar 1.6Ghz has to be at least 100% faster than the Xenon at 3.2Ghz in single threaded performance. As mentioned above it's hard to say for sure because we don't have actual benchmarks. But we do know that the first generation Atom is massively faster clock per clock than each core in the Xbox 360.

 

[Fox5]

If each Xbox 360 core can match an Atom in per mhz performance, that still looks pretty bad for Jaguar in comparison. On top of that, Atom sees 50-100% scaling with SMP due to its inefficiency, and reports said similar things were true of the xbox 360 cpu cores.

However, the xbox 360 when it launched was at least equivalent to a mid range desktop cpu.

 

[Topweasel]

If each Xbox 360 core can match an Atom in per mhz performance, that still looks pretty bad for Jaguar in comparison. On top of that, Atom sees 50-100% scaling with SMP due to its inefficiency, and reports said similar things were true of the xbox 360 cpu cores.

However, the xbox 360 when it launched was at least equivalent to a mid range desktop cpu.

No it wasn't Sony and Microsoft both tried to sell their CPU's as the greatest thing under the sun. But in reality they made very simple CPU's with very simple proccessing capabilities and then clocked them up very high. A a P4-D or an A64X2 would have ran circles around them. An Atom at 1GHz didn't have the computing power to topple a 1GHz Tbird (also known as a 2001 CPU), but is faster than Xenon or Cell compute unit. Add on Brazos is faster considerably per core even to this day (but maybe not for long) than any Atom core and that Jaguar is supposed to be considerably faster, It's easy to A.) see that it will be much much much faster than the previous gen, B.) That while it might be very far from the front line it will still be a potent chip with the 8 cores and all.

Actually these APU units are probably going to closer to the future and performance of general computing then the last gen CPU's anyways. Markets spiraling quicker and quicker to "just enough computing". OS's have less overhead. People are actually slimming down applications. CPU performance hasn't been needed in a long time and its the things that are needed for CPU performance that are holding up a lot of markets.

 

[Fox5]

No it wasn't Sony and Microsoft both tried to sell their CPU's as the greatest thing under the sun. But in reality they made very simple CPU's with very simple proccessing capabilities and then clocked them up very high. A a P4-D or an A64X2 would have ran circles around them. An Atom at 1GHz didn't have the computing power to topple a 1GHz Tbird (also known as a 2001 CPU), but is faster than Xenon or Cell compute unit. Add on Brazos is faster considerably per core even to this day (but maybe not for long) than any Atom core and that Jaguar is supposed to be considerably faster, It's easy to A.) see that it will be much much much faster than the previous gen, B.) That while it might be very far from the front line it will still be a potent chip with the 8 cores and all.

Actually these APU units are probably going to closer to the future and performance of general computing then the last gen CPU's anyways. Markets spiraling quicker and quicker to "just enough computing". OS's have less overhead. People are actually slimming down applications. CPU performance hasn't been needed in a long time and its the things that are needed for CPU performance that are holding up a lot of markets.

Without benchmarks, it's hard to tell.

However, the Xenon and Cell were large and power hungry cpus. The Xenon was about as large as an Athlon X2, and the Cell was about as large as a Core 2 Quad. Per core performance wasn't great, but it's hard to see it being worse than a low power optimized and tiny Atom core.

Early reports by developers stated that a Xenon core was about on par with a 2.4ghz Pentium 4. Maybe that was already including SMP, so two threads on a core.

Still, Jaguar is a low power, low die size core. It's per mhz performance is certainly higher, but is it >2x as high? I doubt it has the same floating point performance of a xenon core either, although it does have more cores plus gpu compute to help.