PS3 Cell power smoke and mirrors?

[Baine]

An intresting read i have come across

THE FACTS NO HYPE

At this year's E3 (or thereabouts) Sony proclaimed that their processor could achieve 200GFLOPS! However, according to IBM's white paper, only 155.5 GFLOPS was actually achieved (Table 4). BUT, IBM's tests used all 8 SPEs. The PS3 will only use 7 SPE's, due to manufacturing yield issues.

The efficiency of the Cell is 75.9% (Table 4), with of a theoretical peak of 201GFLOPs (Figure 5)--running 8 SPEs at 25.12GFLOPS apiece (Table 2). Similarly, the theoretical peak for the PS3's processor will be 176GFLOPS, using 7 SPEs at 25.12GFLOPS apiece. Assuming the same 75.9% effieciency, we could easily interpolate the PS3's Cell to be capable of 133.6GFLOPS.

The take home message is that with the PS3 being cabable of 133.6 GFLOPS and the Xbox 360 being capable of 115.2 GFLOPS, the PS3 is not nearly as far ahead of the Xbox 360 as we were lead to believe. we should expect relatively similar power coming from both consoles, processor power, and ease of programming all considered.

Not to mention that one of the SPE's in the PS3 are reserved for the OS and the bottlenecking of the data transfer between the SPE's and the on board memory. I see the 360 hand in hand with a gaming Revolution taking home this next round at least, if not the whole cake over time.

 

[Steedie]

lol i think we all knew this was going to be the case

Sony exaderating their product beyond belief is nothing new. And the claim that it was almost 3x as powerful was laughable. I personally dont think its going to be that much more powerful at all, if any.

And the fact that the xbox360 developers are gonna have a years experience under their belt, means they'll be getting more power out of what they have available anyway.

After their claims with the emotion engine, everyone has learnt to take sony's claims with a pinch of salt

 

[DaveyD]

And how many general public members would be able to tell you what a GFLOP is, why it's important? Probably less than 0.1%.

It's all hype, I couldn't give a monkeys how many % better in GFLOPs the Cell will be than the 360/Wii.

It's as I've always said, they're going to be very closely matched, all of the consoles, and it'll be down to how much time developers spend on making good games that will make the consoles, along with sevices like Live etc, not who has the biggest gigafloppy to wave around the place.

 

[FeFiDoh]

Thing is tho the majority of people will be more impressed by a big number, and how many of those will see this?

Why sony does so well because they release info to the general public and the stuff the tech heads kinda know isnt released as publically.

 

[Baine]

And how many general public members would be able to tell you what a GFLOP is, why it's important? Probably less than 0.1%.

It's all hype, I couldn't give a monkeys how many % better in GFLOPs the Cell will be than the 360/Wii.

It's as I've always said, they're going to be very closely matched, all of the consoles, and it'll be down to how much time developers spend on making good games that will make the consoles, along with sevices like Live etc, not who has the biggest gigafloppy to wave around the place.

My point is sony have been show to be full of BLEEP they stood at E3 in front of everyone and lied

If they are happy to lie to the people that will be making the games for the PS3 then what does that say about how they will treat us lot the gamers?

 

[dirtydog]

...

This is something we didn't know?

 

[DaveyD]

My point is sony have been show to be full of BLEEP they stood at E3 in front of everyone and lied

If they are happy to lie to the people that will be making the games for the PS3 then what does that say about how they will treat us lot the gamers?

That's been happening for years, twisting the truth, and making people believe things.

Everybody does it, it's not just Sony that do it, Microsoft are as guilty, though I don't think Nintendo are really *that* bad, as they don't really claim as much, but they can do the dirty if needs be. Though the recent big one before the PS3 you have the whole "Emotion Engine" regarding Toy Story graphics and all that. Which is quite a good joke really

 

[Steedie]

That's been happening for years, twisting the truth, and making people believe things.

Everybody does it, it's not just Sony that do it, Microsoft are as guilty, though I don't think Nintendo are really *that* bad, as they don't really claim as much, but they can do the dirty if needs be. Though you'll have the big Sony haters bring the "Emotion Engine" up regarding Toy Story graphics.

Its not just the Sony haters that say it, im not a sony hater, definatley not, ps1, ps2, psp and soon to be a ps3 all to my name so i definatley wouldnt class myself as a hater. Just they are guilty more than most when it comes to glorifying their products, and the Emotion Engine and the hype that surrounded it was an absolute joke from what they said it could do to what it actually did. And because it was such a joke, not may people will let them forget that

 

[DaveyD]

Its not just the Sony haters that say it, im not a sony hater, definatley not, ps1, ps2, psp all to my name so i definatley wouldnt class myself as a hater. Just they are guilty more than most when it comes to glorifying their products, and the Emotion Engine and the hype that surrounded it was an absolute joke from what they said it could do to what it actually did. And because it was such a joke, not may people will let them forget that

I should have worded that a bit better, I'll do that now, as I'm not a Sony hater, just I think Emotion Engine is comical

 

[deSade]

I agree with DaveyD - all companies are guilty of it, it's part & parcel of releasing new products in most areas of life! We shoudn't be getting all wound up about things like this at all.

I believe (based on no concrete facts I'll admit) that the PS3 will be slightly more powerful & possibly capable of a bit more than my 360, but as has been said, the XBox will have such a lead programming wise, that we'll probably never see any real practical difference between them.

 

[Boogle]

Actually its not quite as clear cut as that:

The take home message is that with the PS3 being cabable of 133.6 GFLOPS and the Xbox 360 being capable of 115.2 GFLOPS, the PS3 is not nearly as far ahead of the Xbox 360 as we were lead to believe. we should expect relatively similar power coming from both consoles, processor power, and ease of programming all considered.

6 of the 7 'cores' aren't multi-purpose and have a teeny tiny cache (not that the PPE has a large cache). The Xbox 360 will expose far more practical power than the Cell for the first couple of years, simply because all the cores can do everything.

The PS3 shares a lot more with first generation Atari consoles than a modern console. Reason being the first games systems didn't have genuine multi-purpose processors and required dedicated chips to 'pick up the slack' as it were. I don't know anyone who wishes to go back to the days before microprocessors. Personally I hope the PS3 (and Cell) flops, not because its Sony etc. but because I don't want to see a resurrection of abysmal archictures. Sticking with x86 is bad enough, but compared to Cell, multi-core x86 is like the AI computers in Star Trek.

In some respects Cell is a lot like the P4, its marketing gone mad. The P4 had all sorts of crazy high marketing values (double-speed ALUs that didn't have wide enough busses to even run get enough data, high clock speeds, etc.) that result in a CPU that is ultimately a huge waste of time. Cell is definitely all talk. I have a Xeon (P4) PC btw, so I don't think you can call me an AMD fanboy.

I don't like the Cell with a passion.

You know what would be cool? A CPU that has a 10 cores!
Sir, we can't create a CPU with 10 cores.
Well, what if we cut down the cores a little?
But sir, it won't be a genuine CPU!
If we make one core a real CPU, and have the rest as filler it will be though, technically.
I suppose, but the others will interrupt the main one all the time.
Who cares? It'll sound great on paper!

Interestingly both the PS1 and PS2 relied on the CPU for graphics (the GPU was just triangle setup, just like graphics cards before the GeForce 1). The PS1 didn't even do triangle setup, it didn't have a graphics card. All 3D was done in software, with the CPU having instructions similiar to SSE to dramatically speed up geometry calculations.

 

[Psyk]

6 of the 7 'cores' aren't multi-purpose and have a teeny tiny cache (not that the PPE has a large cache). The Xbox 360 will expose far more practical power than the Cell for the first couple of years, simply because all the cores can do everything.

What is it the cores are designed to do? Are they all for graphics calculations?

 

[Buzza]

Due to the cost of development, most games will be cross platform and even if the PS3 is more powerfull, itll just mean a slightly better framerate. Also, the Xbox 360 will likely be the lead platform for games development as it will have more machines out in the market place by the time PS3 is released.

 

[Needles]

Due to the ineffeicent architecture of cell, especially in data transfer between it and the main memory, those extra GFlops of preformance may aswell not be there, it is too customised and as has been stated require programmers to learn a lot of new specialised programming routines, ( which are probably being figured out as all those figures are theoretical ) to get the best out of the system, 360 due to its close relationship with how PC games are programmed, (XNA being a hybrid of DX9\10) developers will be more or less able to dive right in and start getting the best out of the machine really quickly. Also developers will be able to share information on new programming techniques they have found with xna and 360 as this was one of the points allard bigged up at the gdc when xna was showcased well in advance of the 360 being shown at E3, developers have had there hands on this software for a good while now. In relation to the whole smoke and mirrors hype machine of sony, microsoft are nowhere near as bad as sony, every video at the last E3 was actual real-time being created by the machine and that was one of the key points microsoft stood on against sony. 360 does have it's own architectural problems too, a cache for each core instead of 1meg between all 3 really would have released the potenial of each core and increased power a fair bit.

 

[Boogle]

What is it the cores are designed to do? Are they all for graphics calculations?

Geometry calcs, physics calcs, etc. But only if the calculations can be formatted in a way that both works with the SPE, and with greater speed than with the PPE. For example if it takes 100ms to set up the values, 10ms to do the calculations and then 100ms to get the values into memory, it would probably be faster to just let the SPE do it. Plus you have sync issues (typical in any multi-processing environment), that means the SPEs are only good when you have a large batch of calculations that need to be done all at once, and can be formatted in a way that the SPEs can handle.