Ps3 Hand-on Report


Radek posted on Feb 20 2006 at 02:02 PM said:
tmcleroy posted on Feb 20 2006 at 05:58 AM said:
A friend of mine works for IBM on the cell processor for PS3 and he says that the processor totally lives up to the hype. Example, a PC with 2 7800 GTXs ran this benchmark at 11 fps and the Cell (alone w/o a fancy gpu) ran the same benchmark at 85 fps. Amazing. Still though, i'll believe it when i see it.

The Cell has the raw power as it's a massive vector processor. But in actual aplications it might be hard to use it efficiently. Its memory/caches accesses must be handled by a programmer and having 8 (or more?) independed cores inside aren't making things easier too.

It will be probably hit and miss with Cell. Some things will be totally awesome on the PS3 where some other just average.

Yeah i forgot to mention that he said it was really hard to program for. He predicts that at first the games wont look anywhere near as good as they could potentialy look because w/ 7 cores, it's just damn hard to program on.
 
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I don't know. Will the PS3 blow away the 360 or will it end up being similar? With the PS3 you have a main power PC with a bunch of smaller asymmetrical cores. The 360 has 3 full featured symmetrical cores. In the end I would suspect that they would be pretty close in power. The PS3 probably a bit better but is it enough to notice much difference? We will see.
 
DaveC posted on Feb 21 2006 at 05:58 AM said:
I don't know. Will the PS3 blow away the 360 or will it end up being similar? With the PS3 you have a main power PC with a bunch of smaller asymmetrical cores. The 360

Cell doesn't have a cores in a normal sense. Cell has multiple vector units and very fast scratchpad for every of them. It's not really a cpu as you will not get the same thing putting for an example few Athlons on the same chip's die.

It's rather a "DSP" taken to extremes.


DaveC posted on Feb 21 2006 at 05:58 AM said:
has 3 full featured symmetrical cores. In the end I would suspect that they would be pretty close in power. The PS3 probably a bit better but is it enough to notice much difference? We will see.

In raw computing capability there is no contest. The Cell is vastly superior but how it will perform in real world aplications it's a different matter. Then we have the "GPUs" as they also will strongly affect the results. Imho PS3 has upper hand over xbox360 but personally I don't like both. They are overengineered machines with too much silicon wasted in a features what are hard to use, costly to implement and finally theirs manufacturing costs will not be low. All that mean big prices for titles because the Sony/Microsoft will have to recoup money after subsidizing the hardware.

Hardware should be simple and just good enough. History shows that for a console success raw specs haven't a meaning. Available software is much more important factor and inherit difficulties of these monster to program for aren't a good thing too.
 
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Well you could always stick with the current gen another year and play out some of the cheaper greatest hits priced titles for the time being, then you can aviod the shorttages and wait for the prices to drop before you bother.
 
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