phoenix_chipset
Regular
Depends on the workload. SIMD workloads hugely favor the XCPU since it's pushing 4x 32 bit SIMD (SSE) max versus the Gekko's 2x 32 bit. I also can't remember if the XCPU technically has an FPU + Vector Processor for it's SSE implementation.
Non SIMD workloads could favor the Gekko despite the clock speed deficit with it's 4 stage pipeline. SIMD/FPU workloads were only 7 stages IIRC. Pentium III was 10 stages for non-SIMD. The Wii's clock boosts certainly helped narrow the gap, but it's really hard to just say one is better than the other. Both the Wii and Xbox have their share of some very busy game worlds with alot going on. For the latter I think Halo 2, for the Wii I think Xenoblade. At least with the Xbox CPU you can easily sorta simulate what it could theoretically handle by playing PC games on a similarly clocked Pentium III. The Gamecube and Wii's PPC750s are not all that different from the Apple G3 versions, but of course there are much fewer games on Mac to make [Fuji] apple to [Granny Smith] apple comparisons.
I don't think the GC or Wii could've handled Half-Life 2 all that well (clearly built with SSE in mind). We saw how Far Cry (FC: Vengeance) played out on the Wii at launch, which definitely was a rushed job. Aside from graphics, physics were much more paired back compared to the Xbox versions.
According to a post here by Exophase : https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/...cube-relative-to-its-peers-spawn.59940/page-5
Referring to the Pentium - "There are only 8 128-bit registers and while they support 4x32-bit FP operations it only completes 2x32-bit per cycle. Its integer SIMD is limited to the original MMX instruction set over a separate set of 8 64-bit registers. Both MMX and SSE were pretty deficient compared to AltiVec."
"On Gekko the ps_madd family of instructions execute in one cycle and perform two FP32 FMA operations so the overall throughput is four FLOPs per cycle.
On Pentium III addps and mulps perform four FP32 operations in two cycles. They can execute in parallel on ports p0 and p1, so the overall throughput is also four FLOPs per cycle."
So they are even in terms of processor throughput, per clock.
Half life isn't a good example because it runs terrible on the Xbox. Not that I think they optimized it as much as they could either.
Wii has games with pretty nice physics such as boom blox and Super Mario galaxy, and i'm not saying Xbox couldn't handle those but I also saw nothing like that on Xbox.
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