Anandtech dashes cpus from ps3 and xbox360

[mistwalk]

=sorry=

 

[seismologist]

you pull an article if it gives out information which is under NDA not information of numbers and facts which everyone knows. Pulling the article only demonstrates they got thier information from "ONE developer" who basically...well how should i put it...glorified himself to anand by lying

huh? Why would some developer lye to Anand? The article was pulled because it was too revealing (possible having info that's under NDA) or somebody wasn't happy about it being published.

 

[DukenukemX]

If bandwidth were horsepower, we know bigger engine doesn't alway mean a faster car. A smaller engine with less horsepower can outperform a big, heavy motor with a huge engine. The important consideration is TOTAL SYSTEM DESIGN, not individual component performance.

Don't know about you but bigger engines always means more horsepower. Smaller engines get more power from turbos or superchargers that compress the air so the fuel would burn. You get a V10 engine from a Viper and add a turbo then no small engine will ever catch it.

Cars work on the principle that the more fuel and air you get in and out of the engine the more power you'll get out of it. The faster you do this will also produce more power.

A graphics card can't process lots of data if it isn't being fead enough of it. The only other alternative is to get less useful data to the GPU.

There's no way that the article is valid. If it was so valid why'd he pull it? Everyone here can see through that article, so we should just write it off.

It's not meant to be valid. It's to give insight to the performance of the new console systems. It's not like we can benchmark those systems with 3DMark. Yet...

After all if Sony and MS say that their machines are so powerful that they are 10X powerful then any PC today plus can make toast, you would believe every word without questioning it? How would you know if thier claims are true?

I've yet to see anyone give a solid argument against the AnandTech article.

 

[mckmas8808]

huh? Why would some developer lye to Anand? The article was pulled because it was too revealing (possible having info that's under NDA) or somebody wasn't happy about it being published.

Come on seismologist you actually believe that crap. Yes devs can lie. If you want to go by what devs say then do a search for Tim Sweeney and see what his team has said about the PS3 CELL and X360 system. Its websites everywhere now claiming that the X360 will only be twice the speed as Xbox. And that is horribly wrong. Can someone here explain this to him?

 

[DukenukemX]

Woops the forums are acting funny today.

 

[seismologist]

I've yet to see anyone give a solid argument against the AnandTech article.

Same here. People just seem to want to believe the marketing slides and pretend this article never existed.

Come on seismologist you actually believe that crap. Yes devs can lie. If you want to go by what devs say then do a search for Tim Sweeney and see what his team has said about the PS3 CELL and X360 system. Its websites everywhere now claiming that the X360 will only be twice the speed as Xbox. And that is horribly wrong. Can someone here explain this to him?

Well you could at least point out which part you think is a lie. Sometimes what devs talk about in front of the press and their business partners is vastly different from what's being said casually off the record.

 

[mckmas8808]

I've yet to see anyone give a solid argument against the AnandTech article.

Come on people. Duke did you even read this.

Anand is out to lunch on a lot of this. His previous article was pretty sketchy, but this one is pretty much overboard with inaccuracies and random leaps to conclusions.

For one, he bases a lot of his discussions on the fact that the PPE is "identical" to a Xenon core, which is far from the truth. In fact, internally the Xenon team and the Cell team were not allowed to communicate with eachother for legal reasons. The cores were developed by different teams, they just happened to have made the same design decisions for a couple fundamental aspects (like SMT and in-order execution).

He gets so much fundamental basic things wrong that I'm shocked it was published, usually Anand is very knowledgable.
Floating point multiplies are also not "1/3" as fast as on Xenon, I've no idea where he got that from. It sounds like some developer told him that and he took it as verbatim truth.

What I think is going on here is Anand talked to some (curiously anonymous) developers who took their code designed for more PC-like processors (like the G5/PowerPC 970) and ran it on Xenon/Cell and was amazed that it didn't perform that well.

Xenon and Cell are in-order processors. The order of the instructions is very important, because the processor doesn't dynamically re-order them on Xenon/Cell, unlike the PC processors. A straight port will give you sub-par performance, easily.

Once they learn more about the chip, and how to program for it, the performance will be much, much higher.

This article is from a PC-centric website likely talking to PC-centric developers who don't have much experience with in-order cores. It's pretty worthless."

This is from a guy that works at IBM. So you will believe Anand over the IBM guy?

 

[Dave Glue]

you pull an article if it gives out information which is under NDA not information of numbers and facts which everyone knows. Pulling the article only demonstrates they got thier information from "ONE developer" who basically...well how should i put it...glorified himself to anand by lying

Yup. He wanted the "glory" of being an anonymous source who complained about real-world vs. theoretical performance.

Posting a senseless comment twice doesn't increase it's validity, just for future reference btw.

According to Anand's forums, the article was pulled because Anand fears that MS can trace one of the comments back to a particular developer.

 

[Dave Glue]

you pull an article if it gives out information which is under NDA not information of numbers and facts which everyone knows. Pulling the article only demonstrates they got thier information from "ONE developer" who basically...well how should i put it...glorified himself to anand by lying

Yup. He wanted the "glory" of being an anonymous source who complained about real-world vs. theoretical performance.

Posting a senseless comment twice doesn't increase it's validity, just for future reference btw.

According to Anand's forums, the article was pulled because Anand fears that MS can trace one of the comments back to a particular developer.

 

[Dave Glue]

you pull an article if it gives out information which is under NDA not information of numbers and facts which everyone knows. Pulling the article only demonstrates they got thier information from "ONE developer" who basically...well how should i put it...glorified himself to anand by lying

Yup. He wanted the "glory" of being an anonymous source who complained about real-world vs. theoretical performance.

Posting a senseless comment twice doesn't increase it's validity, just for future reference btw.

According to Anand's forums, the article was pulled because Anand fears that MS can trace one of the comments back to a particular developer.

 

[Tap In]

whatever the reason behind the posting and then retracting of the article, I really don't give a flying whoop what any developer thinks until they have actually worked with final hardware to the point of completing a game.

Otherwise to me, it smacks of someone just frustrated with an initial level of unfamiliarity with a new process and/or configuration.


Programmers are smart, they'll figure it out.

 

[Dave Glue]

you pull an article if it gives out information which is under NDA not information of numbers and facts which everyone knows. Pulling the article only demonstrates they got thier information from "ONE developer" who basically...well how should i put it...glorified himself to anand by lying

Yup. He wanted the "glory" of being an anonymous source who complained about real-world vs. theoretical performance.

Posting a senseless comment twice doesn't increase it's validity, just for future reference btw.

According to Anand's forums, the article was pulled because Anand fears that MS can trace one of the comments back to a particular developer.

 

[Tap In]

double post

 

[Dave Glue]

you pull an article if it gives out information which is under NDA not information of numbers and facts which everyone knows. Pulling the article only demonstrates they got thier information from "ONE developer" who basically...well how should i put it...glorified himself to anand by lying

Yup. He wanted the "glory" of being an anonymous source who complained about real-world vs. theoretical performance.

Posting a senseless comment twice doesn't increase it's validity, just for future reference btw.

According to Anand's forums, the article was pulled because Anand fears that MS can trace one of the comments back to a particular developer.

 

[Megadrive1988]

my comment on the article is, I hope it's dead wrong.

I would expect Anandtech, in the future, will be looking at Intel's future multi-core processors especially the ones based on Intel's Platform 2015 roadmap, and shower them with praise

 

[Bobbler]

I've yet to see anyone give a solid argument against the AnandTech article.

Same here. People just seem to want to believe the marketing slides and pretend this article never existed.

I think a better question is... What proof did Anand's article have? It was chalk full of speculation. Usually when someone makes a claim against something they get to deal with the burden of proof.

There was none, thus no reason to believe any of it over any of the marketing and the numbers we do know are facts (regardless of how valid they are in showing the true performance). A lot of the conclusions they came to just don't apply because of the fact that you are dealing with a closed systems where limits are severely pushed. Coders aren't going to be programming for the Xcpu and Cell like they would a P4/A64 -- it is incredibly stupid to believe that. They adapt -- that is why games at the start of a console generation generally look inferior to those near the end of the generation (developers learn the tricks and how to do things that the engineers never even though of).

There is a reason both MS and Sony decided to go with a weak general purpose/strong FP core -- they aren't crazy.

 

[Farid]

The X360 GPU will support DirectX 10 when longhorn is release.

Xenos will never, ever support WGF1.0 or 2.0, not because it can't, but because it's not a PC part.

The X360 is a closed environment platform, the final XeDK will contain all the functions the X360 can do. X360 has its own API, based on DirectX.

 

[GuyMe]

Chris Hecker (who works at EA now) aired similar complaints about the NextGen console's CPUs at the GDC in March. I haven't read the entire thread, so I apologise if this has already been discussed in this or any other thread.

http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/03/18/news_6120449.html (starts at the last quarter of the page)

...

Here is the terrifying realization about the next generation of consoles. I'm about to break about a zillion NDAs, but I didn't sign any NDAs so that's totally cool!

I'm actually a pretty good programmer and mathematician but my real talent is getting people to tell me stuff that they're not supposed to tell me. There we go. Gameplay code will get slower and harder to write on the next generation of consoles. Why is this? Here's our technical slide. Modern CPUs, like the Intel Pentium 4, blah, blah, blah, Pentium [indiscernible] or laptop, whatever is in your desktop, and all the modern power PCs, use what's called 'out of order' execution. Basically, out of order execution is there to make really crappy code run fast.

So, they basically--when out of order execution came out on the P6, the Pentium 6 [indiscernible] the Pentium 5, the original Pentium and the one after that. The Pentium Pro I think they called it, it basically annoyed a whole bunch of low level ASCII coders, because now all of a sudden, like, the crappiest-ass C code, that like, Joe junior programmer could write, is running as fast as their Assembly, and there's nothing they can do about it. Because the CPU behind their back, is like, reordering that guy's crappy ass C code, to run really well and utilize all the parts of the processor. While this annoyed a whole bunch of people in Scandinavia, it actually…

[laughter]

And this is a great change in the bad old days of 'in order execution,' where you had to be an Assembly language wizard to actually get your CPU to do anything. You were always stalling in the cache, you needed to like--it was crazy. It was a lot of fun to write that code. It wasn't exactly the most productive way of doing experimental programming.

The Xenon and the cell are both in order chips. What does this mean? The reason they did this, is it's cheaper for them to do this. They can drop a lot of core--you know--one out of order core is about the size of three to four in order cores. So, they can make a lot of in order cores and drop them on a chip, and keep the power down, and sell it for cheap--what does this do to our code?

Well, it makes--it's totally fine for grinding like, symmetric algorithms out of floating point numbers, but for lots of 'if' statements in directions, it totally sucks. How do we quantify 'totally sucks?' "Rumors" which happen to be from people who are actually working on these chips, is that straight line gameplay code runs at 1/3 to 1/10 the speed at the same clock rate on an in order core as an out of order core.

This means that your new fancy 2 plus gigahertz CPU, and its Xenon, is going to run code as slow or slower than the 733 megahertz CPU in the Xbox 1. The PS3 will be even worse.

This sucks!

 

[Shifty Geezer]

you pull an article if it gives out information which is under NDA not information of numbers and facts which everyone knows. Pulling the article only demonstrates they got thier information from "ONE developer" who basically...well how should i put it...glorified himself to anand by lying

Yup. He wanted the "glory" of being an anonymous source who complained about real-world vs. theoretical performance.

Posting a senseless comment twice doesn't increase it's validity, just for future reference btw.

According to Anand's forums, the article was pulled because Anand fears that MS can trace one of the comments back to a particular developer.

"What is it?"
"It's White Hole"

 

[DukenukemX]

Come on people. Duke did you even read this.

This is from a guy that works at IBM. So you will believe Anand over the IBM guy?

Why in the world would I believe IBM? It would be in IBM's interest to destroy any of AnandTech's claims. AnandTech has nothing to gain out of this. Well besides hits.

What company would tell you that thier product isn't 10X faster then any PC today? You think Microsoft is going to tell you that Linux is great and you should use it?

Nothing that I've read has disproved AnandTech. Including that piece of information.

"Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth."