further indication that Xbox 360 has 512 MB

I'm having trouble seeing your point here. Paraphrasing, the manual says to hold the "reset" button down for a second until the console turns off. Your point, if I've guessed correctly, seems to be that the "reset" button is the ON/OFF button. While I can imagine the poor old "reset" button having quite an existential crisis over the nature of its being and its identity as a button, seeing as it's labeled on the button itself "reset" and is identified as a "reset" button, it's safe to conclude that it is, in fact, a "reset" button. With that information in mind I've made the rather elementary observation that there is no ON/OFF button on the console. Obviously this is a silly topic to go on for so long about

 

In the bottom Megadrive is a romantic,like me I wish Amiga had been the definitive hardware beast. But since the 8 bits age ( the Amstrad CPC 464 was the computer that gave me more gaming happiness ) i am willing for the time in which a perfect piece of hardware becomes the final solution forever. It´s like women...so complicated!

 

That leads me to another question. If the GPU does have vertex shaders (and it's "probably likely" given that it's based on a PC part), doesn't this raise the question of whether the PS3 really needs a CPU like Cell? I've seen developers cursing over the prospect of trying to write write optimised code for it - from scripting to physics to just about anything else. Take away most of the the graphics work, and is it really such a great choice for a console CPU?

 

It was for me, for a very long period

 

Half right. It also has the universally-recognised on/off symbol pasted over it.

Yes we're going OT. Apologies.

 

Unless cell somehow turns out to be a complete failure, all that power from cell can be used for alot of things.
Think of those SPEs as 8 really fast SIMD units capable of doing the equivalent of lots of SSE or 3Dnow! instructions.
They *could* also easily be used for vertex shading, but we don't know for certain what the GPU will look like.

 

oh that's great... if you had 8 SPUs...

 

Just to clarify, I wasn't saying you can't use lots of processing power or SIMD units (or anything else) if you aren't doing graphics work. Given the practicalities of making games, and the type of none graphics tasks that you'd want to run on a console CPU, I was asking whether Cell's design was less than ideal if you weren't applying it to large amounts of graphics work.

 

SPEs. 8 of them yes.

 

Ideal? Nothings ideal. XB2's rumored 3 powerPC cores are less than ideal. Dual core on the PC is less than ideal and Cell is less than ideal.
In an ideal world we could scale up Ghzes of our single cores indefinitely.

Cells approach may still be the best alternative.

 

Do you see colours? Or is everything grey and black to you?

 

The problem it's not about how you call them,
it's about how many of those units we'll get

 

We won't get 8, but it'll be the next best thing..

There'll still be more than enough, put it that way.

 

You're a hearts breaker

 

It's better to moderate expectations now

Oh and of course..this is all my speculation....ahem..

I just REALLY wouldn't expect 8.

 

Seven?

 

6 useable.

 

I'm not quoting any rumour or anything else..but 6 it's a so ugly number
My hopes are on a 8 SPEs CPU...I feel we'll get a full working CELL CPU

 

Marco, you shall take these 4 spe's and you shall like them! : )

 

around here, next gen hardware, especially concern cell, were too high expectations to start with.

$299 disposable game box, not super space simulator people forgets.

512mb is good tho. 1 more month.