It would most probably take almost exactly as long on both processors. Though I would expect a Cell based system to use a file system you would not need to defrag....
How come Xenos dose not get as much publicity as Cell?
- Thread starter Sound_Card
- Start date
It would most probably take almost exactly as long on both processors. Though I would expect a Cell based system to use a file system you would not need to defrag....
I think there a lot of interesting reads on this forum about cpu architectures.
From what I read if cell has appeal being all news it's far to make everybody happy.
After that it's pointless to compare cpu on a console forum.
a lot of thread have been derailed by fan-boyism, hoppefully the one about the future of console cpu is still living and impressively inightfull.
Some others are interesting too.
From what I read if cell has appeal being all news it's far to make everybody happy.
After that it's pointless to compare cpu on a console forum.
a lot of thread have been derailed by fan-boyism, hoppefully the one about the future of console cpu is still living and impressively inightfull.
Some others are interesting too.
Now, to try and keep things on topic (or course a thread like this would become TFLOP-throwing-around kind of discussion). The very simple answer to the original question ("Why does Cell get so much more publicity than Xenos") is:
Because Sony make sure that it gets all that publicity. They've done it for a while, PR'ing the hell out of their chips (Emotion Engine anyone?) to make sure that there is an image in people's minds of "power" and "hardware superiority" in their platforms. I mean, even coming out with proper names for their processors (when pretty much every other processor before that had a C-3PO kind of name) should tell you something about the different approach, where some kind of personal connection is made with the processor itself (which is a bit sad when you think about it... i mean they're pieces of silicon...)
By contrast, Xenos or most other processors out there get "normal" coverage. They're just processors which run applications and games. No crap about PS2 being able to guide missiles (where do you think that came from, other than Sony??), no crap about how a chip is "more intelligent than us" (we all know where that came from)... It makes "the casuals" think how SOOO powerful their hardware is, and that helps. It's the whole lateral marketing thing they do oh so well.
That's what Sony does best. They create brands around all the things they do, because when the brand is successful, it drives the products a LONG way. First with the Walkman, last with Playstation... That's what Sony do best: A/V equipment and marketing.
Ok now you can go back to your Nth "FLOPs don't matter" discussion.
Because Sony make sure that it gets all that publicity. They've done it for a while, PR'ing the hell out of their chips (Emotion Engine anyone?) to make sure that there is an image in people's minds of "power" and "hardware superiority" in their platforms. I mean, even coming out with proper names for their processors (when pretty much every other processor before that had a C-3PO kind of name) should tell you something about the different approach, where some kind of personal connection is made with the processor itself (which is a bit sad when you think about it... i mean they're pieces of silicon...)
By contrast, Xenos or most other processors out there get "normal" coverage. They're just processors which run applications and games. No crap about PS2 being able to guide missiles (where do you think that came from, other than Sony??), no crap about how a chip is "more intelligent than us" (we all know where that came from)... It makes "the casuals" think how SOOO powerful their hardware is, and that helps. It's the whole lateral marketing thing they do oh so well.
That's what Sony does best. They create brands around all the things they do, because when the brand is successful, it drives the products a LONG way. First with the Walkman, last with Playstation... That's what Sony do best: A/V equipment and marketing.
Ok now you can go back to your Nth "FLOPs don't matter" discussion.
Marketing is what drives our economy. iTunes did not invent the industry. Nor do generic brands of toilet paper work better than Charmin at 3x the price (although I do admit Charmin is pillowy soft). If Cell is more heavily promoted and discussed more, its either more a matter of MS or ATI's choice to not promote Xenos, or their failure to deliver the same message. Its not Sony or IBM's fault. But regardless, the replies clearly show WHY Cell has been discussed much more.
Uhm... It's no one's "failure to deliver the message". The message itself is different. The approach is different, and the marketing strategy is different.
Sony's strategy is to create strong brands inside their brands. Cell and Bluray and all other brands you see inside the Playstation3, they're not just simply hardware to add "value" to their hardware, they are brands marketed separately, in the hope that people will "get them" individually, and when looking at PS3 - with the HUGE Playstation brand - they see even more value than just having "more hardware". It's a subtle difference (thinking of the internal features as "brands" and not just hardware), but it can make a hell of a difference.
This has been VERY VERY successful for them in the past, so of course they will keep doing that.
Why do they have to do this? Because their marketing mix is totally f**ked up by the price and the distribution. So what Sony Marketing needs to do is make sure that the price Sony is asking for the PS3 is "justified". The promotion - and the quality of the product itself - needs to make up for the pricing, in a sense, and definitely needs to make up for the distribution issues Sony will have for a while.
By contrast, MS Marketing mix is more balanced, the price is ok - and will be much better soon - the product is fine, the promotion is going well... It's all very balanced.
It's not about "who's right" or "who's a failure". It's about different strategies and approaches. Only time will tell which strategy is "better". No one knows now. If anyone in the world knew which strategy is the best to take, then that someone would be in charge of one of those companies.
None of these tasks are have high compute requirements so they'll run on anything. The CPU speed isn't that important.
Depends on HD
IE doesn't run on Cell (unless it's emulated). If you're talking about browsing it's down to many factors. Cell can accelerate networking however.
Depends on printer.
Depends on protocol implemented by MP3 player.
This often relies on the speed of the HD, however if we assume the dictionary file is loaded into RAM and a version of the spellchecker has been written to properly use Cell, then Cell should run rings around the P4.
You might think Vector units are very restrictive in what they can run but if you look into what people do with vector units it's actually incredibly versatile, some of the most common OS operations can be accelerated, often by high margins.
I think there's two vectors to the conversation going on here. What london-boy is saying is true, Sony does market technologies as brands in and of themselves, and they do try to attach value to them independently. But on the other hand, if you're asking "why Cell gets publicity", if you look at the publicity it is getting, it is often tied to simple news. The news that IBM has awarded support for Cell-based research to certain universities, or that Los Alamos will build a Cell/AMD based supercomputer..that's not orchestrated on the whim of some Sony marketing people to make things seem 'cool' and 'superior' 
And to be honest, that kind of coverage is what predominates..not articles based on Sony PR releases as to why Cell is so god-darn cool.
And to be honest, that kind of coverage is what predominates..not articles based on Sony PR releases as to why Cell is so god-darn cool.I think there's two vectors to the conversation going on here. What london-boy is saying is true, Sony does market technologies as brands in and of themselves, and they do try to attach value to them independently. But on the other hand, if you're asking "why Cell gets publicity", if you look at the publicity it is getting, it is often tied to simple news. The news that IBM has awarded support for Cell-based research to certain universities, or that Los Alamos will build a Cell/AMD based supercomputer..that's not orchestrated on the whim of some Sony marketing people to make things seem 'cool' and 'superior'
And you think Sony PR is not involved in making sure that those "news" reach LOTS of channels? Now now, let's not be naive...
The news about IBM and Cell being used in professional environments is a huge part of the good PR around Cell, to make it appear like the super-duper chip that is actually is, and whether it's IBM or Sony's PR it doesn't really matter. Those kind of "news" reach certain channels for a reason.
I'm not saying it's bad, it's actually very good, but it's clear that every single word that we get on Cell, whether it's the "cool videos" Sony makes, or the news about IBM using Cell in supercomputers, goes through Sony (or IBM) PR.
Well PR is involved of course, but it tends to be IBM PR or the PR of those other companies engaging the technology (Mercury, Mentor Graphics, Terra Soft etc, all of whom aren't operating according to Sony's agenda to make Cell/PS3 seem 'cool'). It's a platform now, bearing the vested interests of a number of different companies (and their marketing departments).
But my point is that these are news-worthy items. I doubt the OP or anyone here would expect them to go unreported. In the context of this conversation, such 'PR opportunities', if you want to put it that way, are there with Cell but not with Xenos (..and they're not being contrived for the sake of Sony's PR). If they were there with Xenos you can be sure its associated PR departments would make sure they were heard about.
In short, to throw back to my initial response, one is making news worth writing about (or worth a PR department getting into a flap about, at least), one is generally not. The difference is not so much about different marketing philosophies as it is about the different opportunities each has to work with.
Last edited by a moderator:
What kind of gaming benchmarks are you thinking of that works well cross the console and PC space? Or are you thinking of some particular CPU benchmarks that apply well to games as well?
BTW The Quad Core Extreme is a nice CPU, I wish I had one.
I don't believe it's a super computer, please don't put words in my mouth.
No... I don't think Sony PR is involved in every Cell news. They don't have to. In fact, I don't think the real Cell blitz is here yet (If there's going to be one). What we often see in the gaming forums (like this one) are mostly made by fans of opposing camps due to curiosity about Cell.
The STI consortium is pretty quiet these days (as in "normal"). Individual Cell partners probably do their own product promotion according to STI guidelines. The last official info we had is the next Cell availability timeframe... just like CPUs/GPUs released by other vendors. I wouldn't call those "hype" at all.
When they say Supercomputer in the context of Cell what they really mean is it has an architecture that is like a (1980s) supercomputer, probably the Cray 2. They don't usually say this explicitly (no doubt deliberately) but that's what it means.
That said there is precedence for consumer goods being literally classed as a supercomputer, Apple were once banned from exporting G4s to certain countries as the US government classed a CPU with such a high peak FLOPS rating (>10GFLOPS or something like that) as a supercomputer. Apple of course immediately added this to all their marketing materials...
I wasn't talking about hype in particular
PR is not just hype like we've seen around the Emotion Engine and the 2TFLOP and all uber-hyped things released lately. PR is anything that gets made public and all the publicity a company doesn't pay for. It can be good or bad.My initial point was that at the end of the day, Cell has had a lot of PR (not hype) around it, be it from Sony or IBM. All the articles about it being used on server blades, about it being used in next-gen TVs, and all sorts of articles about it that do not constitute the PS3 hype, is all part of PR - be it Sony or IBM's.
When you see a story on a paper, be it part of the PS3 hype or part of the "normal" info you're talking about, the story doesn't come from nowhere. It comes from a phone call from (or to) Sony PR (or IBM or whoever else) - after talks to their respective techie guys.
Agree.
If we're talking strictly about "real" PR, then since Cell is a platform where other companies build their businesses on. Naturally, it will have more PR releases from these other companies also.
Since it's a CPU, we should not be surprised if people find more Cell use elsewhere, generating more info and interests.
i think is more of a cause and effect matters, if the Cell is not a good CPU then the effect would be many negative news about it, however the majority of news surrounded the Cell has praised the Cell as an evolution in CPU design then it only imply that the Cell must be a dam good CPU in its own right.
It's basically the same kind of PR Intel got at one point when there were articles about Pentium processors being used in F1 cars... It wasn't necessarily "Emotion Engine hype", but it was definitely PR geared around making Pentium processors look "better".
