More comments from John Carmack about xbox360, ps3

[ihamoitc2005]

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not I...

Thank you for your reply Scooby_dooby, I only make bad feedback for people who make many personal insults not for people with different opinion but I think some people are different. Two weeks ago someone made bad feedback for me for "heated" conversation I made one month ago with one who is regular insulter of others.

 

[weaksauce]

Let me know when a game-engine uses 200GFLOPs and I'll believe it's not a marketing number.

A synthetic benchmark payed for by IBM has nothing to do with the efficiency in a real world game scenario.

I'm not convinced 100gflops extra of theoretical power in the CPU will have any meaningful impact on anything short of slightly better physics. I'm also not convinced that Sony's system is balanced correctly, seems to put a huge focus on FLOPs while having a very week in order PPE to run it's game code. MS has produced a cpu with very high peak FLOP ratings, but also has 3 processors homogenous for running the game code.

Basically, what reason is there to believe that so much FLOP power is required in today's games? Just cause Sony says so? What about the rest of the processing? What about tasks not suited to SPE's? Is a single 3.2Ghz In-order CPU enough? How do SPE's compares to PPE's in this type of situtation?

GPU's will make the biggest diference like they alsways do, personally I really believe it will come down to whichever GPU has the most legs, and is most future proofed. THis CPU stuff is just hype from Sony to distinguish themselves and their product as something special.

First of all, Cell is not a console CPU only, it's going to be used in real supercomputers and is already being used in the medical industry and is coming to the military, and there's even more.

Second, if PS3 gets the new version of Cell, the DD2 or 3, it'll have a bigger and more powerful PPC than one XCPU core. Also, it's been discussed that SPE's can run integers and in some cases will do it faster than xcpu, like with smaller numbers. (and the cell PPC has access to more cache if the xcores are going to share the 1mb)

About the AA, DMC has a resolution of what, 640x480? Of course you'll see the jaggies better then. I don't see any "quality pixels" in these shots of mgs and motorstorm, and even if they use 2xaa, what's the difference? There's hardly no performance impact and quality doesn't seem too change.

 

[czekon]

First of all, Cell is not a console CPU only, it's going to be used in real supercomputers and is already being used in the medical industry and is coming to the military, and there's even more.

yeah yeah yeah it will launch nuclear rockets and yada yada i heard this when they announced ps2

 

[Bobbler]

Will the 'I heard it at PS2 launch also!' stigma ever disappear?

 

[ERP]

Second, if PS3 gets the new version of Cell, the DD2 or 3, it'll have a bigger and more powerful PPC than one XCPU core. Also, it's been discussed that SPE's can run integers and in some cases will do it faster than xcpu, like with smaller numbers. (and the cell PPC has access to more cache if the xcores are going to share the 1mb)

Here we see the infamous A sound cool so I'll draw conclusion B from it even though they are unrelated.

Current devkits are DD3.x so I'd assume final units will be also.
That in no way implies that the PPE will be faster than an X360 core.

 

[zifnab]

First of all, Cell is not a console CPU only, it's going to be used in real supercomputers and is already being used in the medical industry and is coming to the military, and there's even more.

The same kind of thing can be said of AMD and Intel chips (i.e. http://news.com.com/Army+supercomputing+drafts+Intel,+AMD/2100-1006_3-5294109.html).

 

[blakjedi]

I wish I could be NDA'ed.

 

[bbot]

Since everyone's talking about cell now:

"It's not going to be a general purpose computer," said Tim Dougherty, IBM's director of blade center strategy.


(This is about the cell-based blade server)

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showpost.php?p=693151&postcount=19

 

[archie4oz]

but PS2's CPU alone was rated at 6.2 GFLOPS peak. The thing is that since it doesn't have any sort of shader-related hardware

Good to know that the PS2 has the magic mojo to make vertices move themselves..!

First of all, Cell is not a console CPU only

Is there such thing as a console only CPU? Almost every console CPU I can think of has been derived from another CPU already in use elsewhere, or was being planned to be used in other application sectors... Obviously there are some radically divergent platform specific implementations (EE, Waternoose).

 

[Megadrive1988]

http://glowystarman.tripod.com/locopollo/id12.html

Xbox 120 GFLOPS PS2 6.2 GPFLOPS total system.

no.


if we compare Xbox CPU to PS2 CPU, it's: Xbox: 1.4 Gflops vs PS2: 6.2 Gflops.

Xbox does not push 120 Gflops.
Nvidia rated the final Xbox GPU at 80 Gflops, but that is with Nvidia's way of counting.



edit: as ShootMyMonkey mentioned,
the Xbox CPU has been rated at 1.5 and 3.0 Gflops (and 1.4) depending on who's spec sheet you look at.

also, the original 'NVFLOPS' figure for Xbox GPU was 140 Gflops (or 140.1 Gflops) when it was
figured to be running at 300 MHz. (to find that google Xbox 140 gigaflops, or 141.1)
So at 233 MHz (the final clockspeed of the GPU) the 'NVFLOPs' figure is said to be 80 Gflops
-- which is still Nvidia's fudged version of flops counting.

probably only a small fraction of that is programmable much like the with Xenos and RSX,
a small fraction of their enormous quoted floating point performance is actually programmable.

FLOPs ~ GFLOPs ~ TFLOPs *is* an important rating but only when comparing apples to apples,
and even then, not everything is equal for comparison. one architecture might be come closer to
reaching its peak rating than another.

 

[overclocked]

From what we know now the "real" programable Gflops for each system is what?
Even if that number is really screwed also but anyway..

 

[weaksauce]

Here we see the infamous A sound cool so I'll draw conclusion B from it even though they are unrelated.

Current devkits are DD3.x so I'd assume final units will be also.
That in no way implies that the PPE will be faster than an X360 core.

So why make it bigger if it's not going to be better?

And czekon, where do you think I got that from? Sony? It's mercury, they've already sold it to medical and afaik are getting it to military too. There's a university that's going to build a supercumputer of cells.

zifnab, 404 error so I've no idea what you're trying to say, but AMD and Intel doesn't really have the same architectures. 360 and ps3 though, are quite similar.

And a three-cored PPC is only used in 360 so why is it wrong to say it's a console cpu? Yeah it's build from a PC part but what isn't?

 

[m1nd_x]

deja vu... comparing flops and arguing over ps2 specs and nflops, arguing the relevance of emotion engines and the cell being useful for world domination (sadam didn't get much use out of them). totally killed every thread i've seen.

 

[GB123]

3 processors of Xenon is either game code or flops not both and are "weak in order" type like CELL PPE. So if 1 core is gamecode then only 2 is flops, if 2 is game code then only 1 is flops. For PS3 CELL if PPE is gamecode, then 7 SPE is flops. If PPE and 4 SPE is gamecode, then 3 is flops.

HUH ??