So is the cell spe's "downgrade" confirmed ?
- Thread starter supervegeta
- Start date
mckmas8808
Legend
Barbarian said:
Hold on a second. Sony's private developer forums? How do the developers feel about this issue overall?
ROG27 said:
Is this not correct?
Xbox 360 Xenon CPU: 115 GFLOPs
PS3 version of CELL: 218 GFLOPs
480 flops/cycle GPU on 360
384 flops/cycle on PS3 GPU wise
So in all there's only a difference of 7 FLOPS?
Just curious if I'm looking at this correctly? Not that FLOPS are an accurate determination of power.
Hardknock said:
No.
Xenon: 77 GFLOPS ...MS didn't take into account how things could be executed and instead used a sum of parts capabilities alone
RSX: 768 GFLOPS...2 MADDs per clock
All flops are not created equal as well, and flops in a vacuum will not answer many questions about both respecitve platforms will perform.
I think Cell gets 205 GFLOPS not 218 GFLOPS but I've let this info. slip from importance in my mind so I could be wrong.
Last edited by a moderator:
Hardknock said:
I believe the 384 value is just for Pixel Shaders on RSX, we don't have a Vertex figure yet (should be +80flops/cycle if 8VS, in theory).
You're also kinda adding flops/cycle with FLOPS(per second), when you should be converting those flops/cycle into FLOPS. But it's still probably a bad idea to compare them this way anyway
Just a precision for those interested
Flops values alone are litteraly useless, they need a context (List of instructions, etc...) to start being meanigful. Meaning that you cannot compare the sum of FLOPs of a CPU agaisn't another one's sum. You do a detailed comparison, or it will be nothing but numbers with no real meaning.
And even when you do a detailed comparison, people would still be able to argue that some instructions are more important than others, etc...
Futhermore, comparing GPU and CPU Flops is meanignless, due the diametrically opposed functions of the two ICs.
You can read this thread if you want to learn about CPU VS GPU Flops.
Anyway, back on topic,
Flops values alone are litteraly useless, they need a context (List of instructions, etc...) to start being meanigful. Meaning that you cannot compare the sum of FLOPs of a CPU agaisn't another one's sum. You do a detailed comparison, or it will be nothing but numbers with no real meaning.
And even when you do a detailed comparison, people would still be able to argue that some instructions are more important than others, etc...
Futhermore, comparing GPU and CPU Flops is meanignless, due the diametrically opposed functions of the two ICs.
You can read this thread if you want to learn about CPU VS GPU Flops.
Anyway, back on topic,
The OS has yet to be finalized, so I guess it's not permanent. But as I said earlier, with SCE you never know, the RAM required could change for the better or worse. Or not change at all...superguy said:
MechanizedDeath
Regular
96MB is massive. No other way to put it. There was a time when I wasn't happy with XP booting up with anything over 100MB. Hell, I'd stripped it down to ~80MB for bootup. Nowadays, I don't bother shutting down services, b/c I just don't care. But it's pretty clear that 96MB is unacceptable for a console. 32MB for framebuffer? I can only hope that includes the game framebuffer as well. 64MB in XDR? For what exactly? PS3 OS needs to handle a huge amount of in-game tasks to justify that kind of bloat. B/c 1/5 of total system memory spent on an OS is obscene. PEACE.
Mmmkay said:I believe the 384 value is just for Pixel Shaders on RSX, we don't have a Vertex figure yet (should be +80flops/cycle if 8VS, in theory).
You're also kinda adding flops/cycle with FLOPS(per second), when you should be converting those flops/cycle into FLOPS. But it's still probably a bad idea to compare them this way anyway
Thanks Mmmkay, but just theoretically speaking on the meaningless FLOP scale they aren't as far off as once thought are they? I know we can't really compare(but we know people will do it anyway
)Vysez said:
Thanks for that explanation and link Vysez. I hate that people try and use FLOPS as a major indicater of power when that's clearly not the case. I was just seeing if my numbers were correct.
Hardknock said:Thanks Mmmkay, but just theoretically speaking on the meaningless FLOP scale they aren't as far off as once thought are they? I know we can't really compare(but we know people will do it anyway
[/hides from Vysez]
In our crazy FLOP math, there would be a difference of 118.2 GFLOPS, 33% over the 360.
And now I feel dirty
scificube said:
should be (ammalgamation of BS PR numbers, etc. - ratios should apprx. relative raw performance):
Xbox 360 Xenon CPU: PR rated @ 115 GFLOPs (real world apprx. 77 GFLOPs)
PS3 version of CELL: PR rated @ 218 GFLOPs (real world apprx. 205 GLOPS)
432 programmable flops/cycle GPU on 360
(384 + 80 =) 464 programmable flops/cycle on PS3 GPU wise
Last edited by a moderator:
From what I removed from the XB360 OS thread, can anyone provide a plausible explanation as to how 96 MB can be used up in operations concurrent with gaming? 32 MB would be 3 1080p screens and 8 MB for applications. 48 MB sounds plenty. 96 MB sounds like an insane waste, reserving resources for features that really aren't going to be used by most people most of the time, that I can see.
Continuing from Titanio from the XB360 OS thread...
Does anyone here want these things? Does anyone want their girlfriend editing photos in a popup on top of your game of Lair? Does anyone want more than one TV in the living room for concurrent activities on PS3? Maybe I'm totally at odds with the rest of the world (wouldn't be the first time!) but I want one box under one TV for gaming OR watching movies OR doing other stuff.
If those are Sony's goals, they seems to me very unrealistic. It's like trying to get a whole family's worth of activities onto one machine in one room. Taking your example verbatim, lets say 4 1080p buffers are needed for the movie, interface, and two of those used to feed the PSPs and downscale, plus three buffers for each PSP for triple buffering (why triple buffer a stream server side? Beats me, but I'm really trying to use this 96 MB up!), that'd be something like 35 MB. Let's throw in another 3 1080p buffers for PVR and the blogging, that's a total of about 60 MB. And that requires one PS3 to be recording one program, showing another, video conferencing, video blogging, and serving two PSPs, while gaming. That's either a stupid number of windows on one TV, of a slightly less stupid number of windows on a second TV. It's mythical enough targetting 1080p as a default, given the limited adoption it'll see over the next 5 years. How much more mythical is it to target households that are going to have two people watching movies on their PSPs, a third playing a game while video blogging, and a fourth watching a movie while video conferencing?
But by the time you've got 4 1080p buffers and some applications and even a naffy bitmap based UI, you're not approaching 48 MBs RAM. It would be beyond stupid for Sony to reserve enough space for a dozen 1080p screens. That is almost never going to be touched upon but any users. The three people in the world who will want to do all that simultaneously should just be left having to make do with only PVR+HD movie watching+gaming+Web chat, and if they want to do more than that, not do the gaming. That'll be better for the 100 million other PS3 owners who don't give a snit about trying to do 10 things at once. 48 MB should be an upper limit on what's necessary to satisfy 99% of realistic multitasking use, I reckon.
