Sony's retail training *

[MasterDisaster]

how to play dirty:

Sony Says tell Customers PS3 CPU is THREE TIMES as powerful as 360

Sony has created a training website for store employees who will be stocking the PS3. They encourage people to relay to customers and other staff members that the PS3 CPU is THREE TIMES more powerful than that in the 360 and 35 times than the PS2.

quote:

After logging in, Sony marketing spin quotes can be found while employees read, learn & test their PS3 knowledge. Here’s the real gem:

“Welcome to your PS3 Retail Online Training. We trust that you will find the following information valuable and assist you in understanding and explaining PS3 Technology to your customers and staff. … The Cell Processor is essentially as powerful as 3 Xbox 360 CPU’s or 35 PlayStation® 2 CPU’s”

http://www.maxconsole.net/?mode=news&newsid=11623

This summer Sony created a training website for Canadian Wal Mart employees. The access codes got leaked when a store visitor saw a manager put up internal documents around the store.

After logging in, Sony marketing spin quotes can be found while employees read, learn & test their PS3 knowledge. Here’s the real gem:

“Welcome to your PS3 Retail Online Training. We trust that you will find the following information valuable and assist you in understanding and explaining PS3 Technology to your customers and staff. … The Cell Processor is essentially as powerful as 3 Xbox 360 CPU’s or 35 PlayStation® 2 CPU’s”

And you wonder why store clerks so seldom know what they are talking about? How in the world is “The Cell is actually 7 SPU’s (Synthetic Processing Units) each running at 3.2 GHZ” supposed to inform customers? Here’s a screenshot (click to enlarge) of one of the tests where employees can win prizes if they get all the answers right.

http://www.videogamesblogger.com/20...s-more-powerful-as-the-xbox-360-processor.htm


this is how they spread misinformation and lies, making fool of everyone that has not the minimal tech culture to understand that is a bs, this is not simply the usual unfair lie from kutaragi, they TRAIN the people to spread the lies, this is the worse thing ever from sony
I don't care what someone will think about this but I personally will avoid any product from them from this moment.

 

[nonamer]

If you round the power of the Cell to the nearest multiple, it does in fact have 3 times the theoretical power of the Xbox 360's CPU. So exactly what's wrong with what they're doing?

 

[MasterDisaster]

For those who don't understand (and to who don't want understand):
1) the performance of the isolated cpu means very little when we compare two different architecture
2) cell and Xenon are very different, where one have the little spe to give flops peak, the other works in a total different way with equal general purpose parallel multithreated cores

even the ps2 cpu have a theoretical edge over the xbox1 cpu, but the celeron/p3 is still powerful

there's zero chance that cell is 3 times powerfull than xenon, zero, not even 2 times

the purpose of sony is spreading this misinformation, they do training programs and website to teach how to lie to customers, and where are the intelligent reactions to this?

 

[Duke]

the purpose of sony is spreading this misinformation, they do training programs and website to teach how to lie to customers, and where are the intelligent reactions to this?

Oh, Microsoft or any other company don't do that? I dont care what the big companies do, it's inevitable and there's nothing a single person can do. Business world is a harsh world. I just care about the end products.

 

[Jesus2006]

there's zero chance that cell is 3 times powerfull than xenon, zero, not even 2 times

Sorry, but do we have any Xenos benchmarks around? I think it's not comparable at all. But fact is also that the CELL is alot faster than Xenos when it's used to it's strengths (parallel processing, streaming, decoding, poly transformations...stuff like that) and not just by a margin.

In this regards, CELL might as well be faster than what was posted here.

2) cell and Xenon are very different, where one have the little spe to give flops peak, the other works in a total different way with equal general purpose parallel multithreated cores

This is spreading misinformation as well

 

[Duke]

Oh, Microsoft or any other company don't do that? I dont care what the big companies do, it's inevitable and there's nothing a single person can do. Business world is a harsh world. I just care about the end products.

I didnt mean exactly the thing that Sony did in this news piece with the first sentence but that all the huge corporations use immoral "tactics" when fighting for market share and I dont really care about that.

 

[MasterDisaster]

Sorry, but do we have any Xenos benchmarks around? I think it's not comparable at all. But fact is also that the CELL is alot faster than Xenos when it's used to it's strengths (parallel processing, streaming, decoding, poly transformations...stuff like that) and not just by a margin.
This is spreading misinformation as well

you needs some notions:

1) Xenos is the GPU of Xbox360
2) Xenon is capable of parallel processing, streaming, decoding, vertex processing
3) Xenon is capable to reach directly all the 512 MB
4) Xenon have a cache shared with Xenos
5) Xenon is capable of direct manipulation the data of Xenos in memory, while xenos is working on it
6) Xenon uses 3 simmetrical big cores for games, cell uses only one, plus 6 spe that are a 9 milions transistor mini fp-cpu, useful to make a peak fp number (only in single precision). the different nature of the cores of cell is a bad thing for the developers, as valve says today, and there's not a coherent view of memory.
7) You talk of fact, but you don't give a single fact. In my opinion Cell can have a little edge in pure single precision multithreaded math, but with general purpose game code it's slower than xenon
if you want to talk about facts, provide us some links.


edit to say:
this is not a thread to talk about techical comparison, read the object, it's about the misinformation that sony is trying to spread with its mans to customers

 

[Jesus2006]

you needs some notions:

1) Xenos is the GPU of Xbox360

Sorry on that, my fault

2) Xenon is capable of parallel processing, streaming, decoding, vertex processing

...as every other processor out there, just not as good as CELL.

3) Xenon is capable to reach directly all the 512 MB

Afaik the memory controller sits in the GPU, so no it's not a direct access. Cell has it's own memory controller for XDR + can use RSX (similar to Xenon) to access GDDR as well.

4) Xenon have a cache shared with Xenos

Is that a good thing ? RSX can directly access LS afaik (or/and the other way round?)

5) Xenon is capable of direct manipulation the data of Xenos in memory, while xenos is working on it

Same goes for CELL, just that the bandwidth is higher in the latter (double).

6) Xenon uses 3 simmetrical big cores for games, cell uses only one, plus 6 spe that are a 9 milions transistor mini fp-cpu, useful to make a peak fp number (only in single precision). the different nature of the cores of cell is a bad thing for the developers, as valve says today, and there's not a coherent view of memory.

That could have been Peter Moore

7) You talk of fact, but you don't give a single fact. In my opinion Cell can have a little edge in pure single precision multithreaded math, but with general purpose game code it's slower than xenon
if you want to talk about facts, provide us some links.

Just that non-GP code is still the majority of work. Things like rendering, sound, phyiscs and decompression are what stress the 360 CPU the most (and which CELLs SPE are able to handle much better). See MS own GDC presentations as an example.

 

[Phil]

Talking about spreading mis-information, MasterDisaster...

Last time I checked, CELL in the PS3 still had 1 PPE and 7 SPEs. Matter of the fact is, we don't know what other tasks that SPE reserved for the OS also takes care of during gameplay - but it's still there regardless and should be accounted for.

Anyway, this topic is waste of time. Fact is, CELL has far more technical potential than Xenon. If this will cary over to real-world results is left to be seen. If there is in fact a benchmark figure that would rightfully equal 3 times quicker than an identical task done on Xenon is irrelevant in the context of most games. Then again, marketing - regardless from which company, has never been about fair practices.

 

[nonamer]

There's this weird myth that the SPEs are "mini-CPUs" when they are not. They are genuine vector processors and they have their own characteristics. The main thing they lack over a normal CPU is the branch prediction, have a simplified instruction set, the cache structure being replaced by something totally different, and don't have direct main memory access. However, when it comes to sheer power they give up nothing at all. In fact, they also get a major register boost (128 registers, each 128-bits wide) and a built-in 256KB local scratchpad SRAM with very low latency. Any algorithm that properly utilizes these last two features and isn't very branchy will see performance numbers that are just unhinged. Like upwards of 98% efficiency in some cases and 50 times the performance than a single-core normal CPU: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/library/pa-cellperf/

Even though they're not all that impressive, a single SPE can exceed the performance of a "big" CPU in many areas as shown in the link. These are not meaningless benchmarks, they are things like T&L, cryptography, ray-casting, etc. that can definitely be used in a real application. So for Sony, saying 3x is not absurd, or least does not exceed reasonable PR-speak. They could probably pull out a benchmark showing the Cell is 10 times faster, but that would be unreasonable.

There's also another myth that the Xenon is 3 "big" cores, which is incorrect. As they are very narrow and in-order cores, they're anything but big. They're still very heavily specialized cores meant for the very same operations the Cell is meant for (single precision fp SIMD operations), just that they're more flexible and easier to use than Cell. So it's not like Xenon will have unhinged AI in comparison.

 

[Darkon]

7) You talk of fact, but you don't give a single fact. In my opinion Cell can have a little edge in pure single precision multithreaded math, but with general purpose game code it's slower than xenon
if you want to talk about facts, provide us some links.

Not necesserly and spe's aren't just flop monster.

 

["Nerve-Damage"]

I see this thread getting lock…

 

[StefanS]

I've let this thread continue to see where it's going. But I've come to the conlusion it leads nowhere (except to bad blood). Thus, locked.