I would say the non-unified RAM is it's greatest problems. Thing is, neither the XENON or the RSX will likely ever be used to their full potential, however non-unified RAM presents a problem the entire way no matter how efficient you can get the RSX to run.When I was deciding what console to get, I actually believed that the PS3 was more powerful simply because of all the hype around.
Look at the facts. The PS3 is NOT more powerful than the 360.
The PS3 was actually rushed by Sony. Originally they were going to use another cell for the GPU, but they changed their mind at the last moment and asked Nvidia to make a custom GPU for them. Nvidia basically took a 7800gtx and toned it down.
The Cell can not make up for a weak GPU. A computer or console is only as powerful as its weakest link, and the RSX will always make the PS3 weaker than the 360.
jbz7890
Xbox 360 has a better Graphics Processing unit than the ps3?
This topic is locked from further discussion.
The CELL's SPE's can come together and act like Stream Processors.
Source
Steam Processing
A big difference in Cells from normal CPUs is the ability of the SPEs in a Cell to be chained together to act as a stream processor. A stream processor takes data and processes it in a series of steps.
A Cell processor can be set-up to perform streaming operations in a sequence with one or more SPEs working on each step. In order to do stream processing an SPE reads data from an input into it's local store, performs the processing step then stores the result into it's local store. The second SPE reads the output from the first SPE's local store and processes it and stores it in it's output area.
This sequence can use many SPEs and SPEs can access different blocks of memory depending on the application. If the computing power is not enough the SPEs in other Cells can also be used to form an even longer chain.
Stream processing does not generally require large memory bandwidth but Cell has it anyway and on top of this the internal interconnect system allows multiple communication streams between SPEs simultaneously so they don't hold each other up.
So you think your PC is fast...
It is when the SPEs are working on compute heavy streaming applications that the Cell will be working hardest. It's in these applications that the Cell may get close to it's theoretical maximum performance and perform an order of magnitude more calculations per second than any desktop processor currently available.
On the other hand if the stream uses large amounts of bandwidth and the data blocks can fit into the local stores the performance difference might actually be bigger. Even if conventional CPUs are capable of processing, the data at the same rate the transfers between the CPUs will be held up while they wait for chip to chip transfers. The Cell's internal interconnect system allows transfers running into hundreds of Gigabytes per second, chip to chip interconnects allows transfers in the low 10's of Gigabytes per second.
While conventional processors have vector units on board (SSE or VMX / AltiVec) they are not dedicated vector processors. The vector processing capability is an add-on to the existing instruction sets and has to share the CPUs resources. The SPEs are dedicated high speed vector processors and with their own memory don't need to share anything other than the memory (and not even this much if the data can fit in the local stores). Add to this the fact there are 8 of them and you can see why their potential computational capacity is so large.
Such a large performance difference may sound completely ludicrous but it's not without precedent, in fact if you own a reasonably modern graphics card your existing system is already capable of similar processing feats:
"For example, the Nvidia GeForce 6800 Ultra, recently released, has been observed to reach 40 GFlops in fragment processing. In comparison, the theoretical peak performance of the Intel 3GHz Pentium4 using SSE instructions is only 6GFlops."
"GPUs are >10x faster than CPU for appropriate problems"
CELL ARCITECTURE
The CELL's SPE's can come together and act like Stream Processors.
Source
[QUOTE="CELL ARCITECTURE"]
Steam Processing
A big difference in Cells from normal CPUs is the ability of the SPEs in a Cell to be chained together to act as a stream processor. A stream processor takes data and processes it in a series of steps.
A Cell processor can be set-up to perform streaming operations in a sequence with one or more SPEs working on each step. In order to do stream processing an SPE reads data from an input into it's local store, performs the processing step then stores the result into it's local store. The second SPE reads the output from the first SPE's local store and processes it and stores it in it's output area.
This sequence can use many SPEs and SPEs can access different blocks of memory depending on the application. If the computing power is not enough the SPEs in other Cells can also be used to form an even longer chain.
Stream processing does not generally require large memory bandwidth but Cell has it anyway and on top of this the internal interconnect system allows multiple communication streams between SPEs simultaneously so they don't hold each other up.
So you think your PC is fast...
It is when the SPEs are working on compute heavy streaming applications that the Cell will be working hardest. It's in these applications that the Cell may get close to it's theoretical maximum performance and perform an order of magnitude more calculations per second than any desktop processor currently available.
On the other hand if the stream uses large amounts of bandwidth and the data blocks can fit into the local stores the performance difference might actually be bigger. Even if conventional CPUs are capable of processing, the data at the same rate the transfers between the CPUs will be held up while they wait for chip to chip transfers. The Cell's internal interconnect system allows transfers running into hundreds of Gigabytes per second, chip to chip interconnects allows transfers in the low 10's of Gigabytes per second.
While conventional processors have vector units on board (SSE or VMX / AltiVec) they are not dedicated vector processors. The vector processing capability is an add-on to the existing instruction sets and has to share the CPUs resources. The SPEs are dedicated high speed vector processors and with their own memory don't need to share anything other than the memory (and not even this much if the data can fit in the local stores). Add to this the fact there are 8 of them and you can see why their potential computational capacity is so large.
Such a large performance difference may sound completely ludicrous but it's not without precedent, in fact if you own a reasonably modern graphics card your existing system is already capable of similar processing feats:
"For example, the Nvidia GeForce 6800 Ultra, recently released, has been observed to reach 40 GFlops in fragment processing. In comparison, the theoretical peak performance of the Intel 3GHz Pentium4 using SSE instructions is only 6GFlops."
"GPUs are >10x faster than CPU for appropriate problems"
Rikusaki
More people should read this yo!
Ugh... no seriously, UGH. I haven't played LO so I can't comment about that, but DOA4?!? PDZ? Perfect Jaggies Zero? I'm having trouble taking that seriously. Ninja Gaiden II? No. NGII is anything but a graphical powerhouse, and Gears definitely looks better.excelR83
Dead Or Alive 4
Lost Odyssey
Ninja Gaiden 2
There are no good pics of PDZ,I can only suggest you play the game. The graphics are phenominal...epecially the textures and lighting. Play all of these game,they look much better in motion. ESPECIALLY NG2.
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