@AMiGR

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Numbers in real world applications please, GigaFlops measured in the lab or incredibly tight algorithms like Protein folding and stuff like Seti@Home do not cut it, please find and post some examples where one CPU is by far far far faster than the other.

There's a whole heap of apps where Cell does exactly this.

Terrain renderer 35X faster (IBM)
Medical Volumetric rendering 150X faster (Mercury)
Medical 3D image registration 50X faster (Mercury)
Video transcoding 10X (IBM /BI)

If you want something more independent try this:
http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/sabl/2006/Jul/CellProcessorPotential.pdf

The table on the last page shows it compared to a few other processors, 3.7 - 12.7 times faster than an AMD 64. It's a bit out of date and there'll be accuracy concerns due to it being simulator based but those are pretty good figures given they are for double precision - the first Cell's weakest point*.

Cell can't do this on everything of course, it wasn't designed to. However in the areas where it is relatively bad it's not getting beat by 10x.

--

The problem with processors isn't the peak theoretical FLOPs, that's easy, the problem is feeding those floating point units.

The reason Cell can get these sorts of performance boosts is the memory subsystem, it's different from other processors because it's very good at keeping it's FPUs fed, nobody else has anything even remotely like it. Because of it Cell is good at getting close to it's theoretical peak, most processors can't get anywhere near it.


On the question of Cell V's XCPU, XCPU has less than half the FP units of Cell available to developers. Tthe Cell's memory controller also gives it a major advantage, it can also get memory from the Gfx RAM if it needs it. XCPU has less bandwidth to begin with and to make matters worse it's higher latency *and* it's shared with the Gfx chip.

XCPU doesn't have Local stores but it can do something similar-ish with cache locking, however the available space (per thread) is also lower than the Cell's (170KB v's 256KB) and it's higher latency.

XCPU has all sorts of other tricks (e.g. cache locking, buffers) to mitigate these problems but Cell has similar things or equivalents.



DP won't be Cell's weak point for much longer, the second gen Cell has just been announced, it increases double precision performance 4X and increases memory to 16GB.

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Whyzzat?

@MikeB

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On a game system, each SPE would normally be used for different tasks, so having all the SPEs crunching on the same task may be a poor indicating of real world performance gains.

Hey looks like you're partially on the way to getting it.

Back to the example of procedural synthesis. The 360 has VMX128 which enhances such processing with a single pass dot product. The PS3 to do it must take multiple passes and does it in software. One pass in hardware is nearly always faster then multiple passes in software. While the Cell is the overall winner (and no the difference isn't your 100GFLOPS claim one reason is your statement above) in this case it appears the Xenon would take the lead. This is but 1 of many in a game and total performance goes back to mix of needs for the game and the easiness and ability for the developer to make use of the resoures.

@BrianK

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The 360 has VMX128 which enhances such processing with a single pass dot product.

Actually it may deliver a result every cycle but the operation takes 13 cycles to complete.
I'm not sure about Cell but I believe it takes 2 instructions to do the same.

There was a bit of a debate about the HW dot product on B3D a while back, one game developer didn't like that approach as it's restricted to a certain type of dot product and IIRC Cell could do the same thing in 2 at lower latency.

However...
Even if XCPU is producing results at twice the rate of Cell, Cell has double the execution units so the max throughput ends up the same for both.

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Whyzzat?

@minator

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The problem with processors isn't the peak theoretical FLOPs, that's easy, the problem is feeding those floating point units. The reason Cell can get these sorts of performance boosts is the memory subsystem, it's different from other processors because it's very good at keeping it's FPUs fed, nobody else has anything even remotely like it. Because of it Cell is good at getting close to it's theoretical peak, most processors can't get anywhere near it.

Thanks for your great in-depth contributions and as you know I really like past your communty and Cell related articles!

The SPEs are connected on a 4 ring Element Interconnect Bus capable of a peak performance of ~204.8GB/s (197GB/s observed). Every processing element on the bus has its own memory flow controller, each having 256kb dedicated SRAM and direct memory access controller. Other elements on the bus are the memory controller to the 256MB 3.2 Ghz XDR RAM, and two Flex I/O controllers, the FlexIO bus offering roughly 60GB/s bandwidth.

IMO the Cell is truly an amazingly powerful design, the benefits and power relates as much to how everything works together which make it more than just the summ of the individual parts.

IMO the only real big advantage the XBox 360 offers is a year headstart to mature the dev tools and the general approach and design having more in common with traditional PCs.

Last edited by MikeB on 22-Apr-2007 at 05:53 PM.

@BrianK

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Hey looks like you're partially on the way to getting it

What I stated there is in line what I wrote here before, overall the Cell is potentially enormously powerful with regard to multimedia purposes.

Good turn up of people for the Russian PS3 launch 2 days ago:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdJi5yNPJPM&mode=related&search=

Would be interesting to get some hard data, Russia is a big country with lots of people, but also pretty low density, so I guess in the more remote areas the PS3 may be hard to get and the price is well above what the Americans and Japanese pay for a unit.

@MikeB

That is good because PS3 did not attract crowd in SA and Australia while sales stagnated in Japan. In fact it seems PS3 is in the same situation than XBox (360) is in Japan: it does not sell.

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@minator

Now, THAT'S what I call an answer not "Heavy calculations".

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@Hammer

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Recall PS3’s SpeedTree yields vs X360...

A comment from the people behind SpeedTree with regard to the PS3:

"Indeed! We can't say too much at this point, but there are going to be some great-looking forests on that console."

More a inspiring comment, given great promise and providing an impression of competence and confidence.

@minator

Thanks for the info. All I could find was that multiple (I assumed more then 2) dot products was required in software to accomplish the same goal.

As for the Cell's execution units I assume you're talking about the 7 SPEs vs the 3 VMX128. So how does the double threadedness of those 3 cores play into this issue?


@itix
Quote:

That is good because PS3 did not attract crowd in SA and Australia while sales stagnated in Japan. In fact it seems PS3 is in the same situation than XBox(360) is in Japan: it does not sell.

I was recently reading an article that claimed while Japan played a role in the last 2 generations of consoles it's a poor indicator of the winner worldwide. Due to the size of the US and influences in Europe both of those markets is a better indicator.


@MikeB
SpeedTree will be interesting. So far, and you've posted many here already, the images from Oblivion where Speetree is used I prefer the 360. The PS3 had some other niceities but if I had to pick the trees and bushes the 360's looked better, IMO. Thus, when more games are released using SpeedTree it'll be interesting to see where/how that goes on these consoles.

@itix

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it does not sell

IMO a bit of a strange comment coming from an Amigan. The PS3 has already outsold the best selling Amiga model, the Amiga 500, this in just a matter of months. The Amiga 500 sold best in 1989, so roughly 2 years after the A500's release. Why? Mostly because by then a large number of games were superior for the platform!

Does the PS3 sell? Answer, yes it does without any doubt! Will the PS3 sell even better in the future? IMO that's not unlikely at all! (Price drops, Home, amazing exclusive games, add-ons, upgrades, slim-line redesign, etc)

Last edited by MikeB on 23-Apr-2007 at 12:22 AM.

@MikeB

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IMO a bit of a strange comment coming from an Amigan. The PS3 has already outsold the best selling Amiga model, the Amiga 500, this in just a matter of months. The Amiga 500 sold best in 1989, so roughly 2 years after the A500's release.

Did you know Jack Nicholson was born today?

Quote:

Will the PS3 sell even better in the future? IMO that's not unlikely at all! (Price drops, Home, amazing exclusive games, add-ons, upgrades, slim-line redesign, etc)

I see only doom and gloom there. Allegedly Sony has got large stock of unsold consoles there. It also seems Sony is laying off people from SCEE. Cell interests nobody, Blu-ray interests nobody, Sony must cut prices but they cant get rid of blu-ray...

It gets interesting if you google for words "Sony" and "flop". Seems many predicted in 2006 that PS3 is a flop and at current pace it will be so.

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@itix

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I see only doom and gloom

I think this tells a lot about you, but not about Sony.

Sony is making profits and their shares are doing well, Sony has more than double the amount of employees Microsoft has. Their PS2 games console still is globally the best selling home games console.

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Cell interests nobody, Blu-ray interests nobody,

First of all that's untrue. Secondly the average consumer is still unfamiliar with the benefits Blu-Ray and the Cell processor provide.

In 1985 most Amigans were still indifferent of the Amiga custom chips and abilities (shared libraries?, datatypes? or even multi-tasking?), this because they were unfamliar with the benefits, personally I got interested because my c64 magazine covered and explained the Amiga's strenghts. So I upgraded from the c64 and Atari ST to an Amiga 2000 in 1989, being a 12 year old kid at the time. Friends bought an Amiga as well after they played games like Alien Breed, Super Cars 2, Lemmings, etc on my system. Likewise it's primarily the games which will sell the PS3 to the average consumer.

Last edited by MikeB on 23-Apr-2007 at 08:14 AM.
Last edited by MikeB on 23-Apr-2007 at 08:11 AM.
Last edited by MikeB on 23-Apr-2007 at 08:09 AM.

@itix

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itix wrote: @MikeB That is good because PS3 did not attract crowd in SA and Australia while sales stagnated in Japan. In fact it seems PS3 is in the same situation than XBox (360) is in Japan: it does not sell.

To be fair, there were 20,000 pre ordered PS3's at launch in Australia. Not everyone who pre ordered bothered to turn up to the launch "parties".

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@itix

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Allegedly Sony has got large stock of unsold consoles there ... Cell interests nobody, Blu-ray interests nobody, Sony must cut prices but they cant get rid of blu-ray

Not only allegedly many places are reporting unsold launch consoles and various stores in the UK are now reducing the pricing themselves taking a loss to their own businesses to get rid of excess stock. (Not sure where but previously in this thread you'll find the statements in one of my posting.)

Cell does interest people but it looks to be more academics at this time. Supercomputers all cool stuff definitely but to the Joe User they could really care less. It's about what a system does for you if you're the Average Joe you don't care if it's the fastest as long as it meets your needs. Sony's approach with the PS3 appears to be to let the Engineers make the calls not the market that's why we have a rough product that's getting updated monthly and online services which are in a continual state of . I think this is one reason we're seeing the Wii win the 7th gen along with beating the Gamecube and why we see the 360 beating the Xbox while we see the PS3 losing market compared to the PS2 and that is both Wii and 360 have a better consumer facing story and the PS3 is getting there.

Blu-Ray at current isn't important as it's about 1/2% of the total DVD market, the other 1/2% is HD DVD and the other 99% is DVDs. But each will be more in demand as HDTV grows. I was expecting BR to take off with the PS3 but while there's 20 BR PS3s for each 1 HD DVD player in homes we're still seeing a pretty equal playing field where HD DVD actually ticked up against BR last week. That war is far from over. It'll be interesting to see how the Matrix series does. This summer is the HD release, certainly to increase HD DVD sales.

Don't you just love horsepower vs. torque debates?

@MikeB

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In 1985 most Amigans were still indifferent of the Amiga custom chips and abilities (shared libraries?, datatypes? or even multi-tasking?), this because they were unfamliar with the benefits, personally I got interested because my c64 magazine covered and explained the Amiga's strenghts. So I upgraded from the c64 and Atari ST to an Amiga 2000 in 1989, being a 12 year old kid at the time. Friends bought an Amiga as well after they played games like Alien Breed, Super Cars 2, Lemmings, etc on my system. Likewise it's primarily the games which will sell the PS3 to the average consumer.

I doubt your friends bought Amiga because it had shared libraries or because it had 25 DMA channels. They bought it because it had good games and they could get those games and everyone else was using Amiga anyway.

What if you did not have Amiga? Maybe your friends never got Amiga either.

It is the same with PS2. Everyone have PS2. Everyone have games for PS2. Owning Amiga was a social thing where you joined to the same club with your friends. Technical details wont matter. PS2 is/was not even the best console of its generation. If Wii can continue its success (I think it needs more games) it could be new social thing what people buy because everyone else is doing the same.

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Amiga 500, Efika, Mac Mini and PowerBook

@BrianK

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Sony's approach with the PS3 appears to be to let the Engineers make the calls not the market that's why we have a rough product that's getting updated monthly

Problem with super consoles is that it is very difficult translate numbers to a marketing. There could be a console that does 1900x1200 @ 500Hz with 10 teraflops cpu but will it improve my gaming experience? I am not really Nintendo fan (such crappy toy console maker but I'd like to try Wii Sports. I could afford PS3 now but if I get Wii instead I could spend 300-400e on other things instead.

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Amiga 500, Efika, Mac Mini and PowerBook

@itix

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I could afford PS3 now but if I get Wii instead I could spend 300-400e on other things instead.

That's definitely a HUGE plus for the Wii buy a console and then buy 8 games or by 1 PS3 w/ no games. Is there a surprise the Wii is beating the PS3? It works on the SDTV which everyone has in their home, Sony sells the PS3 as the must have HDTV console, which is good for those 10% of homes that have HDTV, effectively artifically shrinking their own market let alone killing us with high pricing.

MikeB wrote:

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Motorstorm did less well than expected with according to VGChartz as of the 15 of April roughly 223,795 copies sold in North America, a big dissapointment compared to European sales which still has a smaller install base than in North America.

Good news from the UK though, Motorstorm for the week which ended on the 21 of April, the game still outsold all other PS3 and XBox 360 games. The UK is by far the strongest XBox 360 market within Europe.