XBOX 360 processor and the Cell Processor

[17R3W]

2 things,
1) the processor there is the Cell processor, and yes "it's shiny".
2) you can't measure in Mhz and expect it to come out nice...
You've got issues with RISC and not RISC processor (just to start).
Just for starters try measuring in GFLOP (thousands of Floating Point Ops per Second)
(The PS3 claims to be 2TFLOPS)
but the best way to do it is to use benchmarks...

The developer needs to create the same program to run all four platforms...
then check the benchmarks to get a clear idea of how each platform will preform.

[Neumie]

another bottle neck might be the front side bus (FSB). The FSB is the path between ram and the porcessor that data travels on. at the moment the fastest FSB on PCs is 800MHz (or is it 1200MHz). campare that to the speed of the processor itself and there is a big difference. I dont know what speed is on the 360 or PS3 but it couldnt be much faster than a PCs without getting higher costs.
then theres the ram which only goes at 700MHz (although rambus created XDR which goes at 3.2ghz which the PS3 uses 256MB of). all this slows down the machine.
17r3w is right. benchmarks do give a good indication of how a machine will perform in games. numbers alone mean nothing. as someone said (i cant remeber) "there are lies, there are damn lies and there are stastics"

[17R3W]

Thanks for that Neumie,
although I will point out if you read the comments (http://engadget.com/entry/1234000420048777/#comments)
it is sugested that the problem is that the games need to be writen in multithreaded games (Games that are designed to have parts of its code execute concurrently.).

However, keep in mind, that the point stays valid, if no one can write multithreaded games well...

Originally Posted by http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050629-5054.html

While the developers we've spoken to agree that heavily multithreaded game engines are the future, that future won't really take form for another 3 - 5 years. Even Microsoft admitted to us that all developers are focusing on having, at most, one or two threads of execution for the game engine itself - not the four or six threads that the Xbox 360 was designed for... In the end, the more multithreaded nature of these new console CPUs doesn't help paint much of a brighter performance picture - multithreaded or not, game developers are not pleased with the performance of these CPUs.

....techniques that require coders to shoulder the burden of optimally using a complex array of hardware execution resources are no fun for developers.....

...free ride is over for the software industry...Furthermore, the two hardware improvements that coders could count on with each generation of CPUs were more clockspeed and more cache. Clockspeed and cache sizes increases have literally carried the industry along for the past two decades...

...What I have said is that developer difficulties with the new hardware—even extreme, hair-pulling, this-just-ain't-gonna-work difficulties—are not surprising, and in fact have been expected all along by anyone who has analyzed this hardware....

But then again, this brings up a question:
Could the meger Broadway (Revolution) actaully out perform the Cell (or XBOX's Processor) for the first 2-4 years?
I don't know enough about it to tell you... but we will see.

[Neumie]

well multithreaded programming is very new to game developers on all platforms. On pc most developers arent interested in using the technology. however this is just frustation being vented from the developers because they have to relearn how to do pretty much everything. initally they are going to struggle and fight with the technology and the consoles and PC processors wont be used very well. 3 years and a couple of generations of games down the line though and developers will probably be wondering how they ever did without it. the rate at which processors speed up is beginning to slow down.. One away or another developers will have to start using this technology. may aswel be now.