Quote: "That 7 core CPU inside your PS3 isn't going to make any difference whatsoever to detail if you can't load all the models/textures you need into the scene to make it look good..."
It's also a fun fact that the PS3 has 8 SPUs and not just 7 -- one is switched off and was originally delivered to make sure that all PS3s had 7 functional SPUs... Goes to show what IBM and Sony REALLY thought of their new tech.
BUT -- and this is a huge but -- the PS3s SPUs, no matter how fast they are, have to communicate through a PPE that is much slower.
Add this to what's quoted about Cell processors from WikiPedia:
"The PPE will work with conventional operating systems due to its similarity to other 64-bit PowerPC processors, while the SPEs are designed for vectorized floating point code execution."
The PS3 isn't really built for current game technology. Maybe it's From The Future, or it's the professional reason that Ken Kutaragi is no longer PlayStation's chief engineer.
Most modern games rely on GPU processing. Shaders, texture compression, etc. Floating point calculations are very much exactly what you DON'T want on your processors, because it's almost never needed. And it's really the only thing the PS3 is good at. Which, consequentially, means that it's not good for rendering modern games. Its architecture is too far away from the architecture that games have come to rely on. The PS3 has more in common with a parallel supercomputer than a game rig. And no, this is not a good thing.
The 360 however, based on the technology workflow devised by John Carmack and others, is entirely focused on how games are made these days and how the workflow can be threaded and more effective depending on how you choose to adopt it.
Some companies use the SPUs for GPU operations, but since the main rendering cycle has to wait for everything to funnel back through the PPE and THEN get transfered to the GPU, render-times are increased by several cycles.
And well... That's about as far as the tech knowledge I have goes.
