Quote: "I beg to differ. The Cell is extremely good at doing float calculations, games are all about these (3D, physics, sound and even AI). The problem with the Cell is that it is so different from other CPUs (360 got a regular CPU with 3 cores) that it is much harder to code for at first. PS3 have a lot more potential but it's gonna take a while, the technology it uses took to long to develop."
I'd seriously beg to differ about the CellBE power, now firstly when we're talking about the Playstation 3 we're talking about Cell Broadband Engine Processor; not the IBM Cell Processor.
There is actually quite a considerable difference, because like most console processing units; CellBE has had it's most expensive components stripped out to save money.
i.e. the Memory Cache for instructions
While it is all really impressive it has 1x PowerPC Controller Core with 7x SPE (basically VMX128) as opposed to having true additional cores. This means while yes mathematically it can be quite powerful, the reality ends up that it's actual data through-put is very very small.
128KB per SPE, really is absolutely no real different between the 64+128KB (Instruction+Data) the Xenon has.
What's more is while we can sit here and say... Well the Playstation 3 has a total of 8 Cores, one of them is completely unusable leaving with with 7x SPE(VMX) Units which in order to get the most out of must be programmed for using __align8 assembler instructions.
Multithread programming is quite difficult even at the higher level on the x86 or PowerPC, let alone trying to share resources at the Assembler level with no message queue.
So that's one hurdle to overcome.
Another is the forgotten fact that the 360 while it has 3 Cores, actually had 2 Hardware Threads (basically 2 processing lines) per Core. As well as an additional VMX unit per Core, which works independantly provided you're not using Mutex Threading, or using a Stall Message Queue that locks down each thread to a single task (very bad multithread programming trait)
So you know Core wise, they're actually on par with each other for what's useable. This is extended because each of the 360 Cores are actually capable of more than just pure number crunching and do no get slowed down by this.
There was a site that showed the synthetic benchmarks to both processors, and the 360 Xenon was actually quite a fairly bit more versitile and powerful than the PS3 Cell.
This isn't to say the 360 is more powerful than the PS3, because nowadays the Processor is generally used less and less; and the real focus is keeping the processor from not slowing down the graphics card.
In this respect, yes the PS3 has got quite a bit more raw power behind it. RSX (GeForce 7800 equivilant) of 1.4TFlop processing power, compared to the Xenos (Radeon 1800 equivilant) 650GFlop processing power shows this huge difference in raw power.
However the reason we're not seeing any real difference between the graphical output of either is because, the RSX is still very mindset with the old GeForce design around a fixed-function pipeline. The Xenos however was the first card to introduce a shader core solution which provides modern Radeon HD and GeForce 8 cards with their abilities to do far more of any sort of task rather than having to worry about the polygons and pixel throughputs of a scene because if one hits a limit the other will have to wait causing either lag or slow-downs.
I mean while people can harp on about the power that has yet to be unlocked from the Playstation 3, the Xbox 360 is still very far away from being pushed to what it can possibly do. Multithreading code for example for a huge number of companies is extremely inefficient; and thse few who have it right are still not getting anywhere close to the theoretical performance Microsoft hoped they could.
Realistically neither machine is really being pushed; but the Xbox 360 is firmly capable of keeping up with the Playstation 3 in terms of graphics and processing for the plain simple reason of design.
The Xbox 360 is designed from the ground up to be an ENTERTAINMENT CONSOLE, the Playstation 3 is designed to be able to provide as much raw power as possible; as such has ended up with a very PERSONAL COMPUTER style internal design.
Xbox 360 has 512MB of RAM, this is to share amongst Audio, Networking, System, Graphics, etc. Everything can use that. Yet at the same time each device also has a small amount of personal buffering ram. So that it never really runs out of data to be processing. What's more is the GPU is part of the NorthBridge (the chipset that controls everything) so there is 0ms latency on all graphics calls between the processor and graphics processor. What's more is all memeber goes though it's internal DDR Controller, which again means that while it doesn't have as large a data throughout as it might have it doesn't need it as the serious reduction in internal latency means no where near as much data needs to be buffered.
In all the console is designed with steaming data in mind, very much like the GameCube that had some games capable of keeping up with the Xbox in graphics and I never played a game that ever dipped in performance on it. Despite the fact that the console from a technical component standpoint didn't match up.
Microsoft learnt that this business is about the internet design of your console as much as it is your external design. Sony on the other hand just wanted to prove they are the top-dog with the most powerful offering.
Sure the games on the Playstation 2 never really could compete with the GameCube or Xbox, but honestly it wasn't that the graphical aspect that kept gamers buying their machines and software. Guitar Hero for example has an absolutely phenominal following, yet it looks like a 3yo got loose with Softimage.
Good games will always sell a console, no matter how amazing they look. Yes graphically impressive games will sell, but they have to come from either a rich predegree or actually have a damn decent game there to begin with!
A game will sell based on how awesome it is, not on how ever many levels of bloom you can use to blind the gamer. Graphics are an important component but not the only one. More to the point Games in ANY form are important for a console success, developers need to be able to actually create games on a console to sodding well get it noticed.
You can have all the technology in the world, but in the end unless you have games it won't see. (please see NeoGeo, 3DO, Jaguar, Saturn, Dreamcast, etc..)
2010-2011 has been the rumours I've heard about new consoles hitting the market. Although no doubt there are rumours about an Xbox 720 in development, can't say there is much of this news internally. There is an Xbox 360 they have been working on for a year with AMD that has more cores and a DirectX10 graphics processor.. as the Elite was suppose to offer a little "extra" but that was eventually scaled back so it had an additional graphics processor to offload the graphics, the smaller 65nm chips and better cooling solution.
I have no doubt the next Xbox is currently being developed and designed, however I'd be surprised if anything became official until they were getting prepared to release. They want to make sure all of the technology works this time and developers actually have enough time to put games together.
Last time, the company I was working for had an Alpha Kit up to about 4months prior to release; then we found out they were quite different in what they could do. So it's more a prevention of having their pants down again. Which you can't blame them, after all the current design is plagued by gremlins according to most 360 users; and while Microsoft have been extremely great about these issues realistically they're never going to take the "stable console" award away from Ninendo.
