PS3 smoke and mirrors?: IBM stats
I don't pretend to be an expert on matters technical, but reader Crimson Angelus sure sounds like he knows what he's talking about:
At this year's E3 (or thereabouts) Sony proclaimed that their processor could achieve 200GFLOPS! However, according to IBM's white paper, only 155.5 GFLOPS was actually achieved (Table 4). BUT, IBM's tests used all 8 SPEs. The PS3 will only use 7 SPE's, due to manufacturing yield issues.
The efficiency of the Cell is 75.9% (Table 4), with of a theoretical peak of 201GFLOPs (Figure 5)--running 8 SPEs at 25.12GFLOPS apiece (Table 2). Similarly, the theoretical peak for the PS3's processor will be 176GFLOPS, using 7 SPEs at 25.12GFLOPS apiece. Assuming the same 75.9% effieciency, we could easily interpolate the PS3's Cell to be capable of 133.6GFLOPS.
The take home message is that with the PS3 being cabable of 133.6 GFLOPS and the Xbox 360 being capable of 115.2 GFLOPS, the PS3 is not nearly as far ahead of the Xbox 360 as we were lead to believe. we should expect relatively similar power coming from both consoles, processor power, and ease of programming all considered.
Not to mention that one of the SPE's in the PS3 are reserved for the OS and the bottlenecking of the data transfer between the SPE's and the on board memory. I see the 360 hand in hand with a gaming Revolution taking home this next round at least, if not the whole cake over time.
He's working off this data, which has been around for a while.
So much for "twice the processing power," though I'm interested to learn just how many GFLOPS it takes to enter the fourth dimension. Any tech-minded PS3 fanboys care to argue, or are you still busy making fun of the Wii fanboys?
