Late last week, Xbox team member, Major Nelson, began using his blog to detail a performance comparison between the
Xbox 360 and the PS3. Currently he's posted Parts 1 & 2 of a proposed 4-part series. He
writes:
Part 1: "When you break down the numbers, Xbox 360 has provably more performance than PS3. Keep in mind that Sony has a track record of over promising and under delivering on technical performance."
Part 2: "The majority of game code is a mixture of integer, floating-point, and vector math, with lots of branches
and random memory accesses. This code is best handled by a general purpose CPU with a cache, branch predictor, and
vector unit.
The Cell's seven DSPs (what Sony calls SPEs) have no cache, no direct access to memory, no branch predictor, and a
different instruction set from the PS3's main CPU. They are not designed for or efficient at general purpose computing.
DSPs are not appropriate for game programming."
But, as Kutaragi has said, the PlayStation 3 is not a "game machine". Go figure. So what do you think? More smoke and mirrors? Shouldn't we be playing games?
