PS3 smoke and mirrors?: IBM stats

by Ken Weeks on Apr 30th 2006 11:45PM

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?

Source

Tags: specs, tech

Reader Comments (52)

This reminds me of my C64 is better than your Spectrum 48, my Amiga is better and your ST and Snes better than Mega drive etc, etc, days.

The truth of the matter is, how good are these machines if you don't own a HDTV, and how many children, lets face it, parents will be mainly buying them for their kids, will have one in their bedroom. On a standard TV will the graphics look much different between the 360 and PS3? PS3 might have blu ray but if you don't have the equipment to display HD films what advantages does it have, it's not going to replace DVD overnight.

How long is it going to be before the majority of people around the world have upgraded to HD TV's Five years, may be ten, in which case Xbox 720 PS4 will be released so the whole argument begins again.

"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."

I think most people with an ounce of common sense stopped believing Sony's bullshit right after the Emotion Engine/Toy Story graphics/Steven Spieldberg falling off his chair because he was so impressed stories.

I'm not precisely sure why the news that PS3 isn't as powerful as Sony claimed is supposed to shock anyone to be honest.

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