Microsoft's Xbox 360, Sony's PS3 - A Hardware Discussion
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on June 24, 2005 4:05 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
The Consoles and their CPUs
The CPUs at the heart of these two consoles are very different in architecture approach, despite sharing some common parts. The Xbox 360’s CPU, codenamed Xenon, takes a general purpose approach to microprocessor design and implements three general purpose PowerPC cores, meaning they can execute any type of code and will do it relatively well.
The PlayStation 3’s CPU, the Cell processor, pairs a general purpose PowerPC Processing Element (PPE, very similar to one core from Xenon) with 7 working Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs) that are more specialized hardware designed to execute certain types of code.
So the comparison between Xenon and Cell really boils down to a comparison between a general purpose microprocessor, and a hybrid of general purpose and specialized hardware.
Despite what many have said, there is support for Sony’s approach with Cell. We have discussed, in great detail, the architecture of the Cell processor already but there is industry support for a general purpose + specialized hardware CPU design. Take note of the following slide from Intel’s Platform 2015 vision for their CPUs by the year 2015:
The use of one or two large general purpose cores combined with specialized hardware and multiple other smaller cores is in Intel’s roadmap for the future, despite their harsh criticism of the Cell processor. The difference is that Cell appears to be far too early for its time. By 2015 CPUs may be manufactured on as small as a 32nm process, significantly smaller than today’s 90nm process, meaning that a lot more hardware can be packed into the same amount of space. In going with a very forward-looking design, the Cell processor architects inevitably had to make sacrifices to deal with the fact that the chip they wanted to design is years ahead of its time for use in general computation.
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calimero - Wednesday, July 6, 2005 - link
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050629-5054...btw Anand article was "full of shit" (sorry but that is the right phrase) and it's not odd that Anand pull it. It's quite embarassing for Anand; someone already told: one thing is to write test of CPU speed and speed of graphics card in games... and another to analyse CPU architecture.
jwix - Tuesday, July 5, 2005 - link
Creathir - the article was reposted on other forums around the net. Here is the story in summary - Sony & Microsoft have both overhyped the processing power of their cpu's by using clever marketing speak. It turns out the processor designs are uneccessarily complicated, inefficient at crunching today's game code, and unlikely to be useful when game code finally becomes fully multi-threaded in the coming years. Why microsoft and sony didn't go with an Intel or AMD design, I don't know. The article speculates that both companies wanted IP rights to the cpu, maybe that's the reason.The GPU's on the other hand look plenty powerful. They should both be relatively equivalent in performance to the R520 and the current 7800 GTX.
Bottom line - the new consoles will be quite powerful compared to the previous generation. However, PC's will still be more powerful, and wil remain the platform of choice for high end gaming. Something I was glad to read as I just built a new pc.
steveyoung123456789 - Friday, December 9, 2011 - link
wow your so smart! faggitcreathir - Saturday, July 2, 2005 - link
jwix:I had read a good portion of the article, but had been pulled away (thought to myself I'll just reread it later) and was upset to find it was gone. I have never seen this here at Anandtech, and Anand has not made a single comment on his blog about it. I suppose some fact was incorrect? Maybe Sony/Microsoft decided they would SUE him over the article? I bet the most logical answer is this, Tim Sweeney saw the article, and even though Anand referenced the "anonymous developer", he had earlier mentioned in his blog he had been waiting for some answers from Tim. I would bet this "outed" his source, much like the LA Times outed their source recently for a Grand Jury. This outing probably was followed by a request by Tim to pull the article. I would have to bet we will see it soon enough, reworked, reworded. Whatever the case, Anand, it was a good article, you should be sure to repost it.
- Creathir
steveyoung123456789 - Friday, December 9, 2011 - link
o someone can read!! yay!linkgoron - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
blckgrffn, THIS IS NOT i repeat NOT the article you think it is.blckgrffn - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
Yes it is back up! :DNat
jwix - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
Last night, around 10:00pm EST, I surfed over to the Anandtech home page to see what was happening. I was greeted by Part II of the article (Xbox 360, Sony PS3 - a hardware discussion). Did anyone else read this article last night. I was only able to read the first 2 pages before the article was pulled off the website. Why would they post it and then pull it so quickly? And why has not been reposted since?The story it told was unbelievable - basically, the floating point processing power of both the Sony and Xbox processor was less than half of your average Pentium 4. Anand went into detail on how and why this was the case. His sources apparently were confidential, but definitely industry insiders (ie...game developers). I wish I could have finished reading the article before it was pulled. Did anyone read the whole article?
ecoumans - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
Physics Middleware will be Multithreaded and heavily optimized for Cell's 7 SPE's. This makes life easier for gamedevelopers, and it changes the story about CPU usage... Same story for sound etc.Houdani - Tuesday, June 28, 2005 - link
29: In order to turn off the "sponsored links" go to ABOUT in the top left menu and turn off INTELITEXT.I think this setting is stored in a cookie, so you will need to do this everytime you clear your cookies.