For anyone who doesn't want to read through techie junk , you can just skip to the point at the bottom
Not sure if this article is to be believed , but if it is apparently the implementation of the Cell in the PS3 and the Xbox360's Power pc cores are highly inefficient due to their design . According to the article , the Xbox 360's cpu has very weak single threaded performance compared to an Athlon 64 or even a pentium 4 , Microsoft went with a long pipeline Power Pc design for high clock speeds for PR , and its tiny core size ( 64mm2 per core) which enables cheap multi core vs a larger X86 core eg. P4 ( 144mm2 ) or AMD 64 (84mm2)
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It appears a smart move at first , the longer pipeline allows the processor to reach 3ghz and at the same time enables it to use something similar to Hyperthreading on a P4 , so the 3 cores in the Xbox360 can process 6 threads , but in fact it has a negative impact on overall performance .
Longer Pipeline means more clock and allows for hyperthreading , but it also means less work done per clock and less efficiency , as is the problem with P4s today . Since games today are not programmed to be split up among many threads , and only employ 1 or 2 , the Xbox 360's performance now is very poor compared to a desktop processor , and even when games are split up into enough threads for the 360's strength to show itself ( 2 years at least) , games will still employ MAIN thread with the bulk of the load , and several other threads dedicated to sound , physics etc. the performance will still be less than a multicore Pentium or AMD.
Sony's problem now is that the Cell doesn't have enough bandwidth or cache to feed the 7 cores on the Cell processor , each processor will then have to access the main memory off one shared bus , each request to the main memory creates a large delay ,as each core has to wait for another one to use the bus and get data , by the time you split this up among 7 cores it becomes very impractical to do multithreading on the PS3's Cell , and the single threaded performance isn't all that great.........
BASICALLY Sony and Microsoft built the processors along the cheapest possible lines , they are theoretically good but in real world gaming they are not fast enough processing a single thread , and there are few games that use even 2 , for the Xbox to take off in performance it needs 6 threads to be used !
For sony it has both bad single threaded performance and may have inefficient multi threaded performance due to lack of Cache on the cell .
So in effect , next gen consoles are overhyped and probaby are no faster than a top of the line PC .
that is if any of this stuff in the link below is to be believed...
http://www.megagames.com/news/show.cgi?&idtype=hardware&database=332&page=1&YES TRINIMC IS VERY BORED .
