Saturday, January 17, 2009

Which one is more powerful - Xbox 360 or the PS3 ??

Gamasutra.com secured an interview with David Shippy who was the chief architect of the power processing unit for the Cell (the engine that drives the PS3). The chip began the research and design process in 2000 when Sony asked IBM for an "order of magnitude increase in processing performance." Ironically it was that very ambition and the design that followed that would one day be the foundation for Microsoft's Xbox 360.

When asked the flame war inducing question, "which console is actually more powerful?"

Shippy tells Gamasutra,
"I'm going to have to answer with an 'it depends.' Again, they're completely different models. So in the PS3, you've got this Cell chip which has massive parallel processing power, the PowerPC core, multiple SPU cores… it's got a GPU that is, in the model here, processing more in the Cell chip and less in the GPU. So that's one processing paradigm -- a heterogeneous paradigm."

"With the Xbox 360, you've got more of a traditional multi-core system, and you've got three PowerPC cores, each of them having dual threads -- so you've got six threads running there, at least in the CPU. Six threads in Xbox 360, and eight or nine threads in the PS3 -- but then you've got to factor in the GPU," Shippy explains. "The GPU is highly sophisticated in the Xbox 360."

"At the end of the day, when you put them all together, depending on the software, I think they're pretty equal."

Found this on IGN.

--
About Vishal

2 comments:

  1. I say who cares, it's all about the games. As they get cheaper, it becomes even less of an issue. If most gamers are males aged 25 and greater, they probably have enough disposable income to own both consoles, if not concurrently, then by dumping the one with less games on eBay/craigslists and picking up the other. :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sure, good point. But I am slowly getting away from playing with Wii because of its lackluster graphics in most of the 3d texture based games. And multiplayer support. 360 kills it. But then again, the 360 does not have super mario galaxy.

    And what makes Wii an easy target for game developers.

    But PS3 and 360 are so much similar, it is hard to have both in your living rooms. Most people who think smarter, will have either a 360 or a ps3 along with the WIi. I have the 360 and Wii, but my living room can not handle an extra gaming machine! even though i had the $$.

    Vishal

    ReplyDelete

© 2008 Vishal V. Shah. All rights reserved. Contents of this web site reflect my personal work and is not representative of my employer.