Modoman said:
the xbox will be left in the dust. the ps3 will be able to handle multiple threads without question, as it will have essentially 7 cores. that is the purpose of using the chip in the ps3.
Ahhh sony has plagued the mind of many people as they usually do. Yes i guess you could say the Cell processor has essentially 7 cores (specifically called SPE's), however what Sony doesnt' say is that the SPE's are very specific, meaning they will go completly unused unless specific instructions are given to each one. Also, the SPE's work more like hyperthreading.....not really a full core, nor are they running at 3.2ghz. Furthermore, as amazing as the Cell looks on paper, 1. its going to be EXTREMLY difficult to program for (in fact at one point, The Cell was supposed to handle everything in the PS3, but after seeing its limitations in some departments they realized they needed a dedicated graphics chip.) So the best parts of the Cell are going to be limited by the GPU. In the end, i think xbox and sony's powerhouses are really a lot more similar then what most poeple think. To top it off, xbox360 uses a PowerPC chip, something developers are very used to developing on meaning better quality games are def. coming onto the xbox360 long before the ps3. Now the real winner of this war is IBM seeing they have a hand in all three processor, not bad at all IBM.
Just wanted to add a statement that IBM made:
"According to recent testing by IBM [7], SPEs can be expected to reach 75.9% of their theoretical performance."