and general processing means what? spreadsheets and word documents?

 

general purpose processing refers to achieving good results for a broad set of applications. its a very loosely used term as far as i know. cell specializes in floating point calculation and parallele processing.

http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/617/617951p1.html
this article describes xbox360's advantage in general purpose processing over cell, but take it with a grain of salt since its released by M$

 

Dude speaka engrish, damn i don't know wtf you guys are talking about....IS it Good or not...LOL

 

so Terry, what do you make of all that?

 

not much, ps3 is vastly superior as far as graphics is concerned. otherwise its up to the games... if you watched the E3 live gamespot shows they are saying that ps3 games are clearly looking superior now. programing for ps3 seems real hard though, managing 8 cores with possibility of hyperthreading is tricky business, you cant program sequentially anymore, everythings gotta be dynamically scalable. you really gotta know your sh*t and your algorithms. I personally failed my Dykstra's algorithm project

 

Translation: John likes chicken, chitlins, watermelon, grits,sweet potato pie, corn bread, sweat tea and Cali bred full blooded red necked white boys with an air force brat upbringing and a pension for being on the wrong side of the law. ohh yes, john likes bad boys.

 

That's what I thought. But I disagree with your previous statement that the 16 teraflops "number" was skewed. Flops is "float point operations a second". Gigaflops/Teraflops has been an industry accepted standard for decades.

I still don't get the claim that the xbox hardware is better suited for "general purpose" than the ps3 hardware. For gaming, it's all about floating point operations, period. What else is there? Matrix math, 3d, physics, everything, it's all about the flops. The fact is games don't need fast int ops anymore.

Even if it's not about games, but media, it's still about the flops(not that decoding a sound stream and applying transforms is very intensive). Regardless, neither of these machines are "general purpose", and neither are those supercomputers.

But I do agree; parallelism is the future, and changes the world. Unfortunately, in typical "general use" applications, there's simply not much opportunity for parallelism.

 

well as far as the number being skewed is concerned, i should have said that the comparison is skewed. you cant argure a number Im certain that ps3's theoretical limit is up there in terms of FLOPS, i just think that the cell in the ps3 can hang with the conventional super computers in certain types of tasks, but it would lag far behind in other types of tasks. thats what i mean by skewed, ps3 can render graphics at such an alarming rate up there with the super computers, but its not a super computer. I understand FLOP is the widely accepted method of comparing processors, its sure better than comparing clockspeed, i think the capability of supercomputers are far beyond the cell despite the FLOPS rating (depending on the type of task). sorta like how todays video cards, Geforce 6800 for example has 4 times the transister count than a pentium 4 CPU, but its very specialized in its function.

as far as the article from MS comparing the the general purpose processing power, i totally agree with you. as far as video games, and most media related tasks, PS3 is much more superior.

 

so you're basically saying that general processing isnt as important as the quantity of flops per sec right? Im just failing to see as you have what microsoft was trying to prove in that boring presentation.

 

yeah... pretty much everything a game needs are floating point calculations. and that type of stuff is highly scalable, so its prime for parellel processing.

 

PGR3 is def. the most realistic if you are looking for that type of game. NFS is an awesome game and I heard really good things about Burnout. Good luck with your decision.

 

http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cell/Cell0_v2.html
this is IMO the best article about the cell

 

I believe the 16TFLOP number for thePS3 is based on single precision numbers... supercomputer rating are based on double precison nubers ... totally different animal. Anybody that has done some programming using both data types would know from performance differences.