Game on as networked PS 3 targets Xbox
/v3-uk/news/2001044/game-networked-ps-targets-xbox
17 May 2005, Tom Sanders in California , V3
Sony has unveiled its latest Playstation 3 at an event to coincide with the E3 gaming convention in Los Angeles.
Scheduled to ship in early 2006, the console uses IBM's new Cell processor running at 3.2GHz. Sony claims that this allows the Playstation 3 to outrun Microsoft's upcoming Xbox 360 by offering twice the computing power.
The device sports a slew of networking technologies, including Wi-Fi, Gigabit Ethernet and Bluetooth controllers. The Wi-Fi capability allows it to connect to Sony's Playstation Portable gaming computers.
Sony has already confirmed that the Playstation 3 will support the Blu-ray standard for next-generation DVD discs. It will also play DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD+RW and regular CDs. Games designed for Playstation 2 will work on the new console.
Sony's Playstation is the best selling gaming device in the world and one of the profit engines for the consumer electronics manufacturer. It competes with Microsoft's Xbox and Nintendo's Gamecube.
Microsoft is set to start selling its new gaming console in time for the 2005 holiday shopping season. Nintendo is expected to release its next-generation 'Revolution' device by 2006.
Do you agree?
Outrun the X-Box 360? Not likely...
Apparently the writer of this article was un-aware that the XBOX-360 contains a tri-core processor with the equivalent processing power of THREE 3.2GHz CPU's. Already the Cell Processor's weaknesses have been exposed when Sony recently recruited chipmaker NVIDIA to produce a Graphics co-processor for the PS3. Sony?s original plans were to have the "superior" Cell Processor handle both the CPU and GPU functions.
Posted by Not a fan boy..., 23 Nov 2005
Response to fanboy
Even though microsoft has 3 3.2 ghz cores, sony has 6 on the cell chip. Also sony is using 256 XDR main ram @ a speed of 3.2 ghz and 256 GDDR3 ram. Microsoft only matched that with 512 GDDR3 and 700 mhz of DDR. That is nothing compared to XDR memory. While the XBOX can only handle a teraflop the PS3 can handle 2.
Here are the specs you decide.
XBOX:
Custom IBM PowerPC-based CPU
? Three symmetrical cores running at 3.2 GHz each
? Two hardware threads per core; six hardware threads total
? VMX-128 vector unit per core; three total
? 128 VMX-128 registers per hardware thread
? 1 MB L2 cache
CPU Game Math Performance
? 9 billion dot product operations per second
Custom ATI Graphics Processor
? 500MHz processor
? 10 MB of embedded DRAM
? 48-way parallel floating-point dynamically scheduled shader pipelines
? Unified shader architecture
Polygon Performance
? 500 million triangles per second
Pixel Fill Rate
? 16 gigasamples per second fill rate using 4x MSAA
Shader Performance
? 48 billion shader operations per second
Memory
? 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM
? 700 MHz of DDR
? Unified memory architecture
Memory Bandwidth ? 22.4 GB/s memory interface bus bandwidth
? 256 GB/s memory bandwidth to EDRAM
? 21.6 GB/s front-side bus
Overall System Floating-Point Performance
? 1 teraflop
PS3:
CPU
Cell Processor
PowerPC-base Core @3.2GHz
1 VMX vector unit per core
512KB L2 cache
7 x SPE @3.2GHz
7 x 128b 128 SIMD GPRs
7 x 256KB SRAM for SPE
* 1 of 8 SPEs reserved for redundancy
total floating point performance: 218 GFLOPS
GPU
RSX @550MHz
1.8 TFLOPS floating point performance
Full HD (up to 1080p) x 2 channels
Multi-way programmable parallel floating point shader pipelines
Sound
Dolby 5.1ch, DTS, LPCM, etc. (Cell- base processing)
Memory
256MB XDR Main RAM @3.2GHz 256MB GDDR3 VRAM @700MHz
System Bandwidth
Main RAM 25.6GB/s
VRAM 22.4GB/s
RSX 20GB/s (write) + 15GB/s (read)
SB< 2.5GB/s (write) + 2.5GB/s (read)
System Floating Point Performance
2 TFLOPS
Posted by Cloud, 10 May 2006