PS3 isn't even technically multithreaded for one.

Um why did Harry get disagrees? It's the truth. Stupid fanboys lol.

He doesn't say anything about PS3........

he was talking about threads. He never mentioned how each thread was running.

he did talk about using single dedicated core.

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"Where the entire rendering system is offloaded onto one core. he said this was a “natural progression” from the multi-core support it had included in previous generation titles. “That balances pretty nicely for most games, where you can run your game logic and simulation in one thread, and your rendering system in another thread,” he explained.

He explained that there was much more than just this going on in id Tech 5 though. He said that there’s a separate thread devoted entirely to “running analysis over what’s being rendered, managing the streaming of information from DVDs and hard drives, decompressing all of it, transcoding the formats that are useful for GPUs, and so on.”
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the idea of using one core and dedicating threads is _BAD_DESIGN_ when it comes to multiprocessing. They are still in the 90s and early 2000s with their tech if that is what they are doing.

single core/single thread dedication creates bottle necks and underutilizes resources that a polymorphic engine that load balances (automatically and manually) would better utilize giving better throughput. If a program needs more power it should seek it where it can find it... if you cage one process to one processor you limit it's abilities but is MUCH SIMPLIER TO CREATE - that is why it is called naive multiprocessing. True multiprocessing will spread the load as much as possible to allow as much computational power to be used on the problem as is currently available.

did you know that 1 single SPE can run several times faster than a 360 core?
an SPE is much better than a 'core', it's a vector processor specialized in heavy number crunching and since it doesn't have to share cache with anyone, it can run 100% in parallel.

whether it's for rendering, data de/compression, physics, skinning, audio, video, signal analysis and processing of all kinds: an SPE smokes anything else on the planet by a huge margin.

in the Cell processor, 6 SPEs team up with 1 PPE (what you call a 'core') which is where the game simulation runs. The PPE is a general purpose CPU that is kinda slow and... dumb cuz it was designed for word processors, database programs and maybe a little math here and there...

so, to sum it all up:

- the 360 has 3 dumb and slow processors that are easy to code for
- the Ps3 has 1 dumb and slow processor that's easy to code for and 6 ultra fast vector processors that are hard to code for.

As time goes by, people are learning to code on SPEs and amazing stuff is coming up that will leave the 360 in the dust. Look at killzone2, but that's only the beginning.

The Cell is truly an amazing piece of hardware and john carmack will pull his head out of his ass at some point to recognize it, I have no doubt about it.

too bad for the 360 with its 3 dumb cores

yes. too bad for 360 with its developer-friendly 3 cores with two threads each. exactly mimicking the simple PC development environment. yes. too bad.

"developer-friendly"
translation:
"idiocratic"

"two threads each": hyperthreading doesn't mean * 2, far from it: the best you can get is * 1.25 on a P4, i'll be generous and give you * 1.5 on 360 :)

OTOH, SPEs have 2 execution units that can execute in parallel: a good coder can get 80% dual execution which translate to * 1.8. And then there's software DMA control which unlike a cache, allows programmers to completely avoid L2 cache misses which are huge on consoles.

http://www.2cpu.com/article...
http://www.tomshardware.com...

it's like a ford taurus against a racing ferrari: the ford has cup holders and an automatic transmission so it's 'driver friendly'

LOL!