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Sony implies that the PS3 can get 256 gigaflops. Magazines worldwide claim that this is "ten times more powerful than desktop computers" and stuff like that.

On May 12th when the XBox 360 is announced MS shouts that their system can get 1 teraflop.

Today, when Sony debuts the PS3, they claim it is capable of "10 teraflops".


Are they just pulling these numbers out of a hat? How can this be REMOTELY possible? Can someone give me an explanation to give to fanboys who are screaming about these numbers and how the PS3 and XBox 360 can outperform practically everything on the planet, etc, etc?

It seems ridiculously impossible, considering that the Virginia Tech supercomputer cluser with 2,200 G5 processors at 2 GHz apeice is measured at 9 teraflops. And a dual 2.5 GHz G5 is advertised by Apple at 30 gigaflops (which is obviously generous, as they always advertise the maximum theoretical speed). There is no way that the PS3 can outperform Virginia Tech.


Can someone explain this? Thanks.


EDIT:
http://ps3.ign.com/articles/614/614682p1.html

IGN lists "system floating point performance" at 2 teraflops as well, and the CPU at 218 gigaflops. Sony said onstage 10.

Those numbers would have to be theorical maximums. Numbers like this are based on the type of floating point operation that can be completed the fastest in architecture (such as a multiply operation) while utilitizing the full bandwidth of the architecture. Now, I'll call bullshit on the 10 teraflop figure. I can be believe the 2 teraflop figure, but 10 is seriously it.

When it comes to actual, real-world performance, teraflops are useless (and to a certain extent, so are megahertz and bandwidth numbers). It all depends on how efficient the architecture is and how well the software can take advantage of it.

Since it looks like the PS3 has only one Cell processor instead of the rumored three, it is possible that the X-Box 360 and the Revolution will kick the PS3's ass. While it is an impressive peice of hardware, most of its processor is dedicated to math operations - not control operations. So I expect the PS3 to have some insanely fast physics, I think it might get bogged down doing AI and scene traversal (the process of deciding what to send to the graphics chip for rendering), which are logic (not math) intensive tasks. The XBox, and as I understand it, the Revolution are using multiple "genric" PPC processors, which I expect will give them better overall performance. Only time will tell.

The graphics, however, will definitly be impressive! 1080P... DAMN!!!!

Even if the Cell could theoretically hit that speed there's no way it can be fed that much data, at least not with any affordable system.

I'm sure it can pull off 10 teraflops if you do a very specific floating-point operation over and over again.

Arrow Mk84 wrote: Since it looks like the PS3 has only one Cell processor instead of the rumored three,

The Cell was never rumored to have three Cell processors, it was rumored to be 4.6 GHz with 8 SPE's.

Which actually turned out to be the specs for IBM's servers, rather than the PS3

Add the graphics processor into the figure, and you can go from 115 Gflops to 1 Tflop. The PPC chips really only have 115 Gflops performance, total, at most.

For reference 1 Tflop is enough to land on the top 500 supercomputer list. Graphics Processors aren't general purpose, so they can't really count in determining such things.

Praxis wrote: Today, when Sony debuts the PS3, they claim it is capable of "10 teraflops".

<snip>

Can someone explain this? Thanks.

Well the PS3 has a nice silver finish...

I just hope they don't call the online gaming service "SkyNet"

People have been using this article...
http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/05/16 ... 24746.html
To tell me the XBox 360 is backwards compatible.

Along with a firm release date and price point, the other big question surrounding the 360 was backward compatibility. However, Microsoft would only say that the console will be "backward-compatible with top-selling Xbox games." This ambiguous wording could mean that Microsoft will select which titles will run on the next-gen console. However, it could also simply mean that Microsoft is merely being prudent in case some original Xbox titles don't work on the 360, as was the case with some older PlayStation 1 games and the PlayStation 2.

Your take on that? It could be just that they'll be including Halo 2.5 on the hard drive preinstalled as rumored...Most people are assuming that means they're using an emulator that might not be compatible with all games...

In addition to the obvious processor incompatabilities G4TechTV was saying something about how the ATi card has different calls or API's or something from the NVidia card that the developers were using in optimizations, and Microsoft would have to pay royalties to NVidia to be able to use those to play XBox 1 games.

Of course, this was one of the G4 shows rather than the TechTV ones, and the G4 guys are blithering idiots, so I'll reserve judgement till The Kernel or HyperionX or one of the other resident gurus shows up...

Praxis wrote: Your take on that? It could be just that they'll be including Halo 2.5 on the hard drive preinstalled as rumored...Most people are assuming that means they're using an emulator that might not be compatible with all games...

At the very least Microsoft can just recompile the "top selling xbox games" and then dump the executable code onto the harddisk and have the OS detect when you put in a xbox DVD and load the code off the harddisk instead of the actual DVD.

And since Live connectivity is free, they can ship updated copies of the game's code when ever they feel like it and have it picked up.

That doesnt require any tricky software or hardware emulation nor does it require licensing the patents which NVidia hold on the GPU algos the xbox used.

NVidia was not happy with the deal with Microsoft over the xbox. And NVidia holds key patents over the algos used to implement a number of features in the xbox GPU core.

ggs wrote:NVidia was not happy with the deal with Microsoft over the xbox. And NVidia holds key patents over the algos used to implement a number of features in the xbox GPU core.

The DirectX HAL and the HLSL (or whatever they call those in the XBox) should keep that from being a problem in most cases, as long as ATI's implementation is reasonably fast/similar. (IIRC, XBox and the 360 use DirectX). Shader programs and stuff done specifically for that GPU won't work - that will probably be the biggest problem for backwards compatibility. I see that affecting older games the most; assuming I'm remember the XBox architecture correctly...

Arrow Mk84 wrote:Shader programs and stuff done specifically for that GPU won't work - that will probably be the biggest problem for backwards compatibility. I see that affecting older games the most; assuming I'm remember the XBox architecture correctly...

Yes, and the shader programs are generally what make the Xbox games actually look at all reasonable. For all the Xbox games.

This is were NVidia has Microsoft by the balls, they cant do direct emulation of the shader fragments due to patent reasons. Rewriting them is obviously posible, but you might as well recompile the whole game to the new platform while you are at it.