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Originally posted by nostromo
That means I guess that the PS3 won't be out 'till Q4 2006.
I admit I don't understand most of the tech mumbo jumbo. They told us the Cell would have 9 cores, whereas the 360 would only have 3 of them. But now they're saying that the Cell only has one CPU, with 7 x SPE @3.2GHz. I don't have the foggiest idea what a SPE is, so...
That means I guess that the PS3 won't be out 'till Q4 2006.
I admit I don't understand most of the tech mumbo jumbo. They told us the Cell would have 9 cores, whereas the 360 would only have 3 of them. But now they're saying that the Cell only has one CPU, with 7 x SPE @3.2GHz. I don't have the foggiest idea what a SPE is, so...
Vector processors are very fast at doing stuff like 3D math, physics, etc. (dumb computation stuff...straight numbercrunching) They're terrible for things such as AI, core game logic, etc. (conditional logic, branching stuff)
SPEs are "Synergestic Processor Elements". It's a fancy name for a tiny vector processor.
The Cell is a regular PowerPC-style processor (AFAIK, a G5/PowerPC 970) and then 8 SPEs/vector processors. The central CPU is more or less the "mother chip", and delegates work to the "daughter processors" to do the processing of vectors.
On the PS3, one of these SPEs is disabled (for economical reasons...lets them use a higher percentage of chips produced), and another is supposedly reserved for operating system purposes, leaving 6 SPEs and 1 CPU available for developers. In effect, they can run 7 different hardware threads at once, 6 of them in vector units.
On the Xbox 360's CPU, it's a 3.2GHz tri-core chip, each of which has a vector unit. However, each CPU can handle two threads of data at once, giving developers access to 6 hardware threads, and all 6 of them can exist in the vector units.
The difference between the two in the real world will be minimial. The PS3 CPU will have a slight advantage in things such as physics and 3D calculations (which is useless, since the GPU does all that these days), while the X360's CPU is more balanced and can perform better with logic, AI, etc.
IMO, the Xbox 360's design is more appropriate for the gaming console.
The reason Sony went with Cell is they originally planned to have more than one Cell on the console, and use that to do the graphics calculations as well. They got scared of MS (in my opinion...) and called on Nvidia at the last minute to make a graphics chip. Hence the off-the-shelf part in the PS3, and the reduced number of Cells in the thing.
Anyway, acccording to Wikipedia, FLOPS is not a very good measure of gaming console's performance:
It seems they've been going downhill since the N64, which is a real shame since I grew up playing Nintendo games, the first video game I ever played was SMB3 on the NES, when I was 5. Now they are being relegated to handhelds for kids to play Pokemon. 
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