PS3: Playing at a Whole New Level - Cache to Spare at Ports of Call?
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The only part of the CPU that does perhaps fall short of the bar set by the Xbox 360 is the L2 cache, which comes in at only 512KB in comparison with the Xbox's 1MB cache. Of course, you have to bear in mind that the Xbox 360's cache is shared between all three of its cores.
As for I/O facilities, the PS3 is abundant with ports, including six USB 2.0 ports (four at the front, two at the rear), one Memory Stick slot (standard/Duo and Pro), one SD slot (standard/mini), and one Compact Flash (Type 1 and 2) slot. Additionally there will be three Ethernet ports (one each that are 10, 100 and 1000BASE-T compatible); one for input and two for output, Wi-Fi IEEE 802.11 b/g and Bluetooth 2.0. There is also one 2.5" detachable HDD slot. All in all, these ports provide a hell of a lot of communications and connectivity solutions.
Memory wise, the PlayStation three at first glance appears to have only half of the RAM of the Xbox 360, utilizing 256Mb of GDDR3 RAM clocked at 700MHz compared with the 512Mb used by the Xbox (also clocked at 700Mhz). However, in addition to this, the GPU (graphics processing unit) also has 256MB of XDR (the fastest memory in the world) RAM clocked at a circuit ripping 3.2GHz! Bandwidth speeds between the two consoles are very similar, with the PS3 just coming out on top, boasting a main RAM transfer speed of up to 25.6Gb/s.
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