about ps3

i have a quick ? maybe someone can help me with....the ps3 says the cpu runs at 218 gflops
and the gpu runs at 1.8 tflops...is that even possible? and why the heck wouldnt they be using
the gpu as the cpu if it can calculate that fast?..thankx in advance

i think you need to steop back and take a look at those figures.

The WHOLE system runs at 2.18 Terra-flops (218 Gflops = 2.18 Tflops)

The cell does 1.8Tflops and the gpu does the rest.
btw the cell isnt like normal cpu. its different to anything that available.

what exactly is a flop? i mean what happened to hertz? also will the cell be a useable thing in a pc? cuz honestly that would be pretty cool.

Floating-point Operations Per Second-- a measure of how many operations a computer can accomplish in the space of a second.

No....1k gigaflops is a teraflop. is goes like this...kilo...mega....giga..tera...exa...and so on. 218 gigaflops is only .218 teraflops. Ish.

alright so how does that compare to a pc system is there a way to find out how many flops your computer can do??

Linpack. It's what the supercomputers run. How to use it I have no idea. Might when I start using Linux.

Despite the high FLOPs the Cell can reach, there is word that the Xbox 360 may still have an advantage. Also, the 360 and revolution use a PowerPC based core, the PS3 uses cell, a whole different architecture, that may hurt it's 3rd party support. Also, supposedly, the Cell is extremely hard to program for, but can optimize what's thrown at it (whatever that means). But, back to the graphics, FLOPs and MHz do not always make the best of the game systems, there's a lot more to the system than the GPU and CPU.

The Cell has a central core based on a PPC core, but I don't what the difference is, besides IO stuff for the SPE's. I've heard things about how it's supposed to be hard to program for, but I hope companies will take the time to do it, and I hope much of it can be done through the compiler. I don't know what you mean by 3rd party support; I think that you can probably run the same source through a compiler and get something that works on the Cell, it becomes a matter of how well it works. If companies care about their image and their game's performance, they'll spend the time to get it right if they have the resources. I don't think it will be a huge problem in the end, but we'll see.






MHz is never infallible, FLOPS actually measures performance. Both Sony and MS have nice graphics cards that are capable of incredible FLOPS scores; FLOPS measures floating point performance, which is very important in graphics.


But there is more (but not much more) to it. Most of it is buses, and from the looks of the presentations at E3, that's not a proglem- IIRC about 35GB/s between the GPU and CPU of the PS3? IO between the optical drive and everything else is drive-limited, and I'd have to check on system memory, but I think Sony went with something abnormal to the PC world. Dunno about MS on that one.

Yes, exactly what I mean, the compilers won't allow it's full potentional to be unleashed, in theory. In theory it also can, it depends on the orginal code itself. As for the central core being PPC, yes, but the other cores aren't. I'm not sure how programming for this works.



Very true, but a lot also depends on games themselves, and how well they are designed/compiled. But the true best thing is how fun the games are.

I just can't wait for it to come out. I'll probably buy a 360 and play on a PS3. Then compare. It's all in the gameplay.