Microsoft's Xbox 360, Sony's PS3 - A Hardware Discussion
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on June 24, 2005 4:05 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
The Consoles and their CPUs
The CPUs at the heart of these two consoles are very different in architecture approach, despite sharing some common parts. The Xbox 360’s CPU, codenamed Xenon, takes a general purpose approach to microprocessor design and implements three general purpose PowerPC cores, meaning they can execute any type of code and will do it relatively well.
The PlayStation 3’s CPU, the Cell processor, pairs a general purpose PowerPC Processing Element (PPE, very similar to one core from Xenon) with 7 working Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs) that are more specialized hardware designed to execute certain types of code.
So the comparison between Xenon and Cell really boils down to a comparison between a general purpose microprocessor, and a hybrid of general purpose and specialized hardware.
Despite what many have said, there is support for Sony’s approach with Cell. We have discussed, in great detail, the architecture of the Cell processor already but there is industry support for a general purpose + specialized hardware CPU design. Take note of the following slide from Intel’s Platform 2015 vision for their CPUs by the year 2015:
The use of one or two large general purpose cores combined with specialized hardware and multiple other smaller cores is in Intel’s roadmap for the future, despite their harsh criticism of the Cell processor. The difference is that Cell appears to be far too early for its time. By 2015 CPUs may be manufactured on as small as a 32nm process, significantly smaller than today’s 90nm process, meaning that a lot more hardware can be packed into the same amount of space. In going with a very forward-looking design, the Cell processor architects inevitably had to make sacrifices to deal with the fact that the chip they wanted to design is years ahead of its time for use in general computation.
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Doormat - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
@#22: Yes 1080P is an OFFICIAL ATSC spec. There are 18 different video formats in the ATSC specification. 1080/60P is one of them.FWIW, Even the first 1080P TVs coming out this year will *NOT* support 1080P in over HDMI. Why? I dunno. The TVs will upscale everything to 1080P (from 1080i, 720p, etc), but they cant accept input as 1080P. Some TVs will be able to do it over VGA (the Samsung HLR-xx68/78/88s will), but still thats not the highest quality input.
Pastuch - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
RE: 1080P"We do think it was a mistake for Microsoft not to support 1080p, even if only supported by a handful of games/developers."
I couldnt disagree more. At the current rate of HDTV adoption we'll be lucky if half of the Xbox 360 users have 1280x720 displays by 2010. Think about how long it took for us to get passed 480i. Average Joe doesnt like to buy new TVs very often. Unless 1080P HDTVs drop to $400 or less no one will buy them for a console. We the eger geeks of Anandtech will obviously have 42 widescreen 1080P displays but we are far from the Average Joe.
RE: Adult Gamers
Anyone who thinks games are for kids needs a wakeup call. The largest player base of gamers is around 25 years old right now. By 2010 we will be daddys looking for our next source of interactive porn. I see mature sexually oriented gaming taking off around that time. I honestly believe that videogames will have the popularity of television in the next 20 years. I know a ton of people that dont have cable TV but they do have cable internet, a PC, xbox, PS2 and about a million games for each device.
Pannenkoek - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
#19 fitten: That's the whole point, people pretend that even rotten fruit laying on the ground is "hard" to pick up. It's not simply about restructuring algorithms to accomodate massive parallelism, but also how it will take ages and how no current game could be patched to run multithreaded on a mere dual core system.Taking advantage of parallism is a hot topic in computer science as far as I can tell and there are undoubtedly many interesting challanges involved. But that's no excuse for not being able to simply multithread a simple application.
And before people cry that game engines are comparable to rocket science (pointing to John Carmack's endeavours) and are the bleeding edge technology in software, I'll say that's simply not the reality, and even less an excuse to not be able to take advantage of parallelism.
Indeed, game developers are not making that excuse and will come with multithreaded games once we have enough dual core processors and when their new games stop being videocard limited. Only Anandtech thinks that multithreading is a serious technical hurdle.
This and those bloody obnoxious "sponsored links" all through the text of articles are the only serious objections I have towards Anandtech.
jotch - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
#26 - yeah i know that happens all over but I was just commenting on the fact that the console's market is mainly teens and adults not mainly kids.expletive - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
"If you’re wondering whether or not there is a tangible image quality difference between 1080p and 720p, think about it this way - 1920 x 1080 looks better on a monitor than 1280 x 720, now imagine that blown up to a 36 - 60” HDTV - the difference will be noticeable. "This statement should be further qualified. There is only a tangible benefit to 1080p if the display device is native 1080p resolution. Otherwise, the display itself will scale the image down to its native resolution (i.e. 720p for most DLP televisions). If youre display is native 720p then youre better off outputting 720p becuase all that extra processing is being wasted.
There are only a handful of TVs that support native 1080p right now and they are all over $5k.
These points are really important when discussing the real-world applications of 1080p for a game console. The people using this type of device (a $300 game console) are very different then those that go out and buy 7800GTX cards the first week they are released. Based on my reading in the home theater space, less than 10% of the people that own a PS3 will be able to display 1080p natively during its lifecycle (5 years).
Also, can someone explain how the Xenos unified shaders was distelled from 48 down to 24 in this article? That didnt quite make sense to me...
John
nserra - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
I was on the supermarket, and there was a kid (12year old girl) buying the game that you mention with the daddy that know sh*t about games, and about looking for the 18 year old logo.Maybe if they put a pen*s on the box instead of the carton girl, some dads will then know the difference between a game for 8 year old and an 18.
#21 I don’t know about your country, but this is what happen in mine and not only with games.
knitecrow - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
would you be able to tell the difference at Standard resolution?instead of drawing more pixels on the screen, the revolution can use that processing power and/or die space for other functions... e.g. shaders
If the revolution opts to pick an out-of-order processor, something like PPC970FX, i don't see why i can't be competitive.
But seriously, all speculation aside, the small form factor limits the ammount of heat components can put out, and the processing power of the system.
perseus3d - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
--"Sony appears to have the most forward-looking set of outputs on the PlayStation 3, featuring two HDMI video outputs. There is no explicit support for DVI, but creating a HDMI-to-DVI adapter isn’t too hard to do. Microsoft has unfortunately only committed to offering component or VGA outputs for HD resolutions."--Does that mean, as it stands now, the PS3 will require an adapter to be played on an LCD Monitor, and the X360 won't be able to be used with an LCD Monitor with DVI?
Dukemaster - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
At least we know Nintendo's Revolution is the lozer when it comes to pure power.freebst - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
I just wanted to remind everyone that 1080P at 60 Frames isn't even an approved ATSC Signal. 1080P at 30 and 24 frames is, but not 60. 1280x720 can run at 60, 30, and 24 that is unless you are running at 50 or 25 frames/sec in Europe.