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[anotheriori]

Maybe old?

http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/03/18/news_6120449.html
Part of GDC Rantings

The Xenon and the cell are both in order chips. What does this mean? The reason they did this, is it's cheaper for them to do this. They can drop a lot of core--you know--one out of order core is about the size of three to four in order cores. So, they can make a lot of in order cores and drop them on a chip, and keep the power down, and sell it for cheap--what does this do to our code?

Well, it makes--it's totally fine for grinding like, symmetric algorithms out of floating point numbers, but for lots of 'if' statements in directions, it totally sucks. How do we quantify 'totally sucks?' "Rumors" which happen to be from people who are actually working on these chips, is that straight line gameplay code runs at 1/3 to 1/10 the speed at the same clock rate on an in order core as an out of order core.

This means that your new fancy 2 plus gigahertz CPU, and its Xenon, is going to run code as slow or slower than the 733 megahertz CPU in the Xbox 1. The PS3 will be even worse.

-Chris Hecker

 

[xexex]

I think that's old. yeah. interesting tho.

 

[SHOCKIE]

Huh :lol

 

[Izzy]

This means that your new fancy 2 plus gigahertz CPU, and its Xenon, is going to run code as slow or slower than the 733 megahertz CPU in the Xbox 1.

LOL - bollocks.

 

[Particle Physicist]

is it me, or is that horribly written?

 

[Izzy]

FYI, most of this 'info' was taken from that horrible roundtable discussion at the GDC.

 

[SpoonyBard]

The things he say just before and after that are more important than that bit...

 

[Hiro_Kunimi_80]

Maybe old?

This means that your new fancy 2 plus gigahertz CPU, and its Xenon, is going to run code as slow or slower than the 733 megahertz CPU in the Xbox 1.


-Chris Hecker

Good .. So:

3+ ghz (trial core) of Xbox2 can emulate 733mhz Xbox1 cpu... = backward compatibility

 

[Fafalada]

The things he say just before and after that are more important than that bit...

The performance predictions he makes are WAY off base though.

And you don't need to talk to people working on new consoles to find out how CPUs with no OOE perform in general purpose code - except GC and XBox, consoles have always been using in-order CPUs.

 

[SpoonyBard]

Yeah, his numbers are exaggerated. But floating point performance will always be more important to consoles than integer performance and ease of programming.

 

[gofreak]

This is old. But anyway, I like Chris Hecker, learned a bit from his articles on physics, but he's really coming at this from the wrong perspective. Yeah, you're going to have to work hard to get best performance out of the next-gen CPUs, but what's new? The tradeoff is the massive potential performance that's on offer.

 

[Kobold]

That just doesn't make sense, hehe...

 

[puck1337]

is it me, or is that horribly written?

He didn't write it; it's a transcript of a talk from GDC.