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Seems no one is talking about PS3 specs

T

tsp_gatmog

Member
Product name: PlayStation 3

Logo: PLAYSTATION(R)3

CPU

Cell Processor
PowerPC-base Core @3.2GHz
1 VMX vector unit per core
512KB L2 cache
7 x SPE @3.2GHz
7 x 128b 128 SIMD GPRs
7 x 256KB SRAM for SPE
* 1 of 8 SPEs reserved for redundancy
total floating point performance: 218 GFLOPS

GPU

RSX @550MHz
1.8 TFLOPS floating point performance
Full HD (up to 1080p) x 2 channels
Multi-way programmable parallel floating point shader pipelines

Sound

Dolby 5.1ch, DTS, LPCM, etc. (Cell- base processing)

Memory

256MB XDR Main RAM @3.2GHz 256MB GDDR3 VRAM @700MHz

System Bandwidth

Main RAM 25.6GB/s
VRAM 22.4GB/s
RSX 20GB/s (write) + 15GB/s (read)
SB< 2.5GB/s (write) + 2.5GB/s (read)

System Floating Point Performance

2 TFLOPS

Storage

Detachable 2.5" HDD slot x 1

I/O

USB Front x 4, Rear x 2 (USB2.0)
Memory Stick standard/Duo, PRO x 1
SD standard/mini x 1
CompactFlash (Type I, II) x 1

Communication

Ethernet (10BASE-T, 100BASE-TX, 1000BASE-T) x 3 (input x 1 + output x 2)
Wi-Fi IEEE 802.11 b/g
Bluetooth 2.0 (EDR)

Controller

Bluetooth (up to 7)
USB 2.0 (wired)
Wi-Fi (PSP)
Network (over IP)

AV Output

Screen size: 480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i, 1080p
HDMI: HDMI out x 2
Analog: AV MULTI OUT x 1
Digital audio: DIGITAL OUT (OPTICAL) x 1

Disc Media

CD PlayStation CD-ROM, PlayStation 2 CD-ROM, CD-DA, CD-DA (ROM), CD-R, CD-RW, SACD, SACD Hybrid (CD layer), SACD HD, DualDisc, DualDisc (audio side), DualDisc (DVD side)
DVD: PlayStation 2 DVD-ROM, PlayStation 3 DVD-ROM, DVD-Video, DVD-ROM, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW
Blu-ray Disc: PlayStation 3 BD-ROM, BD-Video, BD-ROM, BD-R, BD-RE


Discuss.
 
What would anyone say? I'm a programmer by TRADE, and I could only give you a cursory analysis. Some folks will claim it was designed by God himself; some will call it a bottlenecked Playstation 2.5. All you'll get in this forum are agendas.

How about we discuss why the PSP IS THE GREATEST THING EVER.
 
The answer is 52!


... seriously oh my god!
I should start reading this before going to bed, it should bring on the sleep, maybe I can even watch the first hour of the Sony conference :zzzzzzz:
 
sony is going to take an XBOX size hit next gen guaranteed. i'm beginning to think that that's their model. lets just say the ps2 had the same specs and $$$ loss as the xbox of this gen. if it sold 80 million units, it wouldnt be the same loss as MS is taking on the xbox now would it? i predict a loss of $300 per console.
 
What Drinky said. A quick poll of engineers says - it could be a wash between 360 and PS3, depends on what cell can do, and on what each does with its respective RAM. nobody will have any clue til' they get new beta kits for 360 and some kind of working cell HW from Sony.
 
to all you smart techie people. i had a question i was wondering about. in the PS3 presentation, they showed that the Cell 3.2 CPU had twice as many FPU as the Xbox 360's IBM 3.2 CPU. my question is... doesn't the Xbox 360 have two 3.2 CPU's? and therefore wouldn't it have just as much FPU in the long run (?) considering 1 - X360 CPU = 1/2 + 1 - X360 CPU = another 1/2?

or were they calculation both CPU's of X360? if so, I was confused because they didn't mention it in their slide. they just showed "X360 CPU @ 3.2 gHz." and not something like "both CPU's in X360".
 
besides the bandwith and the optical drive, I can't find how is this supposed to be 2x more powerful than X360.

-Same clock frecuency on the CPU
-Unified memory architecture on the xbox, allows to a more flexible use of the resources
(x360=512MB shared memory) (PS3=256 main memory, 256 VRAM)
-We still don't have many details about the GPU so maybe both companies will improve this in the final version.
 
Well actually I'd like to know whats the difference between an SPE and a Core? And more precisely what is an SPE? Does 7 x 3.2 means it has 22.4 Ghz like Xbox has 9.6 Ghz?
 
Yeah, back in the 8-bit and 16-bit days, heck even the 32-bit days, specs were easier to read and digest. More or less, you just looked for the bigger numbers. Today there's so much more info and they're so filled with new phrases and technical buzz words that it's much harder to decipher.
 
shpankey said:
to all you smart techie people. i had a question i was wondering about. in the PS3 presentation, they showed that the Cell 3.2 CPU had twice as many FPU as the Xbox 360's IBM 3.2 CPU. my question is... doesn't the Xbox 360 have two 3.2 CPU's? and therefore wouldn't it have just as much FPU in the long run?
Click to expand...
I thought it had three?
 
shpankey said:
to all you smart techie people. i had a question i was wondering about. in the PS3 presentation, they showed that the Cell 3.2 CPU had twice as many FPU as the Xbox 360's IBM 3.2 CPU. my question is... doesn't the Xbox 360 have two 3.2 CPU's? and therefore wouldn't it have just as much FPU in the long run (?) considering 1 - X360 CPU = 1/2 + 1 - X360 CPU = another 1/2?

or were they calculation both CPU's of X360? if so, I was confused because they didn't mention it in their slide. they just showed "X360 CPU @ 3.2 gHz." and not something like "both CPU's in X360".
Click to expand...

Xbox has three cores. Cell has seven.
 
All I can say is,

homer_drool.gif


Seriously, from Cell, to the RSX, to the RAM, to the input/output ports, to the wireless connectivity, to Blu-Ray, to having 480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i, 1080p, to the host of readable optical media formats support, etc...it just demands a purchase from me(my inner tech-whore speaking). Given what was accomplished on the "hard to program for", "hamstrung by only 4MB of embedded V-RAM" Playstation 2, I really don't how these specs would disaapoint in any way...it's all up to the developers and the games they make now. Power isn't a worry.
 
And PlayStation3 is about where it was expected to be in terms of computation, beyond X360. The big surprise and one of the coolest aspects IMHO is the level of integrated support for media formats and communication protocols: 802.11b/g, Bluetooth, 1000B-T; MS, SD, CF, USB*6; Blu-Ray, DVD, CD, SACD, et al... it's just f-ing fantastic.

The memory subsystem is starting to grow on me, after an initial responce of "Eww." Personally, I'm a bit disapointed with PS3-Cell's clockspeed; but I suppose if I was Sony and could increase yeilds (and profitability) while still beating out the competition handily, I'd do the same. But as a consumer, it's somewhat disapointing.
 
Solid said:
What is there to talk about? It's the most powerfull console on earth. That's enough for me.
Click to expand...

Not really. Xbox 360 has a more advanced GPU. PS3 has a more advanced CPU. PS3 is more bottlenecked while Xbox 360 is more efficient.

It's going to be quite interesting these next few months :D
 
FiRez said:
besides the bandwith and the optical drive, I can't find how is this supposed to be 2x more powerful than X360.

-Same clock frecuency on the CPU
-Unified memory architecture on the xbox, allows to a more flexible use of the resources
(x360=512MB shared memory) (PS3=256 main memory, 256 VRAM)
-We still don't have many details about the GPU so maybe both companies will improve this in the final version.
Click to expand...

Actually, the memory architecture of the PS3 is confusing me, because in the Sony Press Conference, unless I'm remembering it incorrectly, the Nvidia guy said the RSX was able to access ALL of the 512MB of memory available in the PS3. Even given the much faster clocked memory of the 256MB connected on the CELL (3.2Ghz) would accessing that via RSX rather than the directly connected 256@700Mhz cause too much of a hit to use it in such a fashion. Wouldn't that mean that from the RSX's point of view the PS3 has a "unified memory architecture" but from the Cell's point of view it doesn't (I'm assuming the Cell can't access the 256MB@700Mhz connected directly to the RSX).
 
pcostabel said:
Xbox has three cores. Cell has seven.
Click to expand...

Xbox has three PPC cores doesn't it? Cell has one PPC core surrounded by 7 SPEs, not really the same as having 7 "cores" in the sense that Xbox360 has 3.
 
Question I asked before but I'll ask again here, since the GPU seems to be the bottleneck, wouldn't it make sense to lower the power on the CELL if developers can't use it? Or am I off somewhere?
 
dorio said:
I'm not buying it until I see the actual image quality which has always been a weakness with Sony consoles.
Click to expand...

Image quality will be fine, though can't say for sure that all games will be using AA as Xbox 360, but it'll still look fucking great.
 
Did Sony confirm the speed of the Bluray drive? I thought I read 6x earlier this morning, but that seems a little too good to be true..
 
FiRez said:
besides the bandwith and the optical drive, I can't find how is this supposed to be 2x more powerful than X360.

-Same clock frecuency on the CPU
-Unified memory architecture on the xbox, allows to a more flexible use of the resources
(x360=512MB shared memory) (PS3=256 main memory, 256 VRAM)
-We still don't have many details about the GPU so maybe both companies will improve this in the final version.
Click to expand...

Didn't the Nvidia guys say that the GPU can address all of the RAM in the PS3, not just the 256MB that is allocated to the GPU?
 
pestul said:
I thought it had three?
Click to expand...
No, it has only two CPU's. What you are thinking of is Cores. Each CPU has 3 Cores which = 6 Cores total.


pcostabel said:
Xbox has three cores. Cell has seven.
Click to expand...
I was talking about CPU's not cores. In the Sony presentation, where they were touting twice as much Floating Point Units (FPU's) they compares the Cell 3.2 CPU against "Xbox 360 3.2 CPU" and claimed they had twice as much FPU's.

The PS3 only has one CPU. The X360 has two CPU's.

What my question was is.. was the comparison a 1 to 1 CPU comparison? Because if so, then although one CPU in the Xbox has slightly less than half of the FPU, the overall X360 system has a bit more FPU's than the PS3 due to it having two CPU's.

Is anyone in here following my question?
 
shpankey said:
No, it has only two CPU's. What you are thinking of is Cores. Each CPU has 3 Cores which = 6 Cores total.



I was talking about CPU's not cores. In the Sony presentation, where they were touting twice as much Floating Point Units (FPU's) they compares the Cell 3.2 CPU against "Xbox 360 3.2 CPU" and claimed they had twice as much FPU's.

The PS3 only has one CPU. The X360 has two CPU's.

What my question was is.. was the comparison a 1 to 1 CPU comparison? Because if so, then although one CPU in the Xbox has slightly less than half of the FPU, the overall X360 system has a bit more FPU's than the PS3 due to it having two CPU's.

Is anyone in here following my question?
Click to expand...

The xbox 360 devkits run on dual G5s which is where the whole "2 cpu" thing comes from. Xbox 360 will have 3 cores on a single die.
 
I'm more concerned with how much all that is gonna cost me. i mean damn, I'm not a rich man. And that looks like it's gonna be very very expensive.
 
I'm a computer hardware engineer, but not really equipped to really know how much of anything will break down. Hardware at this level really needs to be played with and explored in depth. I do mostly PCB layout for FPGA's, data aquisition, some communications, some memory systems, and occasionaly write various HDL blocks for customers.

Where has Pana been?

That said, I assume that the 360's unified memory architecture might give it the obvious flexibility advantage, but there are significant negetives with having two systems (CPU & GPU) having to share a bus. I mean, won't that chop bandwidth in half right there, and even if everything is perfectly optimised, there will be bus contention issues.

Of course, maybe they have some neat tricks around this.

The PS3 can have both the GPU and CELL go full speed through their individual memory buses, each most likely optimised in page/packet/bus size and frequency for the particular chip. Programming for this should be damn easy. We also know that the CELL has a freakishly fast connection to NVidia's GPU. Any idea how fast the connection between the 360's CPU and GPU is?

Just some random thoughts. The PS3 is going to be a BEAST.
 
pcostabel said:
Xbox has three cores. Cell has seven.
Click to expand...

Wrong, Xbox360 has a triple core cpu (3 identical CPU's in 1 physical core), Cell is 1 CPU with 7SPE's (mini CPU's with less functionality).

Basically according to most B3D members, the systems are basically the same power wise. CELL is more powerful than XCPU but overall the systems are very comparable. Some members are even stating that due to the PS3's RSX GPU having bandwidth issues that XBox360 may very well have a slight (emphasize slight) graphical edge. Along with nVidia stating PS3's GPU would be based on their next geforce card (G70) which is basically a glorified 6800Ultra with more pipes, the R500 actually has more WGF2.0(DX10) features than PS3 GPU will (which is DX9.0 with some extras). The R500 is close to a generation (feature wise) ahead of PS3's GPU, with unified shader pipes and most WGF2.0 (Longhorn basis) specs. The equivilent PC GPU of Xbox360 will be R600 which won't be out till late 2006 or even 2007.

So basically if you wanna fall for the hype train PS3 is GOD, but if you stick to reality which you should, PS3 is just a bit faster than Xbox360, with Xbox360 having more graphical features than PS3.
 
teiresias said:
Actually, the memory architecture of the PS3 is confusing me, because in the Sony Press Conference, unless I'm remembering it incorrectly, the Nvidia guy said the RSX was able to access ALL of the 512MB of memory available in the PS3. Even given the much faster clocked memory of the 256MB connected on the CELL (3.2Ghz) would accessing that via RSX rather than the directly connected 256@700Mhz cause too much of a hit to use it in such a fashion. Wouldn't that mean that from the RSX's point of view the PS3 has a "unified memory architecture" but from the Cell's point of view it doesn't (I'm assuming the Cell can't access the 256MB@700Mhz connected directly to the RSX).
Click to expand...

Yes, exactly. To quote myself from an earlier thread this is how each system looks graphically:

Xbox360:
Code: 
.             / == (22.4GBsec - [i]n[/i]) ==> [R500] <== [i]64GB/sec[/i] == [b][10MB][/b]
[b][512MB GDDR][/b] | 
              \ == ([i]n[/i] < 10.8GBsec) ==> [CPU]


PlayStation 3:
Code: 
 [[b]256MB XDR[/b]] <== ([i]25.6GB/sec[/i]) ==> [Cell] <== ([i]78 GB/sec[/i]) ==> [RSX] <== ([i]22.4GB/sec[/i]) == [[b]256MB GDDR[/b]]
 
how do the shaders pan out? I think the Nvidia guy said the RSX can do 136 shader ops per cycle, and thats at 550MHz. Whats the equivalent for X360?
 
Ok, the fact that the GPU can use the main ram doesn't make much sense to me, the raw data coming from the CPU is more probable to cap the main ram limit than the GFX process/ data but that is in the x86 plataform maybe this configuration takes advantage of the high bandwith between the CPU and RAM, but that was the case in the PS2 config. some specs had more bandwith than the xbox (ex. fillrate) and look at the results.

IMO both have they will be more even, all this fanboy talk about the PS3 being 2x more powerful than X360 is very far from be true .
 
DopeyFish said:
Not really. Xbox 360 has a more advanced GPU. PS3 has a more advanced CPU. PS3 is more bottlenecked while Xbox 360 is more efficient.

It's going to be quite interesting these next few months :D
Click to expand...

That's quite a claim there. The RSX looks to be more powerfull from a raw power perspective, but we don't know enough yet. Whereas the r500 is more elegant with a unified shader architecture, which wont be bottlenecked by the frame buffer. The R500 may be better as part of a real world system, it was designed as a console part.

But the truth is we don't know at this stage; regardless of how elegant the R500 may be, brute force may win out in the end.
 
DopeyFish said:
Not really. Xbox 360 has a more advanced GPU. PS3 has a more advanced CPU. PS3 is more bottlenecked while Xbox 360 is more efficient.
Click to expand...

Wait, back up here. How is the XGPU more advanced?

The RSX's Shaders can compute 92 Dot Products every cycle AFAIK, the R500 can do 48. Just because the R500 uses a unified shading model doesn't mean it's "more advanced" or will have better preformance or be more "effecient."

In fact, a strong case can be made (as nVidia has done) that segmented and devoted shading constructs will be more effecient in terms of preformance per area than having a jack-of-all-trade-master-of-none unified shading unit.

So, how exactly is the PS3 more bottlenecked and the X360 more effecient?
 
garrickk said:
Any idea how fast the connection between the 360's CPU and GPU is
Click to expand...

I believe the X360 FSB is ~20GB/s but I don't know if the GPU has that all to itself. PS3 has 35GB/s between just the CPU and GPU.
 
DopeyFish said:
The xbox 360 devkits run on dual G5s which is where the whole "2 cpu" thing comes from. Xbox 360 will have 3 cores on a single die.
Click to expand...
ok, thanks. that explains it then.
 
BigBoss said:
You've got to be delusional to think that the PS3 won't be the most powerful console when its released next spring.
Click to expand...

You've got to be delusional if you think PS3 is some wonder machine and don't take into account what every dev has been saying or what B3D members (collection of developers/engineers/tech entusiasts) have to say. Also take into account process technology and the only 6 month development difference between the 2 systems. Yeah PS3 will be more powerful, but only SLIGHTLY.

But go ahead and be a blind fanboy and ignore everything.
 
Dr_Cogent said:
Wait, how many pipelines does the GPU have?
Click to expand...

Don't even think about comparing X360's ALUs directly to PS3's pipelines :p

Seriously, it's just not comparable like that at all.

As for the GPU, we need more detail. But twice the transistors, a higher clock, and higher claimed performance peaks could possibly be telling us something..

Each will have different strengths and weaknesses, but my money's on PS3's GPU to be more powerful in general given what we currently know. That said..we don't know that much yet. Hopefully we'll get more info during E3.

Tenacious-V said:
You've got to be delusional if you think PS3 is some wonder machine and don't take into account what every dev has been saying
Click to expand...

What has every dev been saying, post the PS3 reveal? I'm curious, I've seen few comments outside of press releases..

I also think there's a definite and clear advantage on the CPU side, even if you have to work a little harder for it. The GPU still remains much of a mystery, but again, from the little we do know I don't think things are pointing in X360's favour.

The R500 is close to a generation (feature wise) ahead of PS3's GPU, with unified shader pipes
Click to expand...

Unified shaders are just a different implementation, really. It has its plusses and minuses. Just like dedicated pipes. NVidia would argue the time's not right for unified shaders.
 
Tenacious-V said:
You've got to be delusional if you think PS3 is some wonder machine and don't take into account what every dev has been saying or what B3D members (collection of developers/engineers/tech entusiasts) have to say. Also take into account process technology and the only 6 month development difference between the 2 systems. Yeah PS3 will be more powerful, but only SLIGHTLY.

But go ahead and be a blind fanboy and ignore everything.
Click to expand...

Seems to me you and your 'excellent' B3D source need to wait for more PS3 GPU info. All I'm reading there is a shitload of assumptions.
 
Tenacious-V said:
Wrong, Xbox360 has a triple core cpu (3 identical CPU's in 1 physical core), Cell is 1 CPU with 7SPE's (mini CPU's with less functionality).

Basically according to most B3D members, the systems are basically the same power wise.
Click to expand...

So now Xbox360 is MORE powerful than the PS3? :lol
MS marketting must be hard at work on the PS3 disinformation campaign.

btw, 95% of the people at B3D have no clue what they're talking about.
 
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