Which Numbers Are Meaningful?

However, whenever you look at console
technical specs, you also have to take
them with a whole truckload of salt since
the game console market has a long
history of making a big deal out of
numbers that don't really matter, or even
making up numbers that have a tenuous
grasp on reality. Remember the internal
data precision arguments?

That specification measurement became useless fairly quickly
once marketing departments start adding different specification
numbers together to get up into 64-bit or 128-bit range (OK,
Turbografix started doing it back when we were still in the 16-bit
era).

Console specifications are a lot like statistics in that you can
really change perceptions by paying special attention in selecting
what you measure and how you go about measuring it. Microsoft
may have been the first manufacturer to announce its next-
generation console, but in order to gain that advantage Microsoft
also had to reveal its console specs first--giving a fat target-list
for Sony's marketing team. Do you really think that Sony would
have even mentioned the 51-billion-dot-product-operations per
second number during the PS3 press conference if Microsoft
hadn't boasted that the Xbox 360 could do 9-billion-dot-product-
operations per second? What if we told you that Sony combined
the CPU and GPU performance numbers to come up with the 51-
billion number while Microsoft only reported its CPU performance
number? The Xbox 360 actually has 33.6-billion-dot-product-
operations per second if you also include GPU performance.

We're not saying to ignore specifications altogether--most of
them are relevant in some way or another. And we're going to
talk about the specifications that really jumped out at us at first
glance. Let's start with the processor. Sony has announced that
the PlayStation 3 will have a 3.2GHz Cell processor that consists
of a PowerPC-based core with seven synergistic processing units.
The PS3 spec-sheet says that there's an eighth SPE reserved for
redundancy--whatever that means. The Xbox 360, in comparison,
has a multicore PowerPC processor that has three dual-threaded
cores that can handle six total threads at a time. You might be
able to call the Cell's SPEs overgrown math units, but we think
Sony's Cell processor wins from a brute power perspective.

Apples to Apples on Graphics?

The Xbox 360's ATI graphics core also
throws a wrench into our graphics
comparison since it uses a new-fangled
Unified Shader Architecture that mixes up
pixel- and vertex-pipelines and makes
comparison to older video card technology
very difficult.

The PlayStation 3
has a pretty
strong Nvidia
graphics
processor, but you
can see how Sony
may be afraid of
the specification
sheet comparison
by the pipeline
number
conveniently
omitted from the
PS3 graphics
specifications.

We're guessing that the RSX graphics processors has a
traditional, non-unified shader engine, so it likely has a smaller
total "pipeline" number than the ATI chip. Even if the RSX's normal
pipelines are more powerful than the Xbox 360's pipes, Sony
doesn't want to risk printing a lower "pipeline" number since
people won't understand that it isn't an apples-to-apples
comparison.

So how many traditional pipelines does the RSX have? Sony has
revealed that the RSX GPU has a 550MHz core clock and has over
300 million transistors. Sony has also stated that the chip is more
powerful than two GeForce 6800 Ultra cards put together. Your
first guess might be that Nvidia simply doubled the pipeline
number on the 6800 Ultra to make the RSX, but you also have to
remember that the Ultra only clocked in at 400MHz. If the
"double" performance measurement is based on fill-rate
performance rather than hardware, the clock speed increase up
to 550MHz is clear sign that the hardware improvement isn't from
a pure doubling of pipelines. We're guessing that the actual
pipeline count is going to be at 24, which is about right for 300
million transistors and, at 550MHz, has just a slightly larger fill-
rate than two GeForce 6800 Ultras clocked at 400MHz. Since the
GeForce Ultra had 6 vertex pipelines, the RSX likely has 6 more
vertex pipes in addition to the 24 pixel pipelines.