And the trash talk goes on

This time comming from the PCultists:

"Right now, from what we?ve heard, the real-world performance of the Xenon CPU is about twice that of the 733MHz processor in the first Xbox. Considering that this CPU is supposed to power the Xbox 360 for the next 4 - 5 years, it?s nothing short of disappointing. To put it in perspective, floating point multiplies are apparently 1/3 as fast on Xenon as on a Pentium 4."

"The reason for the poor performance? The very narrow 2-issue in-order core also happens to be very deeply pipelined, apparently with a branch predictor that?s not the best in the business. In the end, you get what you pay for, and with such a small core, it?s no surprise that performance isn?t anywhere near the Athlon 64 or Pentium 4 class."

"The Cell processor doesn?t get off the hook just because it only uses a single one of these horribly slow cores; the SPE array ends up being fairly useless in the majority of situations, making it little more than a waste of die space. "

"We of course asked the obvious question: would game developers rather have 3 slow general purpose cores, or one of those cores paired with an array of specialized SPEs? The response was unanimous, everyone we have spoken to would rather take the general purpose core approach. "

"The most ironic bit of it all is that according to developers, if either manufacturer had decided to use an Athlon 64 or a Pentium D in their next-gen console, they would be significantly ahead of the competition in terms of CPU performance. "

"While the developers we've spoken to agree that heavily multithreaded game engines are the future, that future won't really take form for another 3 - 5 years. Even Microsoft admitted to us that all developers are focusing on having, at most, one or two threads of execution for the game engine itself - not the four or six threads that the Xbox 360 was designed for."

"In the end, the more multithreaded nature of these new console CPUs doesn't help paint much of a brighter performance picture - multithreaded or not, game developers are not pleased with the performance of these CPUs. "

We all know that the upcoming systems will have killer GPUs, but the bigger they are, the harder they fall. A big GPU is useless if it is processor bottlenecked. The PC community saw this problem up close with the recent launch of the 7800GTX (similar to the PS3's future GPU). Although the chip is blazing fast, no CPU exists to supplement it, so little jump in performance is gained.</i>

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2461

If that's true, then that was pretty damn shortsighted of Sony & M$

Hhhm, so in a couple of years my mobile will out perform a 360? Cool.

The only thing worse than a console cpu, is a mobile processor... unless this is 1992 again


I thought the IBM G5 was comparable in performance to AMD?

Hhhm, you lost me now Spud. My PC runs faster than anyone else's with a comparable setup, I reckon because I run a lean setup and alot of maintenance.

A G5 is what? The G8 before a few members joined? LOL

Actually that's lost me now, wtf are you talking about?

I don't see how anything i posted doesn't make sense? Unless you are confused by the G5? The other comment is true, mobile processors (ARM/XSCALE) being anything other than pathetically shit, they are going nowhere fast, they are way back in time in terms of power.

If you meant you don't know what an IBM G5 is, that's what so called "Power PC" is aka The IBM G5 was the first 64bit processor, and is what apple was using. The geeks in the first post are slating these processors they've not even touched, but the Power PCs were running the Xbox2 demos, and I thought these were comparable to AMD64 in terms of power.

The gamecube has a Power PC processor, the Revolution will have one too.

Yeah I know what you are on about Spud, just in one of those moods today.

On a sidenote, I actually saw the 64 bit XP running on an AMD 64 the other day, was actually pretty impressive. In fact, I am already planning my next upgrade for Q1 2006.

impressive in what way?
Gaming/speed/etc?

Dunno really, just "seemed" smoother.

It was faster, but then it was a higher clock speed than mine anyway so this was expected. It was more the fact it just seemed to not struggle when you asked alot from it. It really was great at multi-tasking compared to mine.

I am gonna pop round the fella's house again next week to do some work on his system, so I will try pushing it alot more to see how much better it is.

The thing I really noticed was he was running a distributed computing app that was using the CPU, averageing 30-40%, and was also converting a 700 meg AVI to DVD via Nerovision Express, and the bastard still managed to complete a conversion as fast as I could doing it on it's own. I will get the specs for his machine if I remember.

I know many other factors come into play, and it has to be noted he also has 1.5gig of RAM, and he moaned it was not enough!!!!!!! Video card was an ATI X800 I think. The tosser also has a SATA setup I believe, it really is a nice machine.

I gave a version a whirl that still had a fair whack of bugs in, but to be honest, it didn't seem that much different

ATIs 64bit drivers are absolutely wank, Nvidia is trouncing ATI @ 64bit, just like they do with linux drivers.

Thing is, I ain't really into gaming like I said before, so I tend to py little attention to the vid card side of things.

His vid card fucking blew mine away, then again I am running a 9200 SE Radeon with 128 meg.

As for bugs, didn't use it enough to really notice anything, but I will try to give it a pasting next time I see the geyser.

Anyone know of any specific bugs I could look out for?

try install a program / driver, that normally puts an end to it

If you look in the error log it will tell you what f*ck ups have occured/programs have crashed

I was reading the tests, and whilst performance wasn't really better, programs like IE64 wouldn't crash under strain which is impressive. What isn't impressive is that there's been 64bit linux distros for ages before m$, which is just sad but not unsurprising.