Quote:
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Originally Posted by Qbranch
I am a Sony junkie, most everything i have is made by them. (Laptop, Desktop, Movie Cam, Still Cam, Peripherals, PDA, Headphones, Speakers)
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Do you have
this too?
That whole business of Sony using what amounts to a Trojan horse attack on Windows users who use AutoRun to play a music CDs really diminishes their credibility as a corporation. That's stooping to the level of Gator (or, as they like to be known nowadays, Claria).
(The above situation is only exacerbated by the fact that the software that it tries to install interferes with system settings for other applications, and has exploitable security flaws.)
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Originally Posted by Qbranch
DEFINITELY buying a PS3. You left out that it is the most powerful computer you can buy. Period. It has a combined processing power of 14 TFLOPS. The XBox360 comes in around 2.5 TFLOPS.  |
That's got to be the most ignorant statement that I've read all day. It's got hardware that makes it good for performing floating-point operations, sure—but that's a measure of a very specific kind of processing power. You just can't compare floating-point performance with all the other things that a computer might be asked to do.
And as for the teraflop number, it's a lie or an error. Consider that a teraflop is a trillion floating point operations per second. Go ahead and add the speed of the processors on the PS3 in GHz* (what was it, a
Cell CPU @ 4 GHz and an nVidia GPU @ ≈1 GHz), to get about 5 GHz, then pretend that the processors can perform 4 floating point operations per clock cycle (e.g. 4 FPUs between them). That's still only 20 gigaflops—and I'm generously overstating this estimate.
Now, there's a possibility that they're using some sort of trick with the vector units on board to boost FP processing power a bit (can't SSE and AltiVec do this?), or maybe there are more FP capabilities on the GPU, but even then, it's not going to account for a factor of 1000 in the numbers. And as a matter of fact, when a manufacturer quotes flops, they're usually using a very highly-optimized test routine—basically, they design something that performs at the best-case scenario, and then pretend that that's representative of normal conditions.
By comparison, look at real
teraflop-class computers. If that number were sensible, it would place every PS3 at 18
th in the world in flops—just above the 8192-processor ASCI Q cluster of HP Alphas (which is probably worth tens of millions of dollars).
*This add-the-GHz relation is a huge overestimate for multiprocessor systems under typical loads. Never use it to describe PC performance, without a clarifying statement like this one. I'm giving Sony the benefit of the doubt that all of the onboard processors can be used in parallel like this—in reality the architecture doesn't permit it.