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Dual Core Consoles?

C

CaptCanada

Weaksauce
Joined
Jun 3, 2004
Messages
81
Hi

Just wondering if/when dual core consoles will start appearing? Does it make sense for the big three console makers to release the next gen consoles as featuring dual/quad cores?

Thanks!
 
CaptCanada said:
Hi

Just wondering if/when dual core consoles will start appearing? Does it make sense for the big three console makers to release the next gen consoles as featuring dual/quad cores?

Thanks!
Click to expand...

They have been for years. The Sega Saturn while not really dual core, used 2x Hitachi SH2 cpu's in parrallel which is essentially the same.

At the moment the Xbox 360 uses a tri-core cpu.
 
TheGuyOnTheCouch said:
Since like the PC Engine.

Seriously though, the PS3 has a 7-Core CPU.
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Not exactly. The PS3 has a single general-purpose core and 7 SPEs which are very good at floating-point math. Functionally it is not equivalent to an 8-core CPU. The Xbox360 is the only console right now that has multiple general-purpose cores.
 
yeah, most consoles have had more than one processor in them. again, the 360 is the only one with multiple general cores, but consoles have been doing the multiple processor thing for years.

the PS2 had 3 I believe. which made it semi-difficult to program for, but yeilded really great particle effects and as long as textures were managed well, it could spit geometry all day (see: Zone of the Enders: Second Runner, Jak 2 and 3, MGS 3, etc.)
 
Sagan said:
consoles sux. PCs are better at gaming.
Click to expand...

O man I love going into forums that I don't care about and posting comments that no one gives a rats ass about because its an opinion that everyone chalks up to ignorance too!!:D
 
The way technology is progressing, it will always be more cost-effective to have a single high-performance GPU than two running in SLI/Crossfire mode.

As pointed out, the 360 currently uses a "true" tri-core CPU. Others have used dual CPUs in the past as well.
 
I haven't really been following the tech specs of the consoles lately, so I guess it shouldn't have come as a surprise the the new next gen systems have multiple cores and/or multiple gpu's as well.

Thanks for all the great replies.
 
chameleoneel said:
yeah, most consoles have had more than one processor in them. again, the 360 is the only one with multiple general cores, but consoles have been doing the multiple processor thing for years.

the PS3 had 3 I believe. which made it semi-difficult to program for, but yeilded really great particle effects and as long as textures were managed well, it could spit geometry all day (see: Zone of the Enders: Second Runner, Jak 2 and 3, MGS 3, etc.)
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I'm guessing you're talking about the PS2. It's not quite a true multi-core system. The latter revisions had a unified emotion engine, which consisted of two vector units and a general purpose MIPS variant CPU all in one chip. But yes, the EE was actually better than the Xbox at generating pure geometry, and particle effects and full screen transparencies were also better. Everything else was the Xbox's territory though.
 
Sagan said:
consoles sux. PCs are better at gaming.
Click to expand...

Wow you must have a lot of friends with those one-liners.

I can start another on going debate about why i prefer a console over a pc, but there are numerous threads here already, you pick one and be happy there.
 
Its interesting too how the different consoles approach the chips and their power.

For example (this is not a flame bait or anything, so dont make it that!) the fact is the PS3 went for a more powerful CPU and the 360 went for a more powerful GPU.

Its amazing that even though they allocate their power differently, both can end up playing the same game at the same quality (most of the time..if it is deved properly).

It really is amazing how these Video game architectures get put together. Must be a PITA to be a game dev that has to learn the new ones each round!
 
Sony has always done "crazy"/odd stuff with their consoles; they like having specialized chips and cores for the console functionality; even the SPU (Sound) on the PS2 is dual-core; the first does volume/panning, the second applies effects. Sega multiplied their hardware by 2 for the Saturn to compete with the PlayStation, but that backfired awesomely. I think everything since the NES has always had discrete chips handling different areas of the console (vid, sound), though that's kind of obvious.

But I think following the PC "version" of the definition (multiple identical cores running on the same die/speed/etc), only the 360 has it AFAIK, and I remember reading something about each of those cores running two symmetrical threads, but don't quote me on that. The PS3 has the custom PPC core + 7 floating-point units that gobble up math, but IMO shouldn't be classed as 'multi-core' seeing as those SPEs are not functionally identical to the core...
 
Another way of looking at it (basically restating what movax said):
PS3 Cell = heterogeneous multi-core processor
360 Xenon = homogeneous multi-core processor
 
movax said:
But I think following the PC "version" of the definition (multiple identical cores running on the same die/speed/etc), only the 360 has it AFAIK, and I remember reading something about each of those cores running two symmetrical threads, but don't quote me on that.
Click to expand...

Youre right, the each 360 core can run two threads..
 
Charlie Hustle said:
Youre right, the each 360 core can run two threads..
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Ah, so that is the case. Lots of heavy horsepower in the 360 indeed then with its processor, though I thought the general "opinion" was that between the PS3/360, one won in the CPU dept, the other won in the GPU dept. Sort of like the PS2 and DC.
 
movax said:
I thought the general "opinion" was that between the PS3/360, one won in the CPU dept, the other won in the GPU dept. Sort of like the PS2 and DC.
Click to expand...

Most people believe the PS3 has the more powerful CPU and the 360 has a more powerful GPU. As far as "why", I haven't the foggiest clue as I am basically a technology moron.
 
The PS3's CPU is better than the 360's at doing the types of calculations that are needed in games. However, the 360's GPU is quite a bit better. When it comes down to it the 360 is theoretically capable of producing better graphics than the PS3 since the CPU is not the limiting component in either console, although effectively they're about on par since a lot of games are cross-platform ports which look the same on both, and the exclusive games are also about on par since the hardware limitations haven't really been reached yet.
 
BladeVenom said:
Neither one has a good CPU.
Microsoft's Xbox 360 & Sony's PlayStation 3 - Examples of Poor CPU Performance
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I dont even have to read the link to see where youre going with this. The CPU's purpose in consoles are to play games, thats all, not to multitask like desktops and laptops. They (PCs)need those types of cpu's in them, and us consumers need them.
Also consoles prices would be significantly more expensive if it had even multiple pentium d's inside.
Basically, theyre good enough for what are supposed to do. And please everyone, stop comparing consoles(3-400 dollars) to top of the line PC's (2-3000 dollars).
 
Charlie Hustle said:
I dont even have to read the link to see where youre going with this. The CPU's purpose in consoles are to play games, thats all, not to multitask like desktops and laptops. They (PCs)need those types of cpu's in them, and us consumers need them.
Also consoles prices would be significantly more expensive if it had even multiple pentium d's inside.
Click to expand...

The first Xbox basically had a PC CPU and it wasn't any more expensive at launch. An AMD dual core CPU is under $50 now.

Basically, theyre good enough for what are supposed to do. And please everyone, stop comparing consoles(3-400 dollars) to top of the line PC's (2-3000 dollars).
Click to expand...

Those consoles costed a lot more than $300 to $400 to make. Both Sony and MS sold them for huge losses. Please everyone, stop this $2,000-3,000 B.S. Few gamers spend that much on a PC.
 
Charlie Hustle said:
I dont even have to read the link to see where youre going with this. The CPU's purpose in consoles are to play games, thats all, not to multitask like desktops and laptops. They (PCs)need those types of cpu's in them, and us consumers need them.
Also consoles prices would be significantly more expensive if it had even multiple pentium d's inside.
Basically, theyre good enough for what are supposed to do. And please everyone, stop comparing consoles(3-400 dollars) to top of the line PC's (2-3000 dollars).
Click to expand...

I was actually just about to post about the difference between in-order execution and out-of-order execution. It isn't a secret that the real-world performance of these processors isn't very good simply because of that, but the reason they're used is to keep costs down. You're lying to yourself if you believe that they couldn't benefit from the more complex and robust architecture of even an A64; it would increase performance significantly if they were out of order execution units. If anyone is interested in more information about the difference between the two, the wiki article has a short and sweet description.

Also, I agree with 'BladeVenom'; quit with the $2-3k computer costs bullshit. Just about everyone on [H] knows that is a complete lie, made worse now that we have sub-$200 quad core procs and $200 videocards that can supply hi-res gaming with good levels of AA/AF.

In any event, everyone should realize that this thread should end now before this just becomes a flamefest.
 
BladeVenom said:
The first Xbox basically had a PC CPU and it wasn't any more expensive at launch. An AMD dual core CPU is under $50 now.



Those consoles costed a lot more than $300 to $400 to make. Both Sony and MS sold them for huge losses. Please everyone, stop this $2,000-3,000 B.S. Few gamers spend that much on a PC.
Click to expand...

Yeah youre right, but thats how much they cost us consumers. So youre saying that that amd processor can outperform whats inside the a console?? Also, theyre 50 dollars now, how much did they cost about two years ago? When they started making these consoles?

quadnad said:
I was actually just about to post about the difference between in-order execution and out-of-order execution. It isn't a secret that the real-world performance of these processors isn't very good simply because of that, but the reason they're used is to keep costs down. You're lying to yourself if you believe that they couldn't benefit from the more complex and robust architecture of even an A64; it would increase performance significantly if they were out of order execution units. If anyone is interested in more information about the difference between the two, the wiki article has a short and sweet description.

Also, I agree with 'BladeVenom'; quit with the $2-3k computer costs bullshit. Just about everyone on [H] knows that is a complete lie, made worse now that we have sub-$200 quad core procs and $200 videocards that can supply hi-res gaming with good levels of AA/AF.

In any event, everyone should realize that this thread should end now before this just becomes a flamefest.
Click to expand...

You guys have to be kidding me with this bullshit. One person ask about processors in consoles, and you guys debunk the thread about pc processors. A pc running a game with a killer card and a killer processor and around 2 gigs of ram can outperform any console. Im an IT person, i know that. but i do know the cost of anything in that neighborhood. And im not talking about no damn cheap ass PC. anything with these specs will run you at least a grand, and thats without a killer card (8800), just an average to above average one.
Look at my sig below, that hp one costed me a grand last year. I was gonna build one, but for what? When the price was gonna run me the same price with the OS and software installed.
 
Charlie Hustle said:
WYou guys have to be kidding me with this bullshit. One person ask about processors in consoles, and you guys debunk the thread about pc processors. A pc running a game with a killer card and a killer processor and around 2 gigs of ram can outperform any console. Im an IT person, i know that. but i do know the cost of anything in that neighborhood. And im not talking about no damn cheap ass PC. anything with these specs will run you at least a grand, and thats without a killer card (8800), just an average to above average one.
Click to expand...

The out of order execution units on a PC processor (as well as the architecture in general) is far more robust than those in order execution units you find in the current consoles. The OPs question was making a general comment as to the number of cores in these consoles, and I thought it would be valuable for him to realize that the number of cores in these consoles doesn't directly relate to those you will find in a PC.

Being an "IT person," you should know that for a grand (sans monitor, and speakers) you can build a quad core system with an 8800 quite easily. Check out the "general hardware" section for some ideas if you're having trouble.
 
deathstar550 said:
Another way of looking at it (basically restating what movax said):
PS3 Cell = heterogeneous multi-core processor
360 Xenon = homogeneous multi-core processor
Click to expand...
There are already terms for this: symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) and asymmetric multiprocessing.

I think it's a bit of an oversimplification to say that the Cell is "better" at running game code than the 360's CPU. The PS3 has some interesting performance advantages in a few situations, but most of that is offset by the difficulty of working with a non-SMP architecture.
 
erwos said:
There are already terms for this: symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) and asymmetric multiprocessing.

I think it's a bit of an oversimplification to say that the Cell is "better" at running game code than the 360's CPU. The PS3 has some interesting performance advantages in a few situations, but most of that is offset by the difficulty of working with a non-SMP architecture.
Click to expand...

not to start a flamewar up again, but imho, the dude that decided the Cell was a good idea for a gameconsole needs to be put into a straightjacket in a padded room. The same applies in lesser amount to the x360 cpu (for the life of me i cant remember which is xenon and xenos).

basically the cell rocks in heavily vectorized floating point stuff with small data/instruction sets since it can call on its SPE's. For branch heavy integer code (game stuff) it has to rely on the single stripped down ppc core. The 360 is also lacking in branch prediction and such, but at the very least can run six general purpose threads at the same time.

the whole huge floating point power house is a nice idea, if it werent for the fact that most floating point stuff in a game is handled by the graphics card these days. I seem to remember an anandtech article stating that a single modest amd64 cpu would outperform both the cell and the x360 cpu in terms of general gaming performance.

Cell is an awesome chip, but not for a playstation, just stick one on a pci-e card and start annoying nvidia (with their GPGPU cards aka cuda stuff), stick a few in a blade/1u server and build a stonkingly powerfull FPU cluster, stick it in a gameconsole, and you end up looking like a fool, imho

i prefer the x360 cpu, but they shouldnt have stripped out the single-thread performance enhancing features such as advanced branch prediction
 
Sony has always always been a fan of the MIPS architecture; all their consoles up to the PS3 were based on a subset of the MIPS core + sub-units Sony added on silicon. They loved the massively parallel pipeline, and its ability to eat large amounts of floating point data very quickly (IIRC MIPS III/IV have 32 general purpose registers). The PS2 EE has a MIPS core + two VUs, one of which is SIMD/VLIW, and does the physics/vertex calcs for the GS that it shoots out later over DMA.

x86 I believe originated when the CISC attitude was still the cat's ass; paying attention to the roadmap and modern descendants of the original arch, they are trying very hard now to become more RISC-like in the area of crunching that floating-point heavy math. Everyone saw what happened to Intel and the P4 with its fucking huge pipeline; you get halfway through the pipeline, hit a branch instruct, and dump everything you just did and start over at the jmp location; only clockspeed saved it from a total disaster.

Console CPUs (with the exception of the Xbox) have almost always been functionally and fundamentally different from PC CPUs, though one could argue that the PPC-derived ones share some relation to the old Macs.

Of course, if the development tools for either console (in this case the compiler) are absolute shit, and fail horribly at optimizing for their architecture, you've entirely pissed away the point of having that type of CPU. And last I looked, it was giving PhDs a hard time to make a decent optimizing compiler to deal with multithreading; any CPU (I think in CS there's some type of deadlock/thread sync problem, dining philosophers?)
 
movax said:
Of course, if the development tools for either console (in this case the compiler) are absolute shit, and fail horribly at optimizing for their architecture, you've entirely pissed away the point of having that type of CPU. And last I looked, it was giving PhDs a hard time to make a decent optimizing compiler to deal with multithreading; any CPU (I think in CS there's some type of deadlock/thread sync problem, dining philosophers?)
Click to expand...
I completely agree. Let it be said out loud for all to hear: there is no magical library or compiler that is suddenly going to make the Cell any less of a pain-in-the-ass to program for.
 
Another thing about console CPU cores is that they don't try to be generalized like a standard CPU. They focus on aspects that traditionally CPU's have required extensions to accelerate. Take the whole MMX and SSE instruction sets. When those were initially introduced, all the talk behind what it could do could be summed up in the basic advertising. Games and multimedia would run better. The line between being a console and being a PC really got blurred when the first XBox came out. Today, the PS3 runs Linux just fine. I'm sure with some hacks the XBox 360 could too. We have PS3 folding@home now.

Getting a high end console now is now reaching the realm of the "average" computer. Look at the launch prices of the Ps3 and the XBox 360. Once you had all the parts needed to get up and running, the PS3 had you at the $1k mark and the 360 wasn't that far off from there. don't forget that you SHOULD include the price of a HDTV in the mix too to be really fair with a PC as a gaming machine. When all is said and done for my PC setup versus my PS3 setup, my PS3 setup costs MORE than my PC. Yeah I have $2K invested into my current rig at the moment, but given today's options, you can easily slash $700 off of the price, if not more.
 
Slade said:
Don't forget that you SHOULD include the price of a HDTV in the mix too to be really fair with a PC as a gaming machine.
Click to expand...

This is getting completely off-topic, but I just wanted to chime in here. I really disagree with you about including the cost of an HDTV when considering a console. One reason is that many people buying these very expensive consoles already own HDTVs. So there is really no reason that the cost of the HDTV should be a concern to them when buying the system.

Secondly, even if you don't own a HDTV, you don't have to buy one to enjoy the systems. Do they make the games look better? Of course. But you will still have a very enjoyable experience without an HDTV.

Finally, an HDTV will be used for MUCH more than just playing games. You will get your video game system looking better, but you will also get better looking television and movies (dvd, hd-dvd, blu-ray). I know many people that own HDTVs that don't care about video games at all. I bought my HDTVs to enjoy television and movies. Making my game systems look better is just a nice addition.
 
The_Law said:
This is getting completely off-topic, but I just wanted to chime in here. I really disagree with you about including the cost of an HDTV when considering a console. One reason is that many people buying these very expensive consoles already own HDTVs. So there is really no reason that the cost of the HDTV should be a concern to them when buying the system.

Secondly, even if you don't own a HDTV, you don't have to buy one to enjoy the systems. Do they make the games look better? Of course. But you will still have a very enjoyable experience without an HDTV.

Finally, an HDTV will be used for MUCH more than just playing games. You will get your video game system looking better, but you will also get better looking television and movies (dvd, hd-dvd, blu-ray). I know many people that own HDTVs that don't care about video games at all. I bought my HDTVs to enjoy television and movies. Making my game systems look better is just a nice addition.
Click to expand...

I'll wager that more people own monitors than own HDTVs. More importantly, isn't the entire point of this "nex gen" to improve the graphical fidelity of the games? Why bother with one of these consoles (the Wii is another matter) unless you've got an HDTV or PC monitor to play on? Otherwise a comparable computer would cost far far less if it only had to display such a small resolution.

and finally, monitors are used for "MUCH more than just playing games." I don't have to explain myself here.
 
quadnad said:
I'll wager that more people own monitors than own HDTVs. More importantly, isn't the entire point of this "nex gen" to improve the graphical fidelity of the games? Why bother with one of these consoles (the Wii is another matter) unless you've got an HDTV or PC monitor to play on?
Click to expand...
So, if we're assuming PC monitors, then there's nothing to add to the console cost relative to the PC's cost. You can output from a PS3 or (HDMI-enabled) 360 to any PC monitor that has DVI.

Besides, the 360 and PS3 still look better than the Xbox and PS2 on the same TV. Your TV's resolution has nothing to do with the amount of geometry, shading effect, physics, and so forth.
 
quadnad said:
Being an "IT person," you should know that for a grand (sans monitor, and speakers) you can build a quad core system with an 8800 quite easily. Check out the "general hardware" section for some ideas if you're having trouble.
Click to expand...

How bout i bring the Hardware forum to you since i am an IT person....

Here are the cheapest quad core i found

And here are the latest one

heres a cheap motherboard for quad core $200

whats next? ram, optical drives, HDD, video card(very cheap) but the cheapest 8800 i found is this since we are talking about 8800's, right?($250), and OS (xp $100, vista 100 at newegg). Thats right about 7-800, 900, 1000 dollars, right? the cheap way.... Oh and dont forget a cheap ATX case for like 40-50 dollars with a power supply, you can find that. Isnt that still more expensive than a console? Oh, and you better have the knowledge to put it together.

im not trying to entertain your topic, but this has nothing to do with the OP's question. He just asked a simple question, and the answer was yes. I dont think he asked for comparisons between consoles and PC's. I, as well as many others here know the difference between the processors of pc's and consoles. But pc's have to do many jobs well, and consoles only have to do one, which is play games.
 
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