^ Pretty good post.
They are made to run looping instructions or instructions that are pipe fed. Not graphics or sound or any other high variable process. And when they are in high variable process (think huge database) they use alot of system RAM and fast SAS disks to make up for the CPU's latency.
Yes they are super fast when fed a long stream of instructions that don't branch, or call for a whole active set to be flushed then reloaded a few cycles later. We on the other hand use our CPU's for graphics setup, sound, and many other out of order processes.
thanks. it was from an article somewhere, it was explaining why a pentium d
or athlon 64 would be better than what the 360 has or the cell. i just condensed it a bit. they also explained how this makes game produces jobs hard as anything. because the branch predictors are so primative (compared to computer cpu's) the coders have to code big hints to the processor to keep the pipe full. i think that console makers focus to much on specs of what the system can run.
maybe with folding on the ps3 you can push it to the max....but with a game, no way, not to mention the thing has 8 (not including the power pc core) cores (some high number i think it's 8) and it's hard to keep them fed with info. look at pc's..how hard is it to keep 2 cores loaded with info. you have to run...two prime 95's, maybe two movies encoding with a virus scan running in the back ground. not many games can take that advantage, and even though you have the cpu in the console doing the load for sound, that takes one core at the max. so if you really put alot of manhours into a game, you get one thread for the sound, maybe two for cpu players, two for physics, and two for graphics. OMFG you get 7 threads, amazing what you could do with that, but now put that into how many manhours of work you need....that's a crap load of time. that's why most games on consoles do not take extensive use of multi core, and on the computer, multi threaded games are hard to come across, right now at least
. sorry for the long post again, lol