xBox 360 PPC vs PowerMac PPC

whitesaint

whitesaint

cocoa love
How is it that the xBox 360 coming out tomorrow seems to have just as high performance, if not better performance than today's low/mid-range PowerMacs? I know that Microsoft is losing money on the consoles and wants to make up for it with game sales, but geez $299-$399 for a triple-core PowerPC gaming console? That seems like one helluva bargain compared to the $2000 Apple is asking for a dual-core PowerPC machine they have out today. The most transistors the 2.5 Ghz dual core PowerPC has is 115 million. But the new xbox's PowerPC has 165 million transistors! Is Apple really ripping us off this bad? Or is IBM giving Microsoft the benefit of the doubt when it comes to processor designs? I'm not trying to sound like im bashing apple and loving microsoft cuz i feel quite the opposite. I'm quite aware that the Mac OS X *might* make the price worth it, but take a look at the games and graphics for the xBox 360, i'm quite amazed. Sorry I just need to vent. But just looking at the statistics for Apple's Quad PowerMac and Microsoft's xBox 360...
Quad PowerMac - 76 Gigaflops - price $3,299
xBox 360 - 116 Gigaflops - price $299-$399
Am I the only one that sees a problem here? :mad:
 
Oh, please. This has been talked to death. :rolleyes:

Once again for those who haven't been paying attention. The Cell processor used in the Xbox 360 is not a candidate for a general-purpose computer--not from Apple, not from IBM, and not from anyone else. Please do some basic research on this topic. You might begin by searching this forum.
 
Yeah, right.

First of all, you're comparing a box with no expansion capabilities to a highly-expandable desktop computer. That right there makes your comparison moot -- you might as well be comparing your microwave to your stove in terms of video display capabilities. Sheesh.

Second of all, as MisterMe said, the processor used in the XBox 360 is NOT a general-purpose desktop computer chip, but a highly specialized multimedia chip. It would not be suitable in a desktop computer.

Third of all, the XBox 360 (and also the original XBox, the PS2 and the GameCube) are all dedicated machines. They do one thing (play games) and they do it well. Computers, on the other hand, are built to handle a variety of tasks -- from multimedia to number crunching to games to video blah blah blah. There's no comparison.

Microsoft also sells every XBox 360 at a loss. They lose money every time a unit is sold. Apple does not. Every computer unit Apple sells turns a profit for them.

Just because two processors use a similar instruction set does not mean you can compare them. The processor in the XBox 360 is not a G5 -- while similar to one, it is not one.

In addition, how many XBox 360s do you think Microsoft will sell vs. how many G5-based Macintosh computers Apple will sell? You think more people will have a 360 or a Macintosh computer? IBM is selling many more processors for the XBox 360 than they are for Macintosh computers, meaning Microsoft gets a bigger discount than Apple.

There is just absolutely no comparison.

whitesaint said:
Am I the only one that sees a problem here?
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I certainly hope so! ;)
 
whitesaint said:
Am I the only one that sees a problem here? :mad:
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Well, back when the PS2 came out plenty of people bought into the hype about how fast it was, and talked about building a supercomputer from clusters of PS2's. I even seem to remember Sony and IBM fueling the hype with small stories about how we would probably see high-end workstations using the same chipset soon.

Sounds familiar?

Don't buy into the hype. The chips, software and architecture of consoles is usually only optimized for graphics, and perform badly at general purpose tasks.
 
I wonder whether they will end up putting OS X on it. Wasn't it PearPC or something that installed OS X onto a xbox? Would be interesting to how it would run.

Does the Xbox have RAM? If so how much, and if it doesn't just ignore this line of my post. Cause it would look rather embarrasing.
 
Pear PC... this is/was an emulator to let users run OSX on an x86 PC.

I ran early versions (Summer 04) and it took 6 hours to install 10.2.8 and had all the athletic agility of a snail with two bags of heavy shopping. Even the developers of Pear said it ran at 10% the speed of your basic G4.

I must admit it was the direct cause of me going out and buying a Pismo so I could run OSX on a Mac =)
 
If you're really that angry, buy an xbox 360 instead of the PowerMac. ;) ... No, forget about that smiley... Take that seriously instead: It's not simply "what's in it", it's all about what you can actually _do_ with each machine. There's a completely different marketing strategy. Apple sells you the machine and gives you software for free with it (Mac OS X, iLife etc.). Whereas with the 360 they _push_ the machine down in price in order to sell you software.
 
Xbox 360 doesn't use the Cell architecture. That's the PS3. The Xbox 360's design is actually closer to the desktop G5 in philosophy....but further in implementation. ::ha::

whitesaint said:
Quad PowerMac - 76 Gigaflops - price $3,299
xBox 360 - 116 Gigaflops - price $299-$399
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These are not comparable numbers. In desktop PCs and supercomputers, gigaflops represent general-purpose floating-point operations. In consoles, it is all specialized. Futhermore, in consoles they typically measure the processing power of the graphics card (which usually makes up for most of the power of the system), which is highly specialized. Even though graphics cards are present in desktop machines, they are not counted in general performance measurements, because they're just not relevant.

Specialized devices will always be faster at what they do than desktop computers. DVD players could decode MPEG2 video years before your average desktop PC had that kind of power. That didn't mean that the DVD players were more powerful; they were just better at what they did.

Lots of PC/Mac people have this same crisis every time a new console comes out. :)
 
mdnky said:
They've actually built a "super computer" from a cluster of PS2s.

http://arrakis.ncsa.uiuc.edu/ps2/cluster.php
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Well sure it can be done, but it is hardly common, you don't see them show up in the top 500 list, and the PS2 is a bitch to program if you want anything near the theoretical peak from it.

It is a common marketing stunt. Next we shall see at least one of the console makers claim that they can't export it to some countries as it is technically a supercomputer. Again.
 
There's really no need to get all :mad: ... IBM have produced a number of customised versions of the PowerPC architecture in the last couple of years, including the processor for the XBox 360, the Nintendo Revolution, and the Playstation 3. All of them are designed specific to the task in hand.

The processor used in the XBox 360 is based on the G4 but heavily modified. Yes, it is dual-core, but each core is only a tiny subset of what you get on a full-scale G4 processor. Much of the RISC (Altivec) instruction set, the pipelines and caches, and mathematical systems have all been changed to optimise the processor for console use. It'll probably never be public knowledge how these systems have been changed since the version of the PPC used by the 360 is proprietary of Microsoft, and they won't share any more info than is needed to the developers, for obvious reasons.

IBM has allways and will always be putting the best of their PPC technology into the IBM Power series servers, with the lessons learnt from that trickling down to each of the other PPC projects. Each of the teams for Nintendo, Microsoft and Cell projects are extremely secretive and seperate, even by IBM standards. ;) I can't really say any more than that, even if I did have any real info, but I an assure you that there is no favouritism toward any one of these companies and that the people working on the PPC processors are always giving it their all to ensure that they're as competitive, cost-effective and powerful as possible.

I sorry to rant, I just felt that all the :mad: was doing the hundreds of people who work on PPC a disservice.
 
As already said, Cell is used in the PS3, and Sony made an announcement a while back that Mac OS X would be able to run on the Cell with little to no modification. I realize that the xBox 360 is targeted for gamers, but aside from that, the next xbox plays dvds, video, music, streaming, and will eventually do high def (if it doesn't already).

I would say the processor in the next xbox is pretty much a triple-core G5. The processor is a 64 bit PowerPC with three cores based on the design of the 970. I'm not sure but i would expect the amount of xbox's microsoft sells and the number of powermacs apple sell would probably be about the same, and I actually believe that microsoft will sell more xbox's that powermacs. The CPU in the new xbox is a dedicated microprocessor just like the original xbox. When I said 165 Gigaflops for the xbox 360, i wasn't including the graphics processor. The xbox 360 has a dedicated ATI graphics chip as well. If I were including both the PowerPC and the ATI GPU, performance would theoretically be 1 Teraflop! So the xbox 360 is not as "specialized" as you guys are saying, it can do many things a PC can do, probably better.

I understand there are plenty of things Mac OS X can do better, but xBox 360 is almost up there with it. and I'm sure it's only a matter of time before a group of hackers install OSX on an xBox 360.
 
Did you read what everyone else said? The Xbox hardware is SPECIALIZED. Notice how someone pointed out it only has 512MB of RAM? That isn't a whole lot in todays desktop computer world. I wouldn't even recommend running OS X on that much RAM but the XBox will be fine because it doesn't have to deal with everything that a real computer does. Take the PS2 for example, technologywise that thing is sooo outdated. I still can't figure out how they get massive games like GTA to run on that thing. It has like a 300mhz processor and 32mb of RAM. Would GTA ever run on a computer like that... god, it wasn't event that amazing on my athlon 1800xp machine with 512mb of ram and a GF2.
 
I have 512 MB for muh eMac and it runs great. I'm sure later on the xbox will be able to upgrade the ram, like right now the xBox 360 has a removable hard drive. It's really not as specialized as you're making it out to be, it has just about all the same components our Macs have, and faster. True, the PS2 does have a 300 Mhz processor but it is probably faster than some of our computers. Just because it is 300 Mhz doesn't mean it is slow. The 300 Mhz processor the PS2 uses, "Emotion Engine", processes data in 128 bit chunks, so technically it is very fast, if you want to put it like that, the 300 Mhz processor should be equal to a 1200 Mhz G3 or G4 depending on how you look at it. None of our graphics cards run faster than 400 or 500 Mhz, does that make them slow? No, they just process data in very large chunks at a time, which makes up for clockspeed, the same argument we use to use for the G4 against the P4 back in the day because the G4 could process data in larger chunks than the P4 could despite it's slower clockspeed which made up for performance.
 
MisterMe said:
Once again for those who haven't been paying attention. The Cell processor used in the Xbox 360 is not a candidate for a general-purpose computer--not from Apple, not from IBM, and not from anyone else. Please do some basic research on this topic. You might begin by searching this forum.
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Please do some basic research yourself. Cell is from IBM, Toshiba and Sony. Not IBM and Microsoft... that's the Xenon processor.

Hit up http://www.arstechnica.com and search. You'll find out the differences real quick.
 
gerbick said:
Please do some basic research yourself. Cell is from IBM, Toshiba and Sony. Not IBM and Microsoft... that's the Xenon processor.

Hit up http://www.arstechnica.com and search. You'll find out the differences real quick.
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Thanks for your prompt correction. I'll just ignore those other posts from people who were even quicker.
 
Okay. So let's say the X-Box 360 isn't as specialised as some of us say it is. Let's say it's a fairly basic PC with quite a good G5 processor variant. Where's the problem?
If the problem is that the x-box does all you want and is cheap: Get one. Or two. Or twelve and do what you usually do with your supercomputer clusters.
If the problem however is that "Apple charges too much for PowerMacs", then I'd say the x-box just _IS_ the wrong thing to compare to. At least for me: Totally. I do graphics design and am a story writer. For both things, the x-box is highly inadequate. Nothing to compare, really.
If the problem is that IBM charges Apple too much for the PowerPC processors and doesn't develop the chips that Apple _needs_ (and not at the right prices), then Apple has already _solved_ the problem by moving on to intel processors.

So again: What exactly is the problem - and wasn't it answered already in this thread?
 
MisterMe said:
Thanks for your prompt correction. I'll just ignore those other posts from people who were even quicker.
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You're quite welcome. You never changed your original post, so I thought you needed an echo, echo...
 
fryke said:
Okay. So let's say the X-Box 360 isn't as specialised as some of us say it is. Let's say it's a fairly basic PC with quite a good G5 processor variant. Where's the problem?
If the problem is that the x-box does all you want and is cheap: Get one. Or two. Or twelve and do what you usually do with your supercomputer clusters.
If the problem however is that "Apple charges too much for PowerMacs", then I'd say the x-box just _IS_ the wrong thing to compare to. At least for me: Totally. I do graphics design and am a story writer. For both things, the x-box is highly inadequate. Nothing to compare, really.
If the problem is that IBM charges Apple too much for the PowerPC processors and doesn't develop the chips that Apple _needs_ (and not at the right prices), then Apple has already _solved_ the problem by moving on to intel processors.

So again: What exactly is the problem - and wasn't it answered already in this thread?
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Hey... just like people hacked the original XBOX to be a media center... perhaps they'll do it to this one too.

As far as the "Apple charges too much for PowerMacs" argument... (Edited: Read board rules about importing other forums' threads...) I just don't get it.

I mean... the original NES in Japan could go online, but it didn't mean I'd use an Office product on it anytime soon. Nor would it replace my then computer. As stated countless times in this thread... it's a single purpose CPU - for games - that's based off of the PowerPC general purpose CPU instruction set.

If I get a XBOX360, it'll be for a video game. A fun one. Not because I think it'll replace a dual-core G5 at 1/8th the price or so.
 
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