cstGaming

Okay, regardless of the lack of “quality” games that surround the PS3, people have to start to realize and acknowledge the hardware that lives inside this beast. This system has been on the market since November 11th 2006 (coming up on 3 years now) and Intel is finally catching up to the speeds and processing rate that the PS3 puts out. Intel! The worlds largest semiconductor company…is finally catching up. Seriously, though, how much of a punch is the cell processor packing that the worlds leader, 3 years later, is just coming into the picture in performance specs?

Orginal PS3 Dev Kit

I remember the original development kits that were released pre PS3 and those puppies were pretty hardware packed at the time. Dual 7950GT’s, 512MB of RAM, and a Cell Processor. As a PC Gamer, mainly, i would have loved to get my hands on those graphics cards. But, who would have thought that the PS3, 3 years later, would be unrivaled hardware wise, even compared to comsumer grade PC’s? I surely didn’t.

PC Games Hardware (a German PC Gaming News Site) was the first to post this interesting information. Below is a rough translation of the article written to compare the video encoding capabilities of the Core i7 965 XE processor to the Cell Processor located inside a PS3. The results are astounding.

“Cell processor faster than Core i7 965 XE
H.264 video: New Playstation 3 codec uses for transcoding

 

A novel transcoding tool Fixstars allows for the conversion of video material on the Full HD format, with the help of a Playstation 3 in real time.

 

Now put Linux Developer Fixstars a video converter called Codecsys CE-10, which was to encode movies into MPEG-4-AVC format (H.265) The Cell processor uses a Playstation 3 – this format will be predominantly on Blu-Ray media and IP-TV via video-stream uses. The CE-10-encoder sends out from a Windows PC, the output data via Ethernet to the console, which finished the encoded data back to the PC sends back.

 

According to the announcement of Fixstars reached the Cell processor of the Playstation a performance of 29 FPS, that is 1.2 times real-time conversion – so that the cell would have a similar performance as the CUDA Badaboom encoder in combination with an Nvidia Geforce GTX 285, so colleagues from heise online. By comparison, Intel’s current top-CPU, the Core i7 965 XE, does it still at 18 FPS – normal desktop CPUs even create only about 5 FPS.

 

Prices Fixstars said the developer still does not know the Codecsys CE-10 will be on 22 Of June will be – more information, see the datasheet.”

Original Article
The Datasheet

So, i guess the question is when will the processing power of the PS3 be trumped? Another 3 years? I guess we’ll have to wait and see…