Next Generation Numbers Game

[Jetboot Jack]

The Numbers Game - just exactly how did the marketing flunkys get their Giga Flop values for the next generation hardware?

 

Here's how someone much smarter than me thinks it works:

 

XBOX = 3.2 GHz

3 (processors)

4 (way SIMD)

2 (operations in a MAC)

+ 3 (processors)

2 (scalar FPUs per processor?)

2 (ops in a MAC)

= 115 GFlops.

 

PS3 = 3.2 GHz

8 (processors)

4 (way SIMD)

2 (ops in a MAC)

+ 2 (threads in the PPU)

2 (ops in a MAC)

= 217.6 GFlops

 

The only problem is the XBox numbers assume you can issue a SIMD instruction concurrently with a scalar float operation which the PowerPC model doesn't allow. Naughty naughty, Microsoft..

 

As for that "two flops in a Multiply-Accumulate" thing, it's the industry standard

 

sTeVE