> >
> >> Next year's games consoles will feature 2x3.2GHz cpus (Xbox 360)
> >
> > ouch.  I have a dual 3.2GHz motherboard in my office right now.  I 
> > guess with a game console the sounds of gunshots will 
> overwhelm noise of the fans?
> 
> huh ;-) There are some nice new fanless coolers out there. At 
> least one uses heatpipes and a huge case-radiator (a whole 
> side of the case is the radiator - no need for fins at that 
> size). Conduction cooling is pretty much standard in more 
> serious equipment (even in camcorders and dvd players!). It 
> is not cheap. It can easily add $100 to a machine's cost (pc 
> level hardware).
> 

The Xbob360 has water cooling!

But lets not forget that the TDP of a powerpc core is nowhere near that
of a P7 core. Intel's creations, are, in many ways, crap. discuss.


> >> If that is true than the consoles will outperform most desktop 
> >> systems sold in 2006
> > Game consoles have exceeded desktop performance for a long time, if 
> > you benchmark things like end graphics performance.  For 
> things OTHER 
> > than graphics and similar, most desktop systems aren't CPU-limited 
> > anyway.
> 
> I am not so sure. The PS2 had a relatively low power cpu one 
> year after it was released. Sometimes playing the same game 
> on a PS2 and on a PC was better on the PC (with accelerated 
> AGP graphics) (saw it myself, the game was Rayman afaik, the 
> PC was a 1.something GHz all-in-one with a nvidia agp video card).
> 

They usually outperform PC's on day 1, but don't hold it for long
because their closed architecture means no upgrades. Xbox outperforms
PS2 (despite what sony say- just look at the graphics in games that are
on both systems). And xbox has a 700Mhz p3 in it.

PS2's processor, and in fact it's whole system architecture, is
interesting. A very novel design. The core is just not that high on the
raw performance stakes - mips and flops, etc, but the whole architecture
being designed to produce polygons quickly means it can perform very
very well at that. The PC architecture is a whole bucket of flexibility,
and legacy tradeoffs that just aren't wanted or needed in a console.


> >>  (few of which will feature dual CPUs).
> > I think you underestimate the number of dual-cpu desktops being 
> > deployed, too.
> 
> Maybe I do but most desktop users will not buy a dual 
> anything. You are probably not the average desktop user (and 
> very few people on this list would be). Most low cost systems 
> sold today are the all-in-one variety, with single CPU and 
> huge penalty on concurrent access by cpu and video to RAM via PCI bus.
> 

Mac users have been buying dual CPU systems (mainsteam) for some time
now. PC buyers generally don't; but there's little reason to at the
moment- most PC apps (certainly the ones that can utilise high spec
hardware (eg games) just aren't written to be efficiently multithreaded,
so dual cpu's doesn't provide much bang for your buck. Not to mention
that it's only with windows xp that there's been a consumer level o/s
that can work with more than one cpu. Of course, in the professional
sector it's a different story- modelling, cad, analysis etc software has
been able to use multi-cpu's for a long time.

But with both AMD and Intel now producing dual core cpus, we'll start to
see some software soon that can provide a real reason to use more than
one processor.


jon




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