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Message: <blockquote data-quote="drothgery" data-source="post: 2817997" data-attributes="member: 360">It's not just a matter of "learning to multithread" (non-programmers tend to hand-wave this; even when you're doing something that can be effectively multithreaded, writing multithreaded code is hard, and despite decades of effort, there hasn't been much progress in making it easier). It's a matter of trying to do things that can be effectively mutli-threaded. There are very severe limits on how multithreaded something that's strongly dependent on user input (i.e. a game) can be. A lot of games might be able to use two threads effectively; very few will be able to use six (three cores + SMT on the Xeon) or one main thread and seven helper threads (PPE + 7 SPEs on the Cell).And the other massive performance drag on both CPUs is that they're in-order machines (which PC CPUs haven't been since the Pentium), rather than out-of-order. Which means code that branches a lot (extremely common in games) doesn't perform very well. Code that involves doing the same thing over and over again in predictable ways can be very fast on an in-order CPU (Intel's Itanium is an in-order CPU), but they're not very good for general purpose computing, or for games. What they are is relatively cheap to design and build (the cheapest Athlon 64 X2 is almost as expensive as an Xbox 360), and something that allows MS and Sony to give impressive numbers to the press.But like console makers have done over and over again, they keep ignoring that CPUs and memory get cheaper a lot faster over time than GPUs (new low-cost GPUs are almost always scaled-down versions of new high-cost GPUs, rather than old midrange or high-end GPUs; CPUs almost always move down-market), so it's better to spend the component budget on the CPU and memory.</blockquote>

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