With Microsoft releasing their new Xbox next month and Sony releasing their new system in 2006, I got very curious about how far along Sony has come with their hardware since the PS2. While I haven't written a review of the PS2's hardware, when I first saw the specs, my first reaction was, "What a piece of crap." Later, it was found that the Dreamcast could actually run some games better then the PS2. That is the Dreamcast, a system released 1.5 years before the PS2. With that I looked at the XBox, and its hardware was up to par for it's release date, which means it stomps the PS2 in the hardware section. With this, I was pissed at Sony, mainly because the games are what make the system, and I had to buy a PS2 to play my Metal Gear Solid games. (BTW, I completely give in to the notion that Tim "Super Tim" Simpson, is far superior in the MGS lore than I am.)

With that began my love/hate relationship with the PS2. I love playing the games, but scream whenever I would have to sit and wait for minutes for the system to save my 10Kb game file to the PS1 style memory card. AHHHH!!!! Now don't think my relationship with my XBox would start any better. I'm a huge Linux person, and it gets to me when I have to constantly use Windows at work. Skipping the standard 10+ page rant of a Linux user, I didn't fully trust my purchase of an XBox. After the purchase, Microsoft quickly dispelled almost all problems I have with that company producing a system. The system, ran very well and had very nice hardware power (at the time) to deal with newer games. My only main problem was the over sized controller that I had to deal with, but I bought one of Mad Catz and was apeased.

To conclude this introduction, without even looking at hardware, my bias is toward the XBox 360. With the horrible hardware of the PS2, I feel as if Sony has stabbed my heart with Cloud's sword. The XBox, as much as I despise the company's OS, has produced a very nice system. One last thing before I begin, I haven't been able to acquire all the specifications of each system, so some sections will be incomplete. I plan to later visit this review when more specifications available. So, without further ado, we will begin the hardware bout.

The CPU is what is thought as the "general processing unit". The CPU is more of a "Jack of all trades and a master of none", so to speak. For consoles, the CPU's job is to take care of input, send information to the Graphic Processing Unit (GPU), and compute the basic math of a game. (For example, Conan just hit Edwin with his two-handed sword, the CPU will compute when that interaction happens, as well as, how much damage Edwin should take.) So, the CPU has a huge job in for it. But, even with that, CPUs have com a long way and, for a console, they are so powerful that you usually won't get much of a boost from putting in a "better" CPU. So, onto the hardware!

The first thing to notice is that both 360 and PS3 use the same "core". Meaning that the basic processing unit is the same in both machines. In other words each core does all the mathematical operations at the same rate. So there is no difference their. Notice IBM is going to make some nice cash =), good thing China didn't buy that part of IBM =).

Next comes the Level 2 cache. This is a huge difference. When it comes to CPU, the largest bottleneck is memory. At 3.2Ghz a piece of data can, at most, travel at the speed of light which is < 3.5 inches per clock tick. This means if the system has to pull data from main memory (which happens all the time) , the system will have to wait for the data to travel to and then from the main memory unit. As a rough estimate, in the time it takes to travel to main memory and back one core could do hundreds of additions. What the L2 cache does is store some of the memory a lot closer to the CPU, so that the speed of light isn't as much of a hindrance. Cache systems are very well developed and know what to fill themselves with (most of the time). A 1MB cache is a huge advantage over a 512KB cache. While I don't see a complete 2 times speed up from this difference, the 360's CPU had a significant advantage here.

The last box has many cryptic acronyms and such. The main thing to take from this is that the PS3 has 7 cores, and the 360 has 3. The best way to think about a core is that PS3 has 7 working "people" while the 360 has 3. (NOTE: the PS3 mentions it has 8 but one is for redundancy. Redundancy is a manufacturing technique. What happens is when producing a chip with 8 cores, it is fairly possible one of the eight are bad. If the PS3 required 8 cores, each time a chip had one bad core you would have to throw it away. Since they require only 7, if one is bad, that is okay. This leads to a higher yield of chips.) Many operation in game can be done in parallel, so more cores is great advantage for the PS3. Unfortunately, the L2 cache will probably be a bottleneck for utilizing all 7 of the cores. How bad? I can't really tell. But, I do see a 1MB L2 cache being a bottleneck for 3 cores... So, I honestly can't give a precise opinion of what will happen with the cores, but I have a feeling that the 7 cores will not be fully utilized in almost any game. Yes the game may use all 7, but I doubt that the amount of time that all 7 are working on a problem will be anywhere near or above .1% of the time. The main reason for my feeling stems from the 512 L2 cache, and that most of the computations of a game are done in the GPU, not the CPU. The VMX, SIMD, and SRAM are basically saying the same thing. The 218 GFLOPS and 9.6 billion dot products stem from the 7 cores the PS3 have and the 3 that the 360 have. (A GFLOPS is roughly "Billion of Floating point Operations Per Second". Also note that it takes many Floating point operations to do a dot product. Unfortunately, I don't' know of a way to compare the two, because many advantages can be taken in a dot product. While a GLOPS is a strict measure of floating point power.)

The change from a single core chip (as with previous consoles) to a multi-core chip is a huge step is producing better processors. The reason is, we are having a hard time making one core go faster, but we are able to make these cores smaller and smaller. Hence we can stick more then one on a single chip. Currently, the only real systems that take a huge advantage from this are servers. (Since servers must service multiple people at once, having more then one core helps greatly!) Thinking of the console as server wasn't something I was accustom to till I noticed that Halo2 doesn't use a central server for running their games. Instead, one machine is chosen to be the "host" (aka the server) and every other system must communicate to the "host". The Celeron processor of the XBox was NOT designed to be a server processor, so some of the game-play in large network games (like Halo2) suffer from this problem. Having 3 cores and a larger L2 cache will greatly alleviate this problem. Now, "host" will still have an advantage, but there will be less of a problem from playing a 1v1 to playing 8v8, 16v16, and so forth.

Both CPUs for each machine are very powerful. So powerful, that I don't believe either system will eventually have huge advantage over each other in the CPU department. Although, later on in the GPU specification, we may see why one company choose to go with one design while to other went with another.

Memory is what holds all the data of a game and is notorious for being the bottleneck of almost any system. Not having enough memory will cause more problems because then the system will have to use a Hard Drive for memory, which, for a 3.2Ghz machine, is about 3,200 - 3,200,000 times slower. So, for memory, you want a lot, and you want your memory fast.

Memory is probably the most interesting subject of comparing the two. Oh, where to start!

First, notice that the 360 has 512MB "Unified memory architecture". This means that both the CPU and GPU share the same memory. On a standard computer this is bad, because GPU usually came on card that would plug into an AGP/PCIX slot. That would mean the GPU would have to go through the AGP/PCIX and the processor each time it wanted access memory (very slow). On a console there is no need to have a AGP/PCIX card slot, you can put the GPU on the motherboard since the hardware for each XBox 360 is the same (completely bypassing both the AGP/PCIX and going through the processor problem). The PS3 gives 256MB to the CPU and 256MB to the GPU. 360 has a nice advantage since the GPU and the CPU can access the same memory block, allowing nice multitasking abilities (the CPU is better at some things, while the GPU is better at others. With the shared architecture of the 360, the CPU and GPU can share some operations). PS3 chose not to share the memory, but instead has the main memory running at 3.2Ghz instead of the 700Mhz. For the CPU, this is nice speed up, because information travels faster from the main memory unit to the CPU. Unfortunately, the GPU isn't given any help because now it still has the same memory speed of the 360, but has less to work with, and can't take advantage of the shared memory architecture of the 360. So, in the end the PS3's choice helped the CPU power, but hurt the GPU in comparison. Finally, the 360 has 10 MB of embedded DRAM (eDRAM), and I will get to that in the next paragraph.

Bandwidth determines the amount of data that can be transmitted at once. Bandwidth measure load, not speed. For example, a 32 lane highway with a speed limit of 40 has higher bandwidth then a 4 lane highways with an 80 speed limit. (If everyone obeys the speed limit.) Yet the 4 lane has a lower latency (sometimes referred to as "lag"). Latency is determined by the clock rate (700Mhz vs 3.2Ghz). Notice that they are pretty close with a little advantage given to the PS3, except in one case. The eDRAM has a 10 times better bandwidth advantage over everything else. The eDRAM is a huge wild card for performance boost; it can make or break the performance of the 360's GPU vs the PS3. The eDRAM 10MB chip serves as a L2 cache for the 360's GPU (*3) (L2 cache has insanely good latency). Remember all that I said about the importance of the L2 cache for a CPU? The GPU pulls memory all the time because a GPU must deal with transforming polygons and transforming the screen. Now, I have not seen eDRAM on a GPU before, but I know that a 10MB cache CPU will crush most CPUs with no cache (Period, end of story). How well this translates to the GPU world, I'm not certain, but I can say that there is a significant advantage here and this little 10MB chip can make or break the 360 GPU's performance vs the PS3's.

Probably the most important feature of these systems is the graphical power. Unfortunately, I'm not given much to work with, and will have to make due with some speculation.

I love to compare graphic power, but I can't find any good specifications for the PS3. Probably because NVidia (company who will make the GPU for Sony) hasn't finished it. The 360 specs have given a nice, but too concise description of their GPU. So, I will give some speculation on what is happening here.

PS3 has a 550MHZ GPU, while the 360 has a 500MHZ GPU. This means almost nothing. To help dispel the Intel-injected belief that processing units are all about clock rates, I present two CPUs: the AMD Athlon 1.3Ghz and the P4 1.7Ghz. The AMD chips can do 50% more divides then the Intel chip, while the Intel chips does 31% more additions (sorry for the lack of a good reference on this fact).

Notably, the PS3's has a 1.8 TFLOPS (Trillion Floating point....) while the 360's combined CPU and GPU have 1. Hence the raw floating point power of the PS3 must be greater then the 360's GPU. (For the sake of argument we assume that the PS3's GPU can do twice as many as the XBox's.) From what I know about NVidia this isn't surprising; but don't count the 360's GPU out yet. Remember about that eDRAM chip? If the RSX can't get all those operations to and from memory fast enough, then having all that power might not even be worth it. The best analogy I can think of is that RSX has more raw power but is trying to push the power through a smaller hose then the 360's GPU. Metaphorically, that is exactly what is happening. How much of a difference does this make between the two? I don't know, I need more specs! I know the polygon rate, sampling, and shader of the 360's but what of the PS3's? Numerous parameters go into finding out which GPU is better. First, the hardware must support standard shading, anti-aliasing, z-buffering, and so on... Knowing NVidia and ATI (ATI makes 360's GPU) they will both have the same or very close amount of hardware capabilities (Nvidia might have more...). So, here is the deal: ATI is known for making better hardware, but having horrible drivers, while NVidia doesn't match ATI's hardware, but can make the best drivers. For console, the drivers aspect will probably play less of a role, because the driver only has to play to one type of GPU. Hence I see an advantage for 360 in this case. Now, here you may wonder, why I said ATI's hardware is better yet NVidia's has the more TFLOPS. Again, many more aspects go into the GPU then just simple TFLOPS. The PS2 is a perfect example of having raw power but no hardware to back it up. That is why the PS2's hardware was a sham.

So here is what I believe each side needs to do to beat the other. The 360, needs to ensure every hardware feature (anti-aliasing and such) are in the hardware. Second they need to ensure the polygon count is high and sample rate is good; which looks to be the case. The PS3 has the power, and knowing NVidia, they will do all those hardware features. (NVidia will might have a couple more then ATI so they will have a little advantage here.) The main concern is to ensure that the memory bottleneck (the small hose they are trying to fit the data through) isn't that big of a problem. Then PS3's GPU will out perform 360's in every regard.

So, while I wish that I could get more specifications for the GPUs, this all I have for the moment. I have noticed however that newer GPU effects are being less and less noticeable. While I surmise that the difference in features of each system will be noticeable, future console may not show too much more (unless there is a paradigm shift.).

I lump the rest together because I'm more concerned about the hardware power of the two machines then the extra features the consoles have. Nonetheless, the special features will bring many people to each system.

So the PS3 support 1000Base-T and the 360 goes up to 100Base-T. My currently cable connection takes up about 3% of a 100Base-T. I don't see either having any difference for networking (unless these systems last more then 4 yrs or Google-Net comes out soon). Note that the PS3 supports 2 Ethernet out ports, which means it will act as a hub/switch, which is nice...

The screen output looks identical, but we will see if PS3 comes out with anything nicer in 2006...

Sound wise, PS3 didn't give me much, so I can't really compare. My intuition says both will be pretty similar. Oh! and they both use DVDs...

Both systems look very powerful and ready to duke each other out to the death. Until the PS3 releases their GPU specifications I can't give a good opinion of which hardware is better. But from the looks of things, it will be interesting to see who wins out.