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AnandTech has a nice little article about SATA(-II), that clears those details. It is reccomended reading. In fact, SATA-II is renamed SATA-IO, but it is a official standard.

... and they don't run even close to 3Gb/s.
Yet another useless submission.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=24 50

Don't use stripping for performance unless you do video editing:
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=21 01&p=10

Don't use RAID0 for redundancy because its not worth the effort, you still have a single point failure of the raid controller card. Stick with a 2nd device (usb drives are good) which you simply copy your important data to every week or so.

Unless you can afford and need RAID5 (5 hard drives) forget about RAID and be happy your not wasting your time with it.

With Blu-Ray and HD-DVD on the horizon, each offering 30-50 GB per disc and in some cases more at a fraction of the cost, why would a normal consumer need to backup stuff using a RAID array? You're going to need to replace the broken hard drive anyway. I can see RAID being useful for businesses where they want as little downtime as possible, but is there really any point in buying more hard drives when you can get the same effect with DVDs or the upcoming BluRay and HD-DVDs? You can cite performance as an advantage using RAID 0, but as has been shown, there really isn't any.

The report found that in businesses with 250 employees or more, 17 percent of the employees were running Mac OS X on their desktop computer at work.

Nine percent of companies with 250 employees or more used Mac OS X Server, while 14 percent of companies with 10,000 employees or more used Apple's Server software.

Well, look no further:

http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2471

It's a full AGP x8 implementation, not a pokey AGP-thru-PCI or something like that. In fact, at present AGP is faster than PCIe on it... But read the review for yourself.

Why disable a feature that people don't use? I don't see your logic. Apple invested engineering time and effort to turn off a feature that the hardware provided for free -- and, if the vast majority of "hack" users are true, it's a feature that works very well. (I still don't buy the "it makes your logic board fail faster" deal, since Apple's iBook logic boards are pieces of shit no matter what.)

That reminds me of the way that Apple sells the same 20" monitors that Dell sells without the VGA connectors. Compare the Apple 20" with the Dell 20" Display if you don't believe me. (Yada yada different backlight yada yada silver coloring is worth hundreds of dollars)

All tests done on a 64 player server with at least 60 players in game

1024x768 4xSSAA max AF, all settings high.

1GB: Avg: 43 - Min: 0 - Max: 79
2GB: Avg: 77 - Min: 35 - Max: 99

1600x1200, all settings on high, No Antialiasing.
Peak memory usage by map:

Mashtuur City : 1088MB
Kubra Dam: 1145MB
Strike at Kakand: 1129MB
Shogua Stalemate: 1100MB
Zatar Wetlands: 1049MB

DivideBYZero of the Anandtech Forums noticed that Google actually messed up and is using the negative of the original NASA photos. Oops is right.

"PowerPC has certain advantages for certain computational processes, which is THE REASON WHY THEY USED MAC IN THE FIRST PLACE."

True,

Compare the 2GHZ G5 mac to the 2.8GHZ Xeon,
In FFT tests, very few processors can beat Apple's veclib libaries - these algorithms form the backbone of a great deal of scientific analysis (the diverse spectrum of fields converning signal analysis) and clearly demonstrate the great advantage altivec can offer, this combined with lower power consumption and good FP performance makes the G5 and excellent choice for clusters.



(lets ignore the G5's memory latency...)

Okay, dinner, dishes, bathing kids: done.

Let me clarify a couple points.

"Most use 'intuition.' But this 'intuition' is generally nothing more than familiarity. And familiarity does not fix the current, demonstrable problems. "

The last line should have read "Familiarity is generally just the reuse of old paradigms, which reimplemented the same demonstrable problems."

The benchmarks showing OS X's problems are here. There are several articles on why Mach (and to some extent the original microkernal design) is poor at handling lots of things at once. Just go read up on microkernels and MACH. New microkernels are better at handling this. L4Ka::Pistachio is well known as it was chosen for the resurrected GNU HURD OS.

I would like to reiterate that I was a die in the wool, cut me I will bleed green, yellow, orange, red, purple, and blue IN THAT ORDER, M$ SUCKS, Mac Freakboy. Then I learned how we interact with computers, what our limits and abilities are, how to fix the current problems, and eventually just got pissed every time I use an interface. Which includes locks, cars, dishwashers, ad infinitum.

As a final thought I would like to interject that we design programs knowing the abilities of computers. To a large extent the best software is the one written by those that understand the fundamental things that are going on with every new thing we tackle in programming. Those who design with the fundamentals in mind get good results. Why are we borrowing from MS blindly? Who are known to screw up how they engineer interfaces from the start. We don't do that with any other major part of the OS unless _forced_. To the user the interface IS the operating system, the hardware, to a great extent it is wholly the computer.

"Keep it in context: this is an anecdotal comment from a single person comparing a bleeding edge 2005 pre-release Mac with their old 2003 retail Mac."

You mean if we have objective tests we can admit the Intel chips are faster?

Sweet.

You really should see this article:

http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2436

OS X may look nice, but internaly it's a mess...

The Pentium 4's design is superior in the ranks of a server chip

Are you reading the right stories? Please, read:

http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030422/opteron-0 4.html

Please slashdot, clarify this if I've left anything out:
The Opteron has it's own memory controller. That means it is not sharing the single memory bus in multiprocessor systems like Intel does. The more CPUs you add to an Opteron, the better it scales. Somebody is likely better at explaining this than I can.

As for the "Apple switching to Intel Debate", slashdotters might find this of interest:
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2436&p =1

The Pentium 4's design is superior in the ranks of a server chip

Are you reading the right stories? Please, read:

http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030422/opteron-0 4.html

Please slashdot, clarify this if I've left anything out:
The Opteron has it's own memory controller. That means it is not sharing the single memory bus in multiprocessor systems like Intel does. The more CPUs you add to an Opteron, the better it scales. Somebody is likely better at explaining this than I can.

As for the "Apple switching to Intel Debate", slashdotters might find this of interest:
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2436&p =1

Nice troll.

Hmmph. If anything, I'm an AMD fanboy. All my home PCs use Athlons.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx? i=2456&p=5

Look at the Windows Media Encoder 9 benchmark and see that of the CPUs that "normal" people can afford, the P4s were faster.

But, now that I look at it again, I see that the numbers were's that much better.

I guess my info is out of date... :(

Mac OS X is incredibly slow, between 2 and 5(!) times slower, in creating new threads, as it doesn't use kernel threads, and has to go through extra layers (wrappers). No need to continue our search: the G5 might not be the fastest integer CPU on earth - its database performance is completely crippled by an asthmatic operating system that needs up to 5 times more time to handle and create threads.

Mac OS X is incredibly slow, between 2 and 5(!) times slower, in creating new threads, as it doesn't use kernel threads, and has to go through extra layers (wrappers). No need to continue our search: the G5 might not be the fastest integer CPU on earth - its database performance is completely crippled by an asthmatic operating system that needs up to 5 times more time to handle and create threads.

BTW I thought you'd like to know that the most popular *nix is Mac OS X.

The server performance of the Apple platform is, however, catastrophic. When we asked Apple for a reaction, they told us that some database vendors, Sybase and Oracle, have found a way around the threading problems. We'll try Sybase later, but frankly, we are very sceptical. The whole "multi-threaded Mach microkernel trapped inside a monolithic FreeBSD cocoon with several threading wrappers and coarse-grained threading access to the kernel", with a "backwards compatibility" millstone around its neck sounds like a bad fusion recipe for performance.

BTW I thought you'd like to know that the most popular *nix is Mac OS X.

The server performance of the Apple platform is, however, catastrophic. When we asked Apple for a reaction, they told us that some database vendors, Sybase and Oracle, have found a way around the threading problems. We'll try Sybase later, but frankly, we are very sceptical. The whole "multi-threaded Mach microkernel trapped inside a monolithic FreeBSD cocoon with several threading wrappers and coarse-grained threading access to the kernel", with a "backwards compatibility" millstone around its neck sounds like a bad fusion recipe for performance.

BTW I thought you'd like to know that the most popular *nix is Mac OS X.

The server performance of the Apple platform is, however, catastrophic. When we asked Apple for a reaction, they told us that some database vendors, Sybase and Oracle, have found a way around the threading problems. We'll try Sybase later, but frankly, we are very sceptical. The whole "multi-threaded Mach microkernel trapped inside a monolithic FreeBSD cocoon with several threading wrappers and coarse-grained threading access to the kernel", with a "backwards compatibility" millstone around its neck sounds like a bad fusion recipe for performance.

Well licensing according to Nvidia says you do need a specialised SLI motherboard. DFI and some other manufactures got into a little trouble over this. DFI's Nforce 4 Ultra-D could orginaly be modifed to run in SLI mode without a SLI bridge. Nvidia quickly had DFI change that flaw in later revisions and blocked out the bridgeless "feature" in their later drivers.

Funnily enough, the block looks to have been disabled in the newest betas. Some speculate because of pressure from ATI's Crossfire.

.... Like two months ago?

Here's benchmarks from a real journal here: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2432

HJ

If the server is going to be busy, OS X probably wouldn't be a good choice. AnandTech had a review of OS X as a server OS and found it couldn't keep up with Linux as the number of connections increased beyond a certain threshold.

Just something to consider; it will undoubtedly improve in the future, but for now a FOSS solution would likely suffice and not have this limitation.

Yeah, this is why OS X and Mach blow as servers. No, really.

ChiefValue was founded by the NewEgg founders as their "off the radar" channel. Its the same warehouse and some of the support staff of NE, but they don't advertise. Sometimes they have better prices than NE, but sometimes they are horribly more expensive.

Use RTPE: http://labs.anandtech.com/

It's pretty good for most hardware (CPU, motherboard, etc) and it even tells you if there are rebates and stuff.

HJ

Try RTPE:

http://labs.anandtech.com/

I find it more useful than fatwallet or Pricewatch.

HJ

include:

http://www.bargainshare.com/
http://forums.anandtech.com/categories.cfm?catid=4 0
http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/categories.cfm?cat id=18
http://www.slickdeals.net/

besides tech deals, one thing i would definitely recommend tech people check out are the finance and grocery forums at these sites (if they have it). you can save so much more money than from purchasing tech equipment.

AMD's 90 micron architecture cpu seems to have a very low power consumption at load, near Intels idle power consumption (I dont know how independant test/results are) http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx? i=2249&p=13

Resellerratings allows you to search for specific products with S&H costs and vendor rating
if you enter your zip. No registration required, and they list a large number
of vendors including newegg, zipzoomfly and monarchcomputer. They also have a
neat hot deals feature on their home page (e.g. they featured a 200GB ATA Maxtor
dive for $69.99 including S&H from outpost.com a few days ago).

For the main post:

Let's not forget http://forums.anandtech.com/

Umberto Eco wrote an enlighting essay on PC's being Protestant while Macs are Catholic. While neither Gates nor jobs produced their respective operating systems or GUIs - at least Gates partially paid for his (although it was peanuts). Jobs is "smart" in terms of having figured out - that "coolness" can be marketed and sold (read The Tipping Point) - due to the fact that "lemmings" follow easily. But when it comes to Usability - Jobs has not interest - futher monopolizing the "lemmings" is his only concern - iPods that only play Apple codecs - Imacs that can't be expanded with 3 year old technology inside etc. The fact is that G5s can't even come close to Intels or AMDs that are $1500 cheaper - when it comes to producing media of all kinds. Check out http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2436 and http://www.creativemac.com/articles/viewarticle.js p?id=32620

Link directs to http://www.anandtech.com/articles.aspx now. I bet some pressue was placed on anandtech to remove it.

The point of a gaming console is to play games. The PC user in all of us wants to benchmark, overclock and upgrade even the unreleased game consoles that were announced at E3, but we can't. And these sorts of limits are healthy, because it lets us have a system that we don't tinker with, that simply performs its function and that is to play games.

The game developers are the ones that have to worry about which system is faster, whose hardware is better and what that means for the games they develop, but to us, the end users, whether the Xbox 360 has a faster GPU or the PlayStation 3's CPU is the best thing since sliced bread doesn't really matter. At the end of the day, it is the games and the overall experience that will sell both of these consoles. You can have the best hardware in the world, but if the games and the experience aren't there, it doesn't really matter.

Despite what we've just said, there is a desire to pick these new next-generation consoles apart. Of course if the games are all that matter, why even bother comparing specs, claims or anything about these next-generation consoles other than games? Unfortunately, the majority of that analysis seems to be done by the manufacturers of the consoles, and fed to the users in an attempt to win early support, and quite a bit of it is obviously tainted.

While we would've liked this to be an article on all three next-generation consoles, the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Revolution, the fact of the matter is that Nintendo has not released any hardware details about their next-gen console, meaning that there's nothing to talk about at this point in time. Leaving us with two contenders: Microsoft's Xbox 360, due out by the end of this year, and Sony's PlayStation 3 due out in Spring 2006.

This article isn't here to crown a winner or to even begin to claim which platform will have better games, it is simply here to answer questions we all have had as well as discuss these new platforms in greater detail than we have before.

Before proceeding with this article, there's a bit of required reading to really get the most out of it. We strongly suggest reading through our Cell processor article, as well as our launch coverage of the PlayStation 3. We would also suggest reading through our Xbox 360 articles for background on Microsoft's console, as well as an earlier piece published on multi-threaded game development. Finally, be sure that you're fully up to date on the latest GPUs, especially the recently announced NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX as it is very closely related to the graphics processor in the PS3.

This article isn't a successor to any of the aforementioned pieces, it just really helps to have an understanding of everything we've covered before - and since we don't want this article to be longer than it already is, we'll just point you back there to fill in the blanks if you find that there are any.

Now, on to the show...

A Prelude on Balance

The most important goal of any platform is balance on all levels. We've seen numerous examples of what architectural imbalances can do to performance, having too little cache or too narrow of a FSB can starve high speed CPUs of data they need to perform. GPUs without enough memory bandwidth can't perform anywhere near their peak fillrates, regardless of what they may be. Achieving a balanced overall platform is a very difficult thing on the PC, unless you have an unlimited budget and are able to purchase

The point of a gaming console is to play games. The PC user in all of us wants to benchmark, overclock and upgrade even the unreleased game consoles that were announced at E3, but we can't. And these sorts of limits are healthy, because it lets us have a system that we don't tinker with, that simply performs its function and that is to play games.

The game developers are the ones that have to worry about which system is faster, whose hardware is better and what that means for the games they develop, but to us, the end users, whether the Xbox 360 has a faster GPU or the PlayStation 3's CPU is the best thing since sliced bread doesn't really matter. At the end of the day, it is the games and the overall experience that will sell both of these consoles. You can have the best hardware in the world, but if the games and the experience aren't there, it doesn't really matter.

Despite what we've just said, there is a desire to pick these new next-generation consoles apart. Of course if the games are all that matter, why even bother comparing specs, claims or anything about these next-generation consoles other than games? Unfortunately, the majority of that analysis seems to be done by the manufacturers of the consoles, and fed to the users in an attempt to win early support, and quite a bit of it is obviously tainted.

While we would've liked this to be an article on all three next-generation consoles, the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Revolution, the fact of the matter is that Nintendo has not released any hardware details about their next-gen console, meaning that there's nothing to talk about at this point in time. Leaving us with two contenders: Microsoft's Xbox 360, due out by the end of this year, and Sony's PlayStation 3 due out in Spring 2006.

This article isn't here to crown a winner or to even begin to claim which platform will have better games, it is simply here to answer questions we all have had as well as discuss these new platforms in greater detail than we have before.

Before proceeding with this article, there's a bit of required reading to really get the most out of it. We strongly suggest reading through our Cell processor article, as well as our launch coverage of the PlayStation 3. We would also suggest reading through our Xbox 360 articles for background on Microsoft's console, as well as an earlier piece published on multi-threaded game development. Finally, be sure that you're fully up to date on the latest GPUs, especially the recently announced NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX as it is very closely related to the graphics processor in the PS3.

This article isn't a successor to any of the aforementioned pieces, it just really helps to have an understanding of everything we've covered before - and since we don't want this article to be longer than it already is, we'll just point you back there to fill in the blanks if you find that there are any.

Now, on to the show...

A Prelude on Balance

The most important goal of any platform is balance on all levels. We've seen numerous examples of what architectural imbalances can do to performance, having too little cache or too narrow of a FSB can starve high speed CPUs of data they need to perform. GPUs without enough memory bandwidth can't perform anywhere near their peak fillrates, regardless of what they may be. Achieving a balanced overall platform is a very difficult thing on the PC, unless you have an unlimited budget and are able to purchase

The point of a gaming console is to play games. The PC user in all of us wants to benchmark, overclock and upgrade even the unreleased game consoles that were announced at E3, but we can't. And these sorts of limits are healthy, because it lets us have a system that we don't tinker with, that simply performs its function and that is to play games.

The game developers are the ones that have to worry about which system is faster, whose hardware is better and what that means for the games they develop, but to us, the end users, whether the Xbox 360 has a faster GPU or the PlayStation 3's CPU is the best thing since sliced bread doesn't really matter. At the end of the day, it is the games and the overall experience that will sell both of these consoles. You can have the best hardware in the world, but if the games and the experience aren't there, it doesn't really matter.

Despite what we've just said, there is a desire to pick these new next-generation consoles apart. Of course if the games are all that matter, why even bother comparing specs, claims or anything about these next-generation consoles other than games? Unfortunately, the majority of that analysis seems to be done by the manufacturers of the consoles, and fed to the users in an attempt to win early support, and quite a bit of it is obviously tainted.

While we would've liked this to be an article on all three next-generation consoles, the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Revolution, the fact of the matter is that Nintendo has not released any hardware details about their next-gen console, meaning that there's nothing to talk about at this point in time. Leaving us with two contenders: Microsoft's Xbox 360, due out by the end of this year, and Sony's PlayStation 3 due out in Spring 2006.

This article isn't here to crown a winner or to even begin to claim which platform will have better games, it is simply here to answer questions we all have had as well as discuss these new platforms in greater detail than we have before.

Before proceeding with this article, there's a bit of required reading to really get the most out of it. We strongly suggest reading through our Cell processor article, as well as our launch coverage of the PlayStation 3. We would also suggest reading through our Xbox 360 articles for background on Microsoft's console, as well as an earlier piece published on multi-threaded game development. Finally, be sure that you're fully up to date on the latest GPUs, especially the recently announced NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX as it is very closely related to the graphics processor in the PS3.

This article isn't a successor to any of the aforementioned pieces, it just really helps to have an understanding of everything we've covered before - and since we don't want this article to be longer than it already is, we'll just point you back there to fill in the blanks if you find that there are any.

Now, on to the show...

A Prelude on Balance

The most important goal of any platform is balance on all levels. We've seen numerous examples of what architectural imbalances can do to performance, having too little cache or too narrow of a FSB can starve high speed CPUs of data they need to perform. GPUs without enough memory bandwidth can't perform anywhere near their peak fillrates, regardless of what they may be. Achieving a balanced overall platform is a very difficult thing on the PC, unless you have an unlimited budget and are able to purchase

The point of a gaming console is to play games. The PC user in all of us wants to benchmark, overclock and upgrade even the unreleased game consoles that were announced at E3, but we can't. And these sorts of limits are healthy, because it lets us have a system that we don't tinker with, that simply performs its function and that is to play games.

The game developers are the ones that have to worry about which system is faster, whose hardware is better and what that means for the games they develop, but to us, the end users, whether the Xbox 360 has a faster GPU or the PlayStation 3's CPU is the best thing since sliced bread doesn't really matter. At the end of the day, it is the games and the overall experience that will sell both of these consoles. You can have the best hardware in the world, but if the games and the experience aren't there, it doesn't really matter.

Despite what we've just said, there is a desire to pick these new next-generation consoles apart. Of course if the games are all that matter, why even bother comparing specs, claims or anything about these next-generation consoles other than games? Unfortunately, the majority of that analysis seems to be done by the manufacturers of the consoles, and fed to the users in an attempt to win early support, and quite a bit of it is obviously tainted.

While we would've liked this to be an article on all three next-generation consoles, the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Revolution, the fact of the matter is that Nintendo has not released any hardware details about their next-gen console, meaning that there's nothing to talk about at this point in time. Leaving us with two contenders: Microsoft's Xbox 360, due out by the end of this year, and Sony's PlayStation 3 due out in Spring 2006.

This article isn't here to crown a winner or to even begin to claim which platform will have better games, it is simply here to answer questions we all have had as well as discuss these new platforms in greater detail than we have before.

Before proceeding with this article, there's a bit of required reading to really get the most out of it. We strongly suggest reading through our Cell processor article, as well as our launch coverage of the PlayStation 3. We would also suggest reading through our Xbox 360 articles for background on Microsoft's console, as well as an earlier piece published on multi-threaded game development. Finally, be sure that you're fully up to date on the latest GPUs, especially the recently announced NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX as it is very closely related to the graphics processor in the PS3.

This article isn't a successor to any of the aforementioned pieces, it just really helps to have an understanding of everything we've covered before - and since we don't want this article to be longer than it already is, we'll just point you back there to fill in the blanks if you find that there are any.

Now, on to the show...

A Prelude on Balance

The most important goal of any platform is balance on all levels. We've seen numerous examples of what architectural imbalances can do to performance, having too little cache or too narrow of a FSB can starve high speed CPUs of data they need to perform. GPUs without enough memory bandwidth can't perform anywhere near their peak fillrates, regardless of what they may be. Achieving a balanced overall platform is a very difficult thing on the PC, unless you have an unlimited budget and are able to purchase

The point of a gaming console is to play games. The PC user in all of us wants to benchmark, overclock and upgrade even the unreleased game consoles that were announced at E3, but we can't. And these sorts of limits are healthy, because it lets us have a system that we don't tinker with, that simply performs its function and that is to play games.

The game developers are the ones that have to worry about which system is faster, whose hardware is better and what that means for the games they develop, but to us, the end users, whether the Xbox 360 has a faster GPU or the PlayStation 3's CPU is the best thing since sliced bread doesn't really matter. At the end of the day, it is the games and the overall experience that will sell both of these consoles. You can have the best hardware in the world, but if the games and the experience aren't there, it doesn't really matter.

Despite what we've just said, there is a desire to pick these new next-generation consoles apart. Of course if the games are all that matter, why even bother comparing specs, claims or anything about these next-generation consoles other than games? Unfortunately, the majority of that analysis seems to be done by the manufacturers of the consoles, and fed to the users in an attempt to win early support, and quite a bit of it is obviously tainted.

While we would've liked this to be an article on all three next-generation consoles, the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Revolution, the fact of the matter is that Nintendo has not released any hardware details about their next-gen console, meaning that there's nothing to talk about at this point in time. Leaving us with two contenders: Microsoft's Xbox 360, due out by the end of this year, and Sony's PlayStation 3 due out in Spring 2006.

This article isn't here to crown a winner or to even begin to claim which platform will have better games, it is simply here to answer questions we all have had as well as discuss these new platforms in greater detail than we have before.

Before proceeding with this article, there's a bit of required reading to really get the most out of it. We strongly suggest reading through our Cell processor article, as well as our launch coverage of the PlayStation 3. We would also suggest reading through our Xbox 360 articles for background on Microsoft's console, as well as an earlier piece published on multi-threaded game development. Finally, be sure that you're fully up to date on the latest GPUs, especially the recently announced NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX as it is very closely related to the graphics processor in the PS3.

This article isn't a successor to any of the aforementioned pieces, it just really helps to have an understanding of everything we've covered before - and since we don't want this article to be longer than it already is, we'll just point you back there to fill in the blanks if you find that there are any.

Now, on to the show...

A Prelude on Balance

The most important goal of any platform is balance on all levels. We've seen numerous examples of what architectural imbalances can do to performance, having too little cache or too narrow of a FSB can starve high speed CPUs of data they need to perform. GPUs without enough memory bandwidth can't perform anywhere near their peak fillrates, regardless of what they may be. Achieving a balanced overall platform is a very difficult thing on the PC, unless you have an unlimited budget and are able to purchase

The point of a gaming console is to play games. The PC user in all of us wants to benchmark, overclock and upgrade even the unreleased game consoles that were announced at E3, but we can't. And these sorts of limits are healthy, because it lets us have a system that we don't tinker with, that simply performs its function and that is to play games.

The game developers are the ones that have to worry about which system is faster, whose hardware is better and what that means for the games they develop, but to us, the end users, whether the Xbox 360 has a faster GPU or the PlayStation 3's CPU is the best thing since sliced bread doesn't really matter. At the end of the day, it is the games and the overall experience that will sell both of these consoles. You can have the best hardware in the world, but if the games and the experience aren't there, it doesn't really matter.

Despite what we've just said, there is a desire to pick these new next-generation consoles apart. Of course if the games are all that matter, why even bother comparing specs, claims or anything about these next-generation consoles other than games? Unfortunately, the majority of that analysis seems to be done by the manufacturers of the consoles, and fed to the users in an attempt to win early support, and quite a bit of it is obviously tainted.

While we would've liked this to be an article on all three next-generation consoles, the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Revolution, the fact of the matter is that Nintendo has not released any hardware details about their next-gen console, meaning that there's nothing to talk about at this point in time. Leaving us with two contenders: Microsoft's Xbox 360, due out by the end of this year, and Sony's PlayStation 3 due out in Spring 2006.

This article isn't here to crown a winner or to even begin to claim which platform will have better games, it is simply here to answer questions we all have had as well as discuss these new platforms in greater detail than we have before.

Before proceeding with this article, there's a bit of required reading to really get the most out of it. We strongly suggest reading through our Cell processor article, as well as our launch coverage of the PlayStation 3. We would also suggest reading through our Xbox 360 articles for background on Microsoft's console, as well as an earlier piece published on multi-threaded game development. Finally, be sure that you're fully up to date on the latest GPUs, especially the recently announced NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX as it is very closely related to the graphics processor in the PS3.

This article isn't a successor to any of the aforementioned pieces, it just really helps to have an understanding of everything we've covered before - and since we don't want this article to be longer than it already is, we'll just point you back there to fill in the blanks if you find that there are any.

Now, on to the show...

A Prelude on Balance

The most important goal of any platform is balance on all levels. We've seen numerous examples of what architectural imbalances can do to performance, having too little cache or too narrow of a FSB can starve high speed CPUs of data they need to perform. GPUs without enough memory bandwidth can't perform anywhere near their peak fillrates, regardless of what they may be. Achieving a balanced overall platform is a very difficult thing on the PC, unless you have an unlimited budget and are able to purchase

The point of a gaming console is to play games. The PC user in all of us wants to benchmark, overclock and upgrade even the unreleased game consoles that were announced at E3, but we can't. And these sorts of limits are healthy, because it lets us have a system that we don't tinker with, that simply performs its function and that is to play games.

The game developers are the ones that have to worry about which system is faster, whose hardware is better and what that means for the games they develop, but to us, the end users, whether the Xbox 360 has a faster GPU or the PlayStation 3's CPU is the best thing since sliced bread doesn't really matter. At the end of the day, it is the games and the overall experience that will sell both of these consoles. You can have the best hardware in the world, but if the games and the experience aren't there, it doesn't really matter.

Despite what we've just said, there is a desire to pick these new next-generation consoles apart. Of course if the games are all that matter, why even bother comparing specs, claims or anything about these next-generation consoles other than games? Unfortunately, the majority of that analysis seems to be done by the manufacturers of the consoles, and fed to the users in an attempt to win early support, and quite a bit of it is obviously tainted.

While we would've liked this to be an article on all three next-generation consoles, the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Revolution, the fact of the matter is that Nintendo has not released any hardware details about their next-gen console, meaning that there's nothing to talk about at this point in time. Leaving us with two contenders: Microsoft's Xbox 360, due out by the end of this year, and Sony's PlayStation 3 due out in Spring 2006.

This article isn't here to crown a winner or to even begin to claim which platform will have better games, it is simply here to answer questions we all have had as well as discuss these new platforms in greater detail than we have before.

Before proceeding with this article, there's a bit of required reading to really get the most out of it. We strongly suggest reading through our Cell processor article, as well as our launch coverage of the PlayStation 3. We would also suggest reading through our Xbox 360 articles for background on Microsoft's console, as well as an earlier piece published on multi-threaded game development. Finally, be sure that you're fully up to date on the latest GPUs, especially the recently announced NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX as it is very closely related to the graphics processor in the PS3.

This article isn't a successor to any of the aforementioned pieces, it just really helps to have an understanding of everything we've covered before - and since we don't want this article to be longer than it already is, we'll just point you back there to fill in the blanks if you find that there are any.

Now, on to the show...

A Prelude on Balance

The most important goal of any platform is balance on all levels. We've seen numerous examples of what architectural imbalances can do to performance, having too little cache or too narrow of a FSB can starve high speed CPUs of data they need to perform. GPUs without enough memory bandwidth can't perform anywhere near their peak fillrates, regardless of what they may be. Achieving a balanced overall platform is a very difficult thing on the PC, unless you have an unlimited budget and are able to purchase

The point of a gaming console is to play games. The PC user in all of us wants to benchmark, overclock and upgrade even the unreleased game consoles that were announced at E3, but we can't. And these sorts of limits are healthy, because it lets us have a system that we don't tinker with, that simply performs its function and that is to play games.

The game developers are the ones that have to worry about which system is faster, whose hardware is better and what that means for the games they develop, but to us, the end users, whether the Xbox 360 has a faster GPU or the PlayStation 3's CPU is the best thing since sliced bread doesn't really matter. At the end of the day, it is the games and the overall experience that will sell both of these consoles. You can have the best hardware in the world, but if the games and the experience aren't there, it doesn't really matter.

Despite what we've just said, there is a desire to pick these new next-generation consoles apart. Of course if the games are all that matter, why even bother comparing specs, claims or anything about these next-generation consoles other than games? Unfortunately, the majority of that analysis seems to be done by the manufacturers of the consoles, and fed to the users in an attempt to win early support, and quite a bit of it is obviously tainted.

While we would've liked this to be an article on all three next-generation consoles, the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Revolution, the fact of the matter is that Nintendo has not released any hardware details about their next-gen console, meaning that there's nothing to talk about at this point in time. Leaving us with two contenders: Microsoft's Xbox 360, due out by the end of this year, and Sony's PlayStation 3 due out in Spring 2006.

This article isn't here to crown a winner or to even begin to claim which platform will have better games, it is simply here to answer questions we all have had as well as discuss these new platforms in greater detail than we have before.

Before proceeding with this article, there's a bit of required reading to really get the most out of it. We strongly suggest reading through our Cell processor article, as well as our launch coverage of the PlayStation 3. We would also suggest reading through our Xbox 360 articles for background on Microsoft's console, as well as an earlier piece published on multi-threaded game development. Finally, be sure that you're fully up to date on the latest GPUs, especially the recently announced NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX as it is very closely related to the graphics processor in the PS3.

This article isn't a successor to any of the aforementioned pieces, it just really helps to have an understanding of everything we've covered before - and since we don't want this article to be longer than it already is, we'll just point you back there to fill in the blanks if you find that there are any.

Now, on to the show...

A Prelude on Balance

The most important goal of any platform is balance on all levels. We've seen numerous examples of what architectural imbalances can do to performance, having too little cache or too narrow of a FSB can starve high speed CPUs of data they need to perform. GPUs without enough memory bandwidth can't perform anywhere near their peak fillrates, regardless of what they may be. Achieving a balanced overall platform is a very difficult thing on the PC, unless you have an unlimited budget and are able to purchase

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2453 &p=2

Reason for the pull..found this half way down link below...

http://www.anandtech.com/talkarticle.aspx?i=2458

Posted on Jun 29, 2005 at 10:04 PM by KristopherKubicki

Reply Ecmaster76: Eh, something was messed up with the content management system. PS3 article is pulled for now because Anand is worried about MS tracing his anonymous insider.

Kristopher

People also said that GPUs wouldn't catch on either. Consider that Epic and other big names are already onboard. The only real problem I see is that their target price range is of GPUs (though they haven't said low-mid-high).

Anandtech had an article awhile ago (here) which gives information on just how much more a PPU can process.

"PS3 article is pulled for now because Anand is worried about MS tracing his anonymous insider."

My biggest concern is that Sun gear tends to overly pricey, but if they're addressing that I might just start buying from them.

While Suns tend to be pricey, it's because their built like tanks (both in terms of chasis/frame, and from CPU and internal layout). Like Macs, they're designed to work well, and you have to pay the designers.

A while ago AnandTech had a review on Sun's V40z.

You could also call up Sun and ask them for a loaner. They frequently let let people try out machines for a couple of weeks to run them through their paces. You can get either Solaris or Linux installed. BTW, make you open the box up and look at the internals: they're very well designed from a space, air flow, and maintenance point of view (part of the cost).

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2461

http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/06/28/news_61283 06.html

http://www.anandtech.com/linux/showdoc.aspx?i=2241 &p=10

Check it out. Anandtech has a review as well.

If you are confused, This guide is pretty good at explaining the differences between the current AMD offerings.