Pandemic PS3 coder Tony Albrecht already has a unique unit of measurement, called the “Tony”, for explaining the differences in processing power between the major consoles. He even went so far as to break it down for the less technically-minded.
Now, I think Tony units are great. Albrecht however felt a deeper understanding of where the consoles sit on the grunt scale was required, so he went and compared the latest generation of gaming platforms with the planet’s fastest supercomputer – the IBM Roadrunner. His findings are fascinating:
For its processors its using 6,562 dual-core AMD Opteron chips as well as 12,240 Cell chips all feeding off of 98 terabytes of memory and is running Red Hat Linux.
Yup, you heard right, this baby is running off of what is effectively 12,240 souped up PS3s.
Tony goes on to say that the Roadrunner consumes one watt for every 437 million calculations, making it “incredibly energy efficient”. This isn’t exactly something the PS3 can boast about.
Albrecht also went to the trouble of figuring out the processing power of the “Xbox 1040” and “PS4”, based on previous consoles and supercomputers. He reckons 4-8GB of RAM and 64, or even 128, processors is not out of the question (the 360 has three and the PS3 eight). Hit the link below to see Tony’s full analysis, which includes pictures, graphs and, if you’re brave, strings of numbers.
Parallel future [Seven Degrees of Freedom][Pic]
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