The results are from Geekbench 2006 (build 243); SIMD support on Linux PPC was added in Geekbench 2006 (build 250). From what I’ve heard the Cell processor doesn’t execute SIMD instructions very well, plus Geekbench itself isn’t optimized for the Cell processor, so I’m not surprised that SIMD benchmarks are slower than expected on the Cell.

In our evaluation ppu-gcc has nearly 20% improvement on speed compared to current gcc which generate pure PowerPC instructions while ppu-gcc generates Cell optimized binary. Sony Computer Entertainment is currently pushing cell optimization code to go into mainline gcc which expecting to be merged around gcc 4.3.

Unstill the merged gcc become the default compiler for common Linux distribution, using ppu-gcc will be greatly appreciated for benchmarking purpose.

But, if you were to run the benchmark with code designed to take full advantage of the Cell, as well as the 360’s multiple cores, you’d likely see the Cell take the lead.

The problem is that the Cell is simply too new, we just don’t have the code necessary to make full use of it…yet.

Combined with the fact that it appears to me, as a novice programmer, quite difficult to write code that would make efficient use of all the SPEs in the Cell.

The real question to me, is whether or not it would even be worth the effort to write software for a linux environment that would effectively unlock the full potential of the Cell; I’m certain the current answer would be “No”.

..by the way.. can any of you state, in one sentence, just HOW powerful is the PS3 when weighed against the 360? or is that question irrelevant to the topic, hehe, sorry.

Obviously real world performance would be much much less than the sum of the 6 available SPEs but it’d be interesting to see nonetheless.

Here’s one figure to help make some wild guesses though: they reserved 2 SPEs in Resistance just for collision detection.

intigrating the Altivec optimised code into the PPC linux tree would be a very good start for all the ppc/Cell based machinesm never mind the SPE’s.

if your really into helping the PPC projects then you could help
theres always libfreevec http://freevec.org/ that might even out the scores and improve overall general throughput for all apps if someones willing to take the time to include it as a PPC GLIBC replacement.

“libfreevec is a free (LGPL) library with hand-optimized replacement routines for GLIBC, such as memcpy(), strlen(), etc. These routines have been written specifically to take advantage of the AltiVec unit (a.k.a Velocity Engine or VMX), “

“For example, did you know that you can do byte swapping with AltiVec 7 times faster than with scalar code? Or that it is possible to sort integers and floats 4 times faster with the help of AltiVec? Were you aware that it helps to do string searching faster? Memory hashing gets upto 7 times faster. The list could just go on and on… “

http://www.powerdeveloper.org/forums…=asc&start =0

you could even take the libfreevec idea and extend it to include the SPE’s as well if your clever enough, (most are not, so it doesnt happen….), markos is back and working on ALtivec again after time away so you might help him and help yourself in the process.