

Ask HN: Is XBox One slower then XBox 360? - Illniyar

From what I&#x27;ve read in the specs, XBox one is going to have 8-core 1.6Ghz processor while XBox 360 has a 3-core 3.2Ghz processor.
Considering Amdahl&#x27;s law, 10GHz on 3 cores should be much faster than 12ghz on 8 cores.<p>Is there something I&#x27;m missing here? Has the gaming industry overcome the hurdles of parallel execution?
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mehrdada
Modern processors are much more complicated than old at-most-single-
instruction-per-cycle processors. There are techniques collectively known as
_Instruction Level Parallelism_ that enable a processor to execute several
instructions in each cycle on each core. That, and a more efficient memory
system, that keeps the processors from stalling, waiting for memory, are
significant factors in performance.

End of the day, what matters is the number of instructions executed in the
unit of time, not the number of clock cycles. Clock frequency is just one
factor in processor performance. A more efficient microarchitecture can easily
beat a "faster" (clock speed-wise) processor, as it's been the case with
Pentium 4's NetBurst vs Core.

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msoad
I don't think you measure system speed by summing up cores clock speed.

Also your question can not be answered anyway because nobody have access to
XBOX One systems

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Illniyar
why not? assuming 100% paralalism, isn't it simply the amount of computations
you can do in a certain period of time?

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inkandstick
Well there are other things to consider like cache size which I'm sure is much
larger.

Plus a lot of the load will be put onto the graphics processor.

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sharth
It's worth noting that the Xbox 360 uses a PowerPC architecture while the Xbox
One will use a x86 core. That will make just strictly comparing Ghz difficult.

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sharth
And just to expand...

Let's look at the apple transition from powerpc to intel chips. Geekbench has
a reasonable number that we can look at to compare against, so let's use that.
[http://browser.primatelabs.com/mac-
benchmarks](http://browser.primatelabs.com/mac-benchmarks)

We can see that the one of the late 2005 Power Mac G5 had 2 2.3 Ghz cores.
This garnered a score of 2088.

About a year later, a mac mini was on the market using an Intel chip. In this
case, the Intel Core Duo T2300 which runs at 1.66 Mhz with 2 cores. This
received a very similar score of 2128, even though it is running considerably
slower.

Later on in the years, I can come up with a Mac Mini (Mid 2011) that has an I5
running at 2.3 Ghz (The same as the original PPC we're comparing to). However,
this gets a score of 5818, more than double the original PPC I picked.

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My only point here is that it is VERY difficult to use processor speed as a
tool to compare processors. It's even difficult to use it to compare a Xeon vs
an I5, even though they both use the same architecture and are made by the
same company.

