Lately I’ve been working on porting Geekbench 2 to the Playstation 3. While I’m hoping to release a version of Geekbench that takes advantage of the Cell processor, I thought I’d share some preliminary results that show how the Playstation 3 (and the Cell processor) performs when running code that’s not optimized for the Cell processor.
Setup
Here’s the configuration of the Playstation 3.
- Playstation 3
- Cell Processor @ 3.2 GHz
- 256 MB XDR RAM
- Fedora Core 6
- PS3 Linux Addon v1.3 (25 April 2007)
- Geekbench 2.0.3 (32-bit and 64-bit pre-release)
I’m reporting the baseline score, rather than the raw score, for each benchmark (where a score of 1000 is the score a Power Mac G5 1.6GHz would receive). Higher is better.
Results
Overall Performance
| Playstation 3 32-bit |
956 | |
| Playstation 3 64-bit |
912 |
Integer Performance
| Playstation 3 32-bit |
920 | |
| Playstation 3 64-bit |
786 |
Floating Point Performance
| Playstation 3 32-bit |
702 | |
| Playstation 3 64-bit |
696 |
Memory Performance
| Playstation 3 32-bit |
1568 | |
| Playstation 3 64-bit |
1678 |
Stream Performance
| Playstation 3 32-bit |
749 | |
| Playstation 3 64-bit |
583 |
Update: You can view the complete 32-bit and 64-bit Geekbench results on the Geekbench Browser.
Conclusions
It’s clear that the Cell processor isn’t all that impressive as a general-purpose CPU; if it’s not executing code designed to run on the Cell processor, it’s generally slower than a PowerPC G5 @ 1.6GHz (the baseline processor for Geekbench).
What remains to be seen is how the Playstation 3 performs when running code designed for the Cell processor; over the next few months I’m hoping to add Cell-specific optimizations to Geekbench that will exploit all the potential the Cell processor has to offer.