I recently took part in the "Great Debate" at GCAP 2007 and have been quoted on, in particular, the 'Tony Unit', so I thought I'd explain where it came from.
The numbers I gave were;
- X360: 6 Tony units
- PS3 : 14 Tony units
- Wii : 0.2 Tony units
The PS3 is a little trickier (and slightly more contentious). It has a single PPU with 2 HW threads which is almost identical to a single X360 core, plus 6 available SPUs. Each SPU is naively about 4x the power of a single core, so each SPU would be about 4 Tony units. So, for the PS3 we get
2 + 6*4 = 26 Tony units.
Now, in order to be a little conservative, I divided the power of each SPU by 2 to incorporate issues with smaller memory footprint, DMAing data to and from the SPUs and to make X360 fanboys feel a little less threatened. Resulting in the following;
2 + 6*2 = 14 Tony units
In reality (yes, I do visit there sometimes but I wouldn't want to live there) SPUs are capable of far more than 4 Tony units but they also require code to be designed for them in order to work really well (good programmers do that - pansies cut and paste), so I settled on the 2 Tony units per SPU.
For the Wii, I took the single core 729MHz processor and divided that by 3.2GHz to get 0.227 Tony Units.
So, there you go, incontrovertible proof that the PS3 is the most powerful console on the market today. You heard it here first.
