Overall, yes. CPU wise, no. Due to less concurrent threads, vector units, and lack of Cell CPU PowerPC based core with over 10 threads and sequences. Even though the Xbox 360 packs more gigaflops.

The threads on the Cell ship won't reach anywhere near the speed of the PowerPC ones because they're not using full or even half cores.

The PS3 can handle 2.0 TFLOPS, not 218...

No it's 218. The 2tflops nonsense is including the GPU which they claim can do 1.8tflops. Which it obviously can't as GPU can't perform flops.

I remember seeing the processor pumping out 2 TFLOPS.

3.2GHz Cell w/ 7 SPEs 2.0 TFLOPS

No, you're totally wrong Paul - a GPU can easily handle over 200 million gigaflops alone (the amount of billion floating point operations that can be calculated per second), as the RSX nVidia brewed GPU chip packs 300+ million transistors on-die, and its multiple way programmable shader FP32 highly ALU complex floating-point parrallel pipeline architecture with unified Shader Model 3.0+ support.

The PlayStation 3 has the advantage of the IBM multiple core PowerPC Cell architecture - although not fully utilized - can reach quite a bit of potential with 7 hardware threads, 7 SPEs, and 256KBs of SRAM for each SPE, clocked at a 3.2 GHz frequency.

And Paul is correct - the CPU itself features 218 teraflops - while the GPU itself has 1.8 teraflops up its sleeve - for full HD (up to 1080p 2x channels) and full anti-aliasing enabled performance and image quality results, and etc.

OK, clarified.

Mixing performance of a CPU and GPU is insane, one is general purpose one is not. Going on this logic the new nVidia chip is more powerful then the Cell, which IBM have poured shedloads of cash into for years.

FLOPS should be left out of comparisons. They're highly subjective and you can practically pull figures out of anything.

The demos Sony were showing weren't anti-aliased according to people who actually watched them they also had a lot of slow down. ATI have the upper hand having 10MB of memory dedicated to this sort of work and with insane bandwidth 256GB/s. The Xbox 360 renders everything internally at 7680x4320 then scales it down to do anti-aliasing. Microsoft just don't boast about what it can do in theory (PS2 and XBox can both to 1080i today), but what it will do in reality Microsoft concentrate on what they're requiring developers to do if they want to publish on Xbox 360, Sony once again are letting developers do whatever they like, so there will be games that only make use of SDTV.

It's nice to see Sony catching up in the sound department, as that was one thing the PS2 was sorely lacking.