Yes and no. You can try and compare using emulation on the projected power of the two units, but you can't have definate results until a true bench mark is done. XBox 360 is possible to get a bench mark, but not the PS3 because there is nothing but the flesh out on paper and probably a alpha if not a beta kit that as of now wouldn't show its true power. Add into the equation multiple cells on a network and it becomes even harder to determine its true potential, and since this is new groundwork, there is very little actual data to compare with. As far as out of the box (just thePS3 without the distributed computing and the XBOX 360) then you can compare a little. As far as floating point goes, it depens on how you test them. I wouldn't trust either MS or Sony on the floating point calcs because there is no standard they are using to measure it.
"A floating point operation can be anything; it can be adding two floating point numbers together, or it can be performing a dot product on two floating point numbers, it can even be just calculating the complement of a fp number. Anything that is executed on a FPU is fair game to be called a floating point operation.
Secondly, both floating point power numbers refer to the whole system, CPU and GPU. Obviously a GPU's floating point processing power doesn't mean anything if you're trying to run general purpose code on it and vice versa. As we've seen from the graphics market, characterizing GPU performance in terms of generic floating point operations per second is far from the full performance story."
Third, when a manufacturer is talking about peak floating point performance there are a few things that they aren't taking into account. Being able to process billions of operations per second depends on actually being able to have that many floating point operations to work on. That means that you have to have enough bandwidth to keep the FPUs fed, no mispredicted branches, no cache misses and the right structure of code to make sure that all of the FPUs can be fed at all times so they can execute at their peak rates. We already know that's not the case as game developers have already told us that the Xenon CPU isn't even in the same realm of performance as the Pentium 4 or Athlon 64. Not to mention that the requirements for hitting peak theoretical performance are always ridiculous; caches are only so big and thus there will come a time where a request to main memory is
needed, and you can expect that request to be fulfilled in a few hundred clock cycles, where no floating point operations will be happening at all."
So, as you can see it all depends on the test type being conducted, and who its being conducted for. Interestingly enough, the PS3 suffers greatly from the 3rd point because of bandwidth problems and a smaller cache size.
