"The Xbox 360's ATI graphics core also throws a wrench into our graphics
comparison since it uses a new-fangled Unified Shader Architecture that
mixes up pixel- and vertex-pipelines and makes comparison to older
video card technology very difficult. The Xbox 360 graphics core may
have 48-pipelines, but we don't know how powerful they are compared to
dedicated pixel and vertex pipelines."
-Gamespot

We
know that unified shaders are more efficient than specialized shaders
with the trade off of performance but we didn't know how big the
performance differential was...until now. I am going to attempt to
answer that question by extrapolating the exact difference from the
official specs we have for the R500 and RSX as well as some info from
the 7800 GTX specs* (# of shader pipelines):

The basic formula:
(X/Y)/Z

Where
X is the number of shader operations per second
Y is the number of cycles per second
Z is the number of pipes

Xbox 360 R500 "Xenos":
48 billion Shader Operations Per Second(SOPS).
Clock: 500MHz
48,000,000,000 SOPS / 500,000,000 (500MHz) = 96 shader operations per cycle
96 (shader operations per clock) / 48 (shader pipes) = 2 shader operations per shader pipe per cycle

PlayStation 3 RSX:
At E3 '05 Sony released a figure of 100 billion shader operations per second (SOPS) for both the RSX and the Cell.

They also told us that the RSX is capable of 136 shader operations per cycle.
We are going to use these two numbers to extrapolate the individual SOPS metric for each the RSX and the Cell :
136 (shader operations per cycle) x 550,000,000 (550MHz)=
74,800,000,000.
The RSX alone is capable of 74.8 billion SOPS.
100 billion SOPS (Cell + RSX total) - 74.8 billion SOPS (RSX) = 25.2 billion SOPS for the Cell alone.

Now we can calculate the power of the RSX's shaders:
74.8 billion Shader Operations Per Second(SOPS).
Clock: 550MHz
74,800,000,000 SOPS / 550,000,000 (550MHz) = 136 shader operations per cycle
136 (shader operations per clock) / 32 (24 pixel + 8 vertex shader pipes*) = 4.25 shader operations per pipe per cycle

R500: 2 shader ops per pipe per cycle
RSX: 4.25 shader ops per pipe per cycle

A 212% difference in favor of the RSX.

The RSX's specialized shaders are 212% more powerful than the R500's unified shaders.



So we now have an approximate estimation of how powerful unified
shaders are in comparison to specialized/traditional shaders.



**The integrity of these calculations is directly
proportional to the integrity of Microsoft and Sony's respective
specifications.**