Compared to its personal computer contemporaries, the relatively high overall floating-point performance of a Cell processor seemingly dwarfs the abilities of the SIMD unit in CPUs like the Pentium 4 and the Athlon 64. However, comparing only floating-point abilities of a system is a one-dimensional and application-specific metric. Unlike a Cell processor, such desktop CPUs are more suited to the general-purpose software usually run on personal computers. In addition to executing multiple instructions per clock, processors from Intel and AMD feature branch predictors. The Cell is designed to compensate for this with compiler assistance, in which prepare-to-branch instructions are created. For double-precision floating-point operations, as sometimes used in personal computers and often used in scientific computing, Cell performance drops by an order of magnitude, but still reaches 20.8 GFLOPS (1.8 GFLOPS per SPE, 6.4 GFLOPS per PPE). The PowerXCell 8i variant, which was specifically designed for double-precision, reaches 102.4 GFLOPS in double-precision calculations.