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Although the war between the Ps3 and 360 is raging and the Ps3 has not even been released,and every time there is a debate about the 360 vs the Ps3 this quote is brought into the argument
Quote:
but the Ps3 has a cell processor
Well it may not be such a good thing,as a cell processor might not be best thing for a next gen gaming machine.
Please read this news from a Microsoft Game Technology Group.
A developer working for Microsoft's Game Technology Group has declared that both the US and Japanese gaming markets have reached "saturation point" - and that success in Europe is key to winning the next-gen battle.
In an interview with Ars Technica, Matt Lee - who works for Microsoft's Game Technology Group - stated: "Japan is obviously a very important market for us and one in which we have to work hard at... We've got a whole bunch of great Japanese titles on the way form major Japanese developers. One thing to note, however, is that Japan is not necessarily the most important market for gaming these days.
"It is also not quite as large as the US and European markets... Both the Japanese and US markets are reaching saturation at this point. The big battleground for us (and for everyone) is going to be Europe."
Lee went on to question whether the PlayStation 3's Cell processor "is as well designed for game development as Sony would have you believe... Some aspects of the SPEs, such as the lack of branch prediction, make them particularly unsuited to running most game code, which contains a lot of branches."
"They appear to be designed more for serialised streaming math code, more common in video codecs and audio processing, the traditional domain of digital signal processing chips... [It] seems like a lot of overhead is needed to feed work units to the SPEs and copy the results back to system memory."
Lee also said that he believes porting games from the Xbox 360 to PS3 will be "reasonably difficult", since "the Xbox 360 has a lot more general purpose processing power that can be flexibly reallocated, and all of the Xbox 360 CPU cores have equal access to all memory. The asymmetric nature of the Cell could easily lead to situations where the game has too little of one type of processing power and too much of another."
"And the content might suffer as well, since you'll never see a PS3 title with more than 256MB of textures at any given time, due to the split graphics and system memory banks."
When asked if Microsoft has any plans to follow in Sony and Nintendo's footsteps by producing a motion-sensing controller for the Xbox 360, Lee replied: "Not that I know of. Microsoft released a tilt sensor controller for the PC several years ago, and it wasn't that successful."
"I think Nintendo has a pretty awesome system on their hands though," he continued.
"It looks like a well thought-out input system. The motion sensing features are solid and uncompromising, and they've left room for future expansion through the port on the main controller."
Lee went on to confirm that Microsoft is "making a big push to bring PC gaming back into the spotlight", and that the company is committed to promoting high street retail as well as online sales: "In terms of online gaming and Internet purchases there has been major growth over the last few years. Microsoft recognises, however, the need for a continuing retail presence, and we are going to be putting some major money into addressing this situation."
Charlie Demerijian at the Inquirer got a look at some insider specs on the PS3, and says, Sony screwed up big time with the Cell processor; the memory read speed on the current Devkits is something like 3 orders of magnitude slower than the write speed; and is unlikely to improve much before the ship date. The slide from Sony pictured in the article is priceless: 'Local Memory Read Speed ~16Mbps, No this isn't a Typo.' Demerjian says when the PS3 comes out a full year after the XBox360, it's still going to be inferior: 'Someone screwed up so badly it looks like it will relegate the console to second place behind the 360
I agree, the cell processor was really not worth all the time and money spent on it. Sony should have took the easy way out and went with some multi-core Intel or AMD. As far as I know, the cell processor is only 1 core and I never heard anything about multi-threading. I haven't checked in a long time but I thought remember hearing that the Xbox 360 has 3 P4s at I think 3GHz. I remember that since I found it odd they used 3 of them and used a P4 when there were so many better choices. So really both systems have a flaw - multiple 3GHz P4s in a tiny system will cause overheating (which does happen CONSTANTLY, so I heard) and the cell processor was obsolete when it came out. But, I say Xbox wins.
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