Breaking Down the Tech Behind Next-Gen Consoles

does any of this even matter? yes technology can be awesome, and make a sweet game even sweeter, but really it's all going to come down to what the developers do and not what the hardware is capable of. how many titles really took advantage of the full potential of ps2/xbox era? how many badass games were made for the (supposedly) inferior gamecube?

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.hartware.de%2Fnews_38071.html&langpair=de%7Cen&hl=en&safe=off&c2coff=1&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&prev=%2Flanguage_tools

maybe?

(from: http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000100046549/ )

After reading all the articles posted in this thread regarding the Cell processor, I'm a little confused as to exactly how it's going to be so great for gaming. The nature of the hardware seems to not be very good for running traditional game engines.

Most traditional game engines to my knowledge are written as a large state machine with very dependent steps and calculations and haven't traditionally benefitted from a heavy multi-threaded environment like Cell provides. Cell will be excelent at calculations which are part of a larger unit that can be broken down into independent smaller units. However data and calculations that are heavily dependent on each other....seems like it wouldn't be very ideal.

If I am understanding the information on Cell correctly, the technical software behind games would have to be written very differently compared to the past. It's a fantastic piece of hardware, but I can see how it might be "difficult to program for" as far as games go. It is very expensive to break years and years of experience on proven, tried and true methods of writing game engines. To change that aspect of game development is very progressive, I am very interested to see how this will all play out.

I'm willing to bet that PS3 games will improve drastically over time as developers become more familiar with the subtle nuances of the hardware. Games for PS3 might show the greatest improvement between game generations from any other system. I can see how it will be "future-proof" as far as games go if developers can tap into the hardware's potential.

It seems like a very risky move by Sony anyway you slice it. A very risky move with a potentially HUGE payoff.

Beyond3D just put up an article on the Xenos GPU for the 360.

http://www.beyond3d.com/articles/xenos/

I just hope Rockstar can use all this new power to make the next GTA game not have drivers on crack.

More importantly, why do hardware sites choose domain names that are weird to pronounce. "Ars Technica"? "Anandtech"? "Hard OCP"? (not hard to say but awkward regardless) What the hell is up with that?
If they were smart they would counter the whole TOM'S thing and do "Bill's Hardware", "Steve's Hardware", that kind of thing.
Of course http://www.hardwarenews.com/ is taken but nobody is doing anything with it. Placeholder site.

It's interesting that Mac is ditching the PowerPC for intel now that the specs for the Cell have come out. I'd have thought they'd be salivating at the idea of making a computer with that many horses under the hood.

Ars also has a 2-part article from February on the Cell processor. ->
-- http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/cell-1.ars
-- http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/cell-2.ars

I think I'm burned out on Cell hype. I just don't see it as a better option than the increasing abstraction coming to bear on GPUs. Fine, abstraction slows you down, but if you're actually trying to distribute software it's a good thing.

The PlayStation 3 is expected to have have 4 Cells.

It's an OLD article