Yesterday, Anand Lal Shimpi published an article called Microsoft's Xbox 360 & Sony's PlayStation 3 - Examples of Poor CPU Performance, and as our Gamesblog points out, it seems to have disappeared.
The gist of the piece is that the (PS3) Cell and (Xbox) Xenon processors, both based on IBM's PowerPC cores, deliver significantly worse real-world performance than yer boring old AMD or Pentium D. It says:
Just because these CPUs and GPUs are in a console doesn't mean that we should throw away years of knowledge from the PC industry -- performance doesn't come out of thin air, and peak performance is almost never achieved. Clever marketing however, will always try to fool the consumer.
And that's what we have here today, with the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Both consoles are marketed to be much more powerful than they actually are, and from talking to numerous game developers it seems that the real world performance of these platforms isn't anywhere near what it was supposed to be.
As a comment on Gamesblog points out, someone posted the text on Usenet.
Comment: I wouldn't set too much store by this: ultimately, the results that matter are the ones based on real hardware and software bought over the shelf. That's months away on the Xbox 360 and probably more than a year away for the PS3. Also, it's not unusual for suppliers to overhype their products, with Sony's Emotion Engine in the PS2 being an obvious example. But the points Anand makes are still interesting....
