There's a techy but readable interview with ATI 'evangelist' Richard Huddy over on bit-tech.net. Huddy claims that, although PS3 seems more powerful on paper, developers will get a better performance out Xbox 360 because of its more unified architecture:
"The PS3 does appear to have a huge amount of CPU power with the seven Cell cores. The problem they have is that CPU power isn't really what developer's need – the bottleneck is really the graphics. Everybody is going multi-threaded and multi-core – the Xbox 360 has three PowerPC cores, AMD and Intel both have dual-core chips, so everyone is having to learn how to write this stuff. But writing multi-threaded apps for two or three cores is difficult. Doing it for seven separate cores, when the main core has a slightly different feature-set from the other six, is very, very difficult."
Of course, someone from the Sony camp is bound to counter claim over the coming weeks, prompting a counter counter claim from Microsoft and so on. But there is a logical argument here, and it's something a lot of developers seem to agree with. When I spoke to Peter Molyneux last week he was saying there's no doubt PS3 has the greater 'nuggets of power' (sounds like the sort of special ability you may find in an adult RPG), IF developers are willing and able to really exploit the hardware.
But given the larger teams, the bigger budgets, the tighter development schedules, are most studios going to have the time to blast open the power of this idiosyncratic machine?
Update: In the interests of impartiality, here's Kutaragi having a good old swing at Microsoft. Let's hope these two don't meet in the queue at some late night kebab shop!
