Microsoft takes a look at the Playstation 3

That is what Ive always said. Oh, here come the Sony fanboys to complain!

man, if this isnt totally bias piece of shit then i dont know what is. this guy is making an ass out of himself. i dont know why you posted this article.

Would Tr1gunn like to explain how this system breakdown is a 'piece of sh*t' or doesnt he know why? Maybe he should ask the Sony rep.

bias? all they said was the truth and that they were comfortable. whats so bias about that. and i agree with #1 "here come the fanboys to complain"

You guys also might want to keep in mind that more people play online games wiht the PS2 than any other console.

http://gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=9051

^ just for the OTHER side bias.

"Xbox Live! is alone at the top, and no one seems interested in trying to take them down."

Come on... I think Nintendo deserves a little love here. Mention their efforts at least.

ps3 is going to be better and hotter xbox 360 will be OK but not as ps3.thats a promise.

This was a good read, but Major Nelson missed some major points that I think make the PS3 look worse than it is. I am a big Xbox fan, but I took the time to recreate some of his charts over on my site http://spaces.msn.com/members/jeromeontech/ for those who care to get the most accurate depiction possible.

I can think of no better way to play my PC re-treads than the Xbox 360! Thanks Bill!

the #'s are almost completly wrong. And if you read it they change their #'s so many times when comparing to sony's. THey flat out lie, its pathedic. Here are links of people who accualy know what the #'s mean who cant belive m$ would do this. Engadget, i advise you remove this as almost everything on there is false info.

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=23193

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=23170

and you want to complain about sony fanboys look at yourselves...

WTF> this is like ATTaCK of the fanboys. guys stfu.

And ppl play online on the ps2 more than xbox what are you fucking STUPID?!

and to clear things up they have never lied. its the sites that lie not them. they have not done anything wrong in this war so far. they have just released specs that were better than our expectations. and DELIVERED!

for example with the ps3. what happened to 4.5 GHZ per cell?

Great post jerome you should go on the forums at xbox365 some times. # 8 Jerome

#11, umm accualy more people play online with the ps2 then the xbox cus their are 4 times as many ps2's sold then xboxs. did you ever think of that? considering its free and all...maby you need a reality check.

and shut up, they did lie, you want me to prove it? go read the links i made in post #10 and you will understand. www.beyond3d.com is an unbias site dedicated to the expansion of knowledge in the electronics field.

YOU ARE THE FANBOY, not me. o and to let you know, major nelson is run by a microsoft rep. so that should tell you right there it is b/s.

This is vastly entertaining. Thanks, Joystiq!

Look, you can't blame Major Nelson for defending his company's interests. Biased? No more so than Sony's hype machine.

Did you also read that: "360 developers had to significantly reduce the image quality of their demos at E3 - which explains their lack luster appearance. Anti-aliasing wasn't enabled on any of the demos." Which means Xbox titles will look as great as we thought they would. Just as good as Sony's.

Listen. These systems are going to be very, very similar in specs. The console wars will be won by the company that delivers the best features, service and software. Reality? There will be great games on all 3 consoles. This is an amazing time to be a gamer.

#11, umm accualy more people play online with the ps2 then the xbox cus their are 4 times as many ps2's sold then xboxs. did you ever think of that? considering its free and all...maby you need a reality check.

and shut up, they did lie, you want me to prove it? go read the links i made in post #10 and you will understand. www.beyond3d.com is an unbias site dedicated to the expansion of knowledge in the electronics field.

YOU ARE THE FANBOY, not me. o and to let you know, major nelson is run by a microsoft rep. so that should tell you right there it is b/s.

#14

i would have to say this goes beyond anything sony has done. one thing is to just play cgi movies (which both sony and m$ did)but it is another to BLATINLY LIE about your competitors stats. thats just pathedic on their part.

Whoa, this thing does this and that's better than that. WTF none of that matters. The machines still have to be programmed for. Designers in Japan seem to think the Xbox is easier to program for, and many have jumped ship. Game designers ability to extract result from the hardware will determine the best graphics. I also seem to remember Sony saying that hardware power doesn't matter. Before we get too far gone, not even Sony is arguing that Xbox live is more successful. Sony counts it's online numbers by systems with adapters and adapters sold. This is inaccurate. Multiples have been purchased and not all are actually playing online. Microsoft can actually calculate it's subscriber base and it is accepted as the fastest to reach 1 mil online suscribers. Even faster than AOL. You can argue hardware # and if this does that, but don't argue the overwelming success of Xbox live (even sony admitted they underestimated the importance of online gaming). It Makes you look biased, overzealous, and stupid.

PS3 folks are going to be screwed with first person shooters. I think the main reason 1st person shooters were not succesful on PS2 was because the controller. It just sucks and particularly for 1St Person shooter. It looks like this controller doesn't even have triggers!!! And is it just me or is this thing huge (PS3)! It looks bigger than original Xbox.

What are they thinking releasing a huge ugly controller with a huge strange looking console knowing how much flac the Xbox took. MS adapts and changed their controller design now 3 times. They also adapted and changed the whole feel and look of their console. If Sony has chosen these rediculous and impractical designs, than they probably will stick to it. Also...where the crap is the Hard Drive for the PS3??? They don't list one as being standard!
Is it just me or are they making all of their mistakes over again and adding all the mistakes MS made on the first XBOX!

Does anyone actually believe that sony will ship PS3 any sooner than Christmas 2006? Just think about all the delays with PS2 and then with PSP happening now. They just don't have their act together. Sony wants us to believe they are coming just around the corner with PS3 and to hold off from buying 360, but I will not wait a year or more for a console we really know nothing about yet except some prerendered CGI movie of Killzone. I was at E3 and saw the 360 demos and even got to play one.
The 360 controller is slightly smaller than the Xbox S controller and feels good. The Guide button worked in the game I was playing and will be a really cool feature.
The Kameo Demo looked amazingly well ( I wasn't expecting it to be so cool). At one point in Kameo, the chick is riding a horse and trampling over what seemed like hundreds of charachters that were fighting against each other in a full on war. It's amazing they can render so many charachters all at once. And yes this was real time actual gameplay occuring right in front of my face.

Call of Duty 2 gameplay looked amazing as well.
The Gears of War Demo was amazing and may just be the Killer Ap for the 360 launch. Although If I remember correctly...the Xbox had a great launch, but from what I've seen at E3, Xbox 360 will have a spectacular set of Launch titles and features over Xbox Live.
Youd be a fool to wait for PS3 given that it's vaporware until they show some real games.

"Youd be a fool to wait for PS3 given that it's vaporware until they show some real games."

NO M$ Suck0rs......haha...fanboys....wish they'd just go away....

from the site: "detachable 20GB HD"

i thought it was 40GB

#16: You wrote: "... BLATINLY LIE about your competitors stats. thats just pathedic on their part."

First, I could barely understand what you wrote (spellcheck is a common courtesy), and second, that's your opinion. Opinions are like assholes, everybody has one. I've spoken with several techheads I know who think Microsoft's specs seem accurate. We'll see when the systems come out now, won't we?

Is it just me, or do the XBox supporters seem to be better spoken than the PS2 fans? Perhaps that's because we're older than 14.

Boomhauer, I hate generalizations, but yeah... I've noticed that, too.

Jerome,
Thanks for the additional analysis. Did you take into account that Major Nelson says that all three cores of the 360's CPU share 1MB L2 cache, while the Cell core has 512KB and each SPE has 256KB local memory (not cache)? That's 2.25MB of memory, not including DMA.

First off, that 256GB/s number is totally bogus, it's the theoretical GPU fillrate into the 10MB EDRAM framebuffer, not "system bandwidth" as claimed. If we're looking at bandwidth peaks, the 7-way vector cores' bandwidths to their 256k local storage memory would come in at, wait for it, 350GB/s (16 bytes/clock @ 3.2Ghz x 7).

Also, Microsoft tries to minimize the FP capability of the PS3's vector units, but SIMD FP, contrary to their stupid claims, is where it's at for games, even AI (haven't they heard of fuzzy logic state machines???).

As far as system bandwidths go, the PS3 has separate data buses, a 25.6GB/s internal bus (so the vector units can talk to each other and to the 512K L2 memory), the XDR RAMBUS channel, and the FlexIO link between the CPU and the GPU, while xbox has the memory controller in the GPU which means if there will be bandwidth contention between the CPU and GPU when the SIMD fur is flying.

Also, xbox can only do 720p while ps3 can do 1080p x 2 channels. Who's going to have stereo, dunno, but the ps3 can do it, out of the box. Microsoft hacks also ignored other areas where Sony is pulling out the stops, like the bluetooth and 6 USB 2.0 ports (including 2 in the back).

I would sell my left nut for a Linux kit for this baby. The xbox2 is nice and all, but the PS3 is just pure mind-blowing over-the-top insanity.

the funny thing is, if you run the numbers the 10mb graphics frame buffer of the 360 is too small to be able to display any HD resolution with anti aliasing.

Heywood,
I can't remember if it was Anandtech, HardOCP, or someone else, but they intervied some engineers at ATI, and were told that the GPU could also handle 1080p. It didn't say if it could handle it on two displays.

#24
No, the Xbox 360 is plainly stated as supporting 1080i. They required developers do 720p as a minimum but mentioned many titles already including 1080i. A lot of it comes down to wha the developer is trying to do. For instance, is the progressive mode's virtues for animation greater than the detail offered by the interlaced mode? Also does the developer want to invest in the assets needed to do more than one of the modes properly?

Both machines have a lot going for them but I'm just not inclined to pick a winner at this point. Sony appear to have an edge on several front but a lot of unknown possible issues as well. It remains to be seen where the problem may arise for developers that cause some of the performance to be lost on the way tot he screen. It gets pretty nebulous until there is retail hardware for regular folks to try out the games for themselves in realworld interactive conditions.

A more interesting difference to me is that each company is playing out the anxieties fromt heir last generation. Microsoft, plagued by hardware costs, appears to be focused on a platform that will scale down smoothly. Sony, OTOH, is concerned with having no questions about their platform performance and is willing to take on a big cost burden to do it, along with still more expense to win the HDTV disc playback crown by sheer force of numbers for their Blu-ray format trojanned on a console, much as they scored big with PS2 DVD playback in Japan.

Both of them are being cautious about production problems. The Cell is being delivered with a SPE disabled to allowed for a high defect rate in early production and the ATI video processor in the Xbox 360 also has redundant elements for the same reason. The rate at which performance demands is outpacing manufacturing capability is affecting more than Intel's P4 progression.

Where in the good green earth do people keep getting the idea that the PS3 is HUGE? Look at the photos... That's a DVD/CD sized slot, not one for records... Jon you sound lost. "Mistakes with the PS2?" Are you 12? Thing redefined home video games... Helped push the DVD outside of the videophile market and to normal people... Still strong sales. You sound like you just got into video gaming a year or so ago, when the XBox actually started selling... And by the way, no real problems waiting to buy the PS3... We'll all be playing XBox360!

And some of you guys are spazzing over numbers that none of us understand beyond what is told to us by the companies themselves... So let's trace the path: XBox360 on MTV: "Sony is gonna lose!" E3 PS3 announcements and quick gloss-over of processors and power: "XBox 360 is gonna get smoked!" Major Nelson gets his team to write a wonderfully overwhelming technical report... Suddenly it's like the XBox added more processors! "Sony is gonna lose!" and next week, Sony will probably post a rebuttal to Major Nelson's page...

Don't keep acting like you understand all of the jargon... Very few who do are even wasting time writing posts on these blogs. It's just too early. It's gonna come down to the programming. We can't know until next year when both boxes are out and in our houses... And it'll probably take another year just to see if one can outpace the other...

This is actually somewhat funny. For one, Nintendo isn't getting dogged right now, and people no longer seem to care about what's really important about video games... the GAMES!! I couldn't care less about the numbers, as long as the games that come out are good. If numbers were my only concern, I sure as heck would never play the portable games, because they don't compare to the systems. I personally have no clue what all the numbers mean, but that's because I don't give a flip. When I choose which system I buy first, it's based on how many good games I wanna buy, not by processors, memory, and whatever other numbers you through at me. And not only is it the games that make my decision, but how much I trust the system not to break down. I know this is gonna sound a bit fanboyish, but that's the reason I like Nintendo. The first PS2 I got broke down for whatever reason, and I had to get a second one (which did last.) I've had 4 Playstations, and I think only one works (if I turn it on it's side.) The first X-Box I got stopped reading discs, got that replaced, and that one has worked fine. The Gamecube however, which is the only system I've ever gotten on release date, is still working perfectly with no kinks, and it's the original one I got. The X-Box one could have been a fluke (it happens, don't really know), but the Playstations breaking down, along with the PS2's, and the PSP thing with the square button (I'll let the dead pixels slide) just set me off Sony for a while. They tend to rush things, and fix it as they go along, so I'll wait untill they fix their system to work correctly. And between Microsoft and Nintendo, I tend to like Nintendo exclusives over Microsoft, and online gaming isn't my thing, so I know which system I'm getting. I know I rambled into a completely different subject, but my thought process is a bit off right now. Anyway, get over the numbers, and get the games you want. The only time numbers start to matter is when the game gets released for multiple systems, otherwise, it doesn't matter what the numbers are on Sony over Microsoft if you want to play Halo 3, you still gotta get the X-Box 360 to play it.

Eric, I've read that the ATI chip scales 720p to output 1080i.

We can all agree that both machines (and even the Revolution most likely) will be amazing platforms that are worthy follow-ons, and totally outclass today's desktop PCs. If the PS3 didn't exist the xbox would indeed be an impressive platform. But looking that the systems side-by-side, IMV Sony has hit the ball outta the park. 7 wireless bluetooth controllers, 6 USB 2.0 ports, 3 (!) gigabit (!) ethernet ports, two HDMI outputs (!) for stereo or multihead gaming.

And probably for the cost of a Mac mini, or less! I wish Apple had the huevos that Sony is showing here.

Americans... xbox is only "easier" in USA...

Man, this is just more FUD from Microsoft. This pattern of behavior from them is really sad. They see a product, or competition, and they either buy them out or they spread FUD that the uneducated masses drink up like kool-aid.

And people wonder why Microsoft is disliked so much. If they were honest in their business practices they'd have a lot more fans.

Way to go, Microsoft. You've not only convinced me that the 360 is incredibly inferior to the PS3, but also that you're willing to sacrifice what little respect you have for consumers in order to make a quick buck at the expensive of your customers satisfaction.

What ever funkonaut # 32
You want to look at things on a personal level thats you business!" This reminds me of people dis liking the Yankess calling them the evil empire. My advice to you Dude try to be more concerned about whats in your backyard .Your not God .Please stop playing Judge. Sony nor Mictrosoft are angels /Please lets leave the moral aspect of stuff out of the gaming world. You have a choice funkonaut you don't have to ever look at xbox360. I'm buying both systems becuse i like what they have to offer. I'm sick of the nay sayers in general. Peace!"

As I was saying... kool-aid...

funkonaut # 35 Lets say your rights ,lets say your wrong. why even waste your time feeding us what we already know. Example I know people who bought the PXS 2 or three times because it broke . knowing it's not durable product . I wonderful if you remember one of the producers of capcom claiming Sony purposibly makes thier system to break down in a short period of time inorder for you to replace it. So yes people do fell for the the kool aid on both sides. Thats leads me to believe that your like most fan boys you only see one way , thats happens to be narrow and closed minded. It's Sad

well i am new to this can anyone tell me is ps3 is 256bit ?

Does anyone else find it funny that a company that creates so much hate from PC users can have so many fans just because they make a games console?!

Neither of these companies cares at all about the consumer - all they care about is making money for their shareholders. They just want their box in your living room, so that they can get a slice of services like video-on-demand. Stop being so sad, learn to spell and just buy the console that has the best games.

jon,
The main core of the PS3's Cell is 64-bit, with the SPEs being 32-bit. The three cores of the XBox360's CPU is 64-bit.

I agree with you Nick about those companies really caring about the bottom line (making money off us!"
As far a spelling is concerned nick even people who are educated misspell words every now and then. I know that for a fact!"

"ATI did clarify that although Microsoft isn't targetting 1080p (1920 x 1080) as a resolution for games, their GPU would be able to handle the resolution with 4X AA enabled at no performance penalty."

Source: http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=2423&p=2

Just read this.
http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/617/617951p1.html

I bought my PS2 on the opening day. I've used it since then more for watching DVDs than playing games, but I'd say I've gotten a lot of usage out of it. The only times it ever broke down on me is when my cats knocked it off the coffee table (4 times). Each time i was able to open it up, realign the laser, run a few tests, and start playing again.

I've been very pleased with my purchasing decision, although I truely covet the smaller PS2 that is on the market now.

Also for the record I don't even know if I'll buy a next gen console. I'll probably decide which one I'll want by christmas of '07. Buy then I'll have made my HDTV purchase as well.

This major Nelson article is a brilliant ploy and completely spun (but not to blame being a MS PR guy).

It assumes that Sony would be going about programming in the same exact fashion as the XNA environment would afford for the xbox 360.

This is typical given that Microsoft is a PC company at heart and would never want to bad-mouth the pc architecture and programming enviroment.

The truth of the matter is that Sony's architecture blows the PC's architecture out of the water...albeit they go about things in a different, way-more efficient way.

If you put Sony's console in a Microsoft programming environment - I would bet that Microsoft would win because Sony's console is not optomized for that (although, I'm not so sure MS's console would even win there).

The truth is that Sony's API's are much more forward thinking and revolutionary than the dinosaur-like PC API's (even though Cell and RSX are compatible with those as well). The brilliance here comes from NVidias "Cg" API's which are C-based but allow for the development of highly-expedited CGI-like graphics and physics rendering. Yes, Sony's console will be easy to program for, as a MICROSOFT software engineer points out in his own journal. Yes, I said a Microsoft employee.

http://spaces.msn.com/members/jeromeontech/

Even more brilliant is the comparison of the GPUs. It pains me to see Major Nelson try and claim that the MS GPU is more powerful because of programmable "hybrid" shaders (which program in software by the way -- and are way, way weaker than dedicated hardware shaders, of which the RSX has many more than the R520). What's more is that Major Nelson assumes how many shaders the Sony chip has and has no factual evidence to make a comparison on. He makes the claim that because MS has more transistors on its chip (332 Million compared to RSX's 300 Million) that it's more powerful. What he fails to mention is that only slightly more than 232 Million of those 332 Million are processing logic (almost 100 million transistors are for the 10 MB of embedded DRAM - the frame buffer). This means that the RSX has about 70 Million more transistors for processing logic (the only thing that really counts in the comparison). This shows that the comparison is a farce. (IGN reference):

"The daughter die totals an even 100 million transistors [10 MB EDRAM], bringing the total transistor count for the GPU to 232 million."

His comparison of Memory Architecture is again a complete and miserable failure. Most of the number he put up in the bar chart has nothing to do with actual processing logic (the things that make your graphics, physics, ai, and sound come into being). Rather than explicity state this, he just clumps everything into one meaningless category. Most of the number he put up there refers to the Memory Bandwidth of the frame buffer. The only thing the frame buffer contributes to is Image Quality (Anti-Aliasing, which is important to some extent), but becomes less important at higher and higher resolutions for obvious reasons.

In no way does the frame buffers memory bandwidth relate to in anyway to processing logic calculations. The reason it is so large is because of FSAA oversampling...in order to do anti-aliasing at high resolutions at say 4 to 8 times over, you need to locally store literally dozens of memory intensive, high-resolution "screenshots" of the same image and lay them over each other to blur the edges of the lines. I will say that ATI really excels in the FSAA department, but at the end of the day very good image quality does nothing to advance either the complexity of the graphics, physics, ai, or the sound...which are the most important part of a videogame experience. NVidia has it's own FSAA solution and while probably not as efficient as ATI's, it works well and doesn't deter from the four areas that I just mentioned that are the future of videogames.

MS knows the XBOX 360 will not be as powerful as the PS3 (which makes sense...the PS3 will have been in development much longer), so it tries to make up by comparing its strengths, which are the following:

Image Quality and Integer-intensive Applications

The second part really pisses me off....because once again...Major Nelson lies calling games "general computing intensive programs", when in reality they are very, very highly floating point intensive and not very integer intevsive. In fact, I am seeing some ulterior motives being surfaced here. MS wants to turn your gaming console into a PC in the living room. The reason PC cpus have high integer performance is because they do highly-integer intensive computing and multitasking(eg. MS products like Microsoft Word, Excel, Access, Internet Explorer, Messenging, OS services, etc.). Now, do you want your game console to be transformed into a platform for office products and web browsing? I think not. Another cross-marketing ploy for MS to suck the life out of your wallet.

The truth is that Sony's CPU and GPU are much, much more specialized for gaming (graphics, physics, ai, and sound) than MS's more general computing console. The cell works like a network of independent, specialized processors that can each handle tasks independently and have little to no lag time because of the lack of a bottlenecking bus. One of the SPEs is even dedicating to redundancy to ensure that clock-cycles are not lost when synching instructions together, making the cell uber-efficient. MS's cpu on the other hand has 3 cores which cannot act independently...they just take one task and do it at 3 times the speed. Sure they are more complex...but complex is not necessarily better - in fact, in this case it's worse.

The best allusion to compare the cell with MS's processor is this scenario:

The cell if it were an office environment:

One high-level thinking Manager managing, working with, and delegating tasks to 8 very-well rounded technical employees.

The MS processor in the office environment:

Three high-level thinking Managers working concurrently on one problem together.

Which is the proven way of doing business, you ask?

The cell's way of doing business of course. It just works in the real world. And sadly, up to this point, hardware engineers have been too lazy to change the architecture to afford this kind of highly efficent, specialized work environment. PC champions would never, ever make you aware of this though. This would destroy their world. Imagine if Microsoft had to write OS's for Cell PC's in the future...you know how pissed off they would be? That's how nervous MS is here.

Microsoft invaded Sony's space in the gaming world. Now Sony is pissed and making attack on MS's world with the Cell.

If the Cell does catch on, PC people are in a whole world of shit.

I have one simple, small, short question: If the PS3 has 1 more year left of development will they be able to improve on any of the lacking features (lacking at least to the Xbox360)? If you want to throw in Moore's law, a year from now the PS3's technology will be a year old at its debut! So is any improvement to the hardware completely impossible for them to implement in this next year? Thats the sole thing that I am worried about.

Plus I think that its clear that if the PS3 really does sell enough and gain a stronger community then it clearly leads to extra development of the Cell processor. The Cell processor is something that will/should permeate just about every product of technology. Its incredibly small and fast, perfect for mobile computing and considering its grid-design its immediately perfect for servers. I want the PS3 to flourish just because of the endless possibilities of the cell processor.

#45 I'm with you on that one.

More good news for Sony fans. Looks like the KILLZONE video was in fact rendered with in-game "real-time" rendering. Thus, it is a true representation of what the game will look like on PS3. Here is what confirms it on Gamespot:

"RUMOR #1: The Killzone PlayStation 3 tech demo was prerendered.

Source: Forums all over the place, such as this thread on Evil Avatar.

The official story: See below.

What we heard: When the lights at Monday's PlayStation 3 demo came up, the audience members picked up their jaws off the floor...and began wagging their tongues. Like a game version of the Kennedy assassination, the audience quickly split into two camps: Those who thought the demo was prerendered, making it essentially computer animation, and those who thought it was rendered in real time, which means it would be close, graphically, to actual gameplay. The fires of speculation were fueled further by the ambiguous comments of Jan-Bart Van Beek, game eirector of the PS3 Killzone at Guerrilla Games, to the official PlayStation UK site."It's basically a representation of the look and feel of the game we're trying to make," he said. Then a post on the Eurogamer forums laid out a tantalizing conspiracy: Axis Animation, the same Scottish computer animation company that made a cinematic for the first Killzone, had been working on the E3 demo for months as straight-up CG. So how does Sony respond to the allegations? Far from being evasive, it met them head-on. "Yes, it is real time," a rep told GameSpot."

So boo-ya XBOX fanboys. You can stop your annoying bitching and whining now and take some time to reflect on the fact that you were just utterly and completely mushed in the face.

"One of the SPEs is even dedicating to redundancy to ensure that clock-cycles are not lost when synching instructions together"

? I thought this was to increase yields. If 7 out of the 8 SPEs work, Sony will still use the CPU (and if all 8 work Sony will disable one SPE).

"MS's cpu on the other hand has 3 cores which cannot act independently...they just take one task and do it at 3 times the speed."

This is wrong, totally wrong. The xbox will have 6-way multiprocessing, which in itself is pretty impressive, though it remains to be seen how the FSB holds up under this load.

#47

You neglected to include the conclusion

"Bogus or not bogus?: Believe Sony? Bogus. Think Sony's lying? Not Bogus."

Guess you believe Sony. When have they ever misled anyone?

#48 No, actually you are wrong...words right from a Microsoft software engineers mouth:

"Think of today’s computers. You don’t have multiple processors, but you are able to run a plethora of applications seamlessly and concurrently. With the Xbox 360, developers will not have dedicated processors for each of their physics engines, etc, but the bus speed and the large unified memory will allow them to “hack” it and write software and libraries that will be just as good as if it had a dedicated processor. This actually puts more responsibility on the developers making it a little harder to program in my opinion than the PS3"

Um, I believe the term used is "hack" it. To "Hack" it usually means to use software emulation to get similar functionality.

So there, you my friend are wrong. The three cores will work concurrently on the same instructions and won't be dedicated, or specialized. The words right out of the horses mouth.

MS software engineer ... for reference to what I just stated.

http://spaces.msn.com/members/jeromeontech/