scooby_dooby
Legend
This is actually quite unbiased even though it is coming from Bizarre, not the most technical read but he does give some nice nuggets about some of the cool features of the systems/GPU's. Interesting to hear a developer speak about it.
http://www.bizarreonline.net/index.php?action=fullnews&showcomments=1&id=37
"On the CPU side, once again both machines offer a common challenge. Moore's law is over - the limits of silicon are reached. The speed of light has even become a consideration in chip design with the physical distances on the die being a limiting factor!
....
This forces a rethink in programming practices and how game engines are put together. Expect to see a big jump between successive generations of games on both machines. From the perspective of a programmer working on a title, this is the biggest change. It should mean one can separate out a fixed, predictable amount of processing from the chunk taken to manage the visuals; again helping to deepen the experience. Although the raw 'GFLOPS' provided by the CPU is only 10% of the overall figure, it's critical to utilize for the depth of the gaming experience."
"The approach offered to CPU side multiprocessing is the biggest difference between them. Microsoft's machine on paper promises to be the more developer friendly with 3 identical custom PowerPC cores, 2 hyper threads each. One can write common code then decide at will how to balance the program across them. Hyper threading creates some interesting back doors with 2 tasks sharing the same cache.
In practice, both for optimization and to avoid hard-to-track, production-schedule-stretching bugs, the best practices mean the more limited the 'background-tasks' are, the better, which takes forethought in engine design. Microsoft's customized PowerPC is still reliant on specific coding to maximize use of its truly powerful vector processing instructions... although it's worth pointing out it has the fullest featured SIMD unit I've yet seen!
Sony's contrasting approach has been to take this observation and design a totally new processing architecture around this. Some talk about it being like the "RISC revolution all over again". On paper this will be harder to deal with as you're using non-standard tools. But given the issues above, the architecture has a certain elegance. An extremely exciting development in the PC space that I'll be watching closely is the Agiea physics board, designed explicitly for the sort of 'spatial' processing seen in games - collision detection and physics. This operates very similarly to the Cell, surely a vote of confidence for the concept. "
http://www.bizarreonline.net/index.php?action=fullnews&showcomments=1&id=37
"On the CPU side, once again both machines offer a common challenge. Moore's law is over - the limits of silicon are reached. The speed of light has even become a consideration in chip design with the physical distances on the die being a limiting factor!
....
This forces a rethink in programming practices and how game engines are put together. Expect to see a big jump between successive generations of games on both machines. From the perspective of a programmer working on a title, this is the biggest change. It should mean one can separate out a fixed, predictable amount of processing from the chunk taken to manage the visuals; again helping to deepen the experience. Although the raw 'GFLOPS' provided by the CPU is only 10% of the overall figure, it's critical to utilize for the depth of the gaming experience."
"The approach offered to CPU side multiprocessing is the biggest difference between them. Microsoft's machine on paper promises to be the more developer friendly with 3 identical custom PowerPC cores, 2 hyper threads each. One can write common code then decide at will how to balance the program across them. Hyper threading creates some interesting back doors with 2 tasks sharing the same cache.
In practice, both for optimization and to avoid hard-to-track, production-schedule-stretching bugs, the best practices mean the more limited the 'background-tasks' are, the better, which takes forethought in engine design. Microsoft's customized PowerPC is still reliant on specific coding to maximize use of its truly powerful vector processing instructions... although it's worth pointing out it has the fullest featured SIMD unit I've yet seen!
Sony's contrasting approach has been to take this observation and design a totally new processing architecture around this. Some talk about it being like the "RISC revolution all over again". On paper this will be harder to deal with as you're using non-standard tools. But given the issues above, the architecture has a certain elegance. An extremely exciting development in the PC space that I'll be watching closely is the Agiea physics board, designed explicitly for the sort of 'spatial' processing seen in games - collision detection and physics. This operates very similarly to the Cell, surely a vote of confidence for the concept. "
He basically says everything is great for the xbox360 and adds that everything about the PS3 is probably great too.. (although he admits he knows next to nothing about the cell) He also doesn't actively compare both systems. Nevertheless it's a interesting read 
