The Next Generation Consoles

[Quark]

But three months is a huge amount of time for hardware changes.  Look at WoW.  In 6 months, they went from hardware that could barely support many realms, to the point where most realms are incredibly stable.

Not a fair comparison. Blizzard was taking systems that were already designed, and modifying their code to make it more scalable. If Microsoft is still making hardware changes to go from so-called 25% to 100%, they're not just plopping in faster, ready-made, hardware. They're doing design changes. Considering it takes a few months just for a chip to tape out, it would be completely irresponsible for Microsoft to be making changes right now.

Unless Microsoft wants to miss their deadline, their hardware is already designed 100% and hopefully taped out so they can fix bugs. You don't get a 4x speed increase from changing hardware in between Alpha and release. Software that's possible, but not hardware.

Edit: okay, read a little more, saw the piece about it being run on dual Power Macs. So only ATI had a real Xbox running at this time? That may explain the speed issue, since they were limited not by their hardware design, but by using temporary parts. They couldn't produce 20 preview systems for E3? That's a scary though when you think about console shortages. I see Sony had no hardware on hand according to Anandtech. That's a little less shaky, since they're planning a later release, but if either of these companies have bugs with their chips, there could be delays.

Programming for PS3 won't be an easy task, either.  The Cell processor isn't just a single processor you program for.  You have to write multithreaded code the same as you will for the 3 processing cores of the Xbox360.

If you'll look, you'll see I mentioned PS3 in the thread paragraph too. I'm no less skeptical about performance increases from Sony.

The biggest issue I see is that it appears that the Cell has a "main" processor that looks like it will be the controller for all of the sub-cores, while Xbox360 looks like it has three parallel cores that can all act as a "main controller."  All of this is speculation, but that's how the design looked to me.

If it is that way, I gaurantee one of the three equivalent Xbox 360 cores will become the defacto "main" processor. The others will just be taking offloaded work. The main processor may change per game, depending on the SDK, but it'll still be just as prevelant as Cell's.

I think one thing that may be a blunder on Sony's part is the lack of a dedicated online service.  Both Microsoft and Nintendo are offering a dedicated service, and Microsoft is even requiring that all games be, in the least, Live-aware, so that online functions will still continue while that game is active, even if it has no real online game modes.
Sony seems to be leaving it to the game companies to set these things up.  Now, correct me if I'm wrong here, but I don't think Sony has announced any online service for the PS3, and that may be something that hurts them in the long run.[right][snapback]78080[/snapback][/right]

Sony really hasn't said much about multiplayer that I've seen. Oh well, the games I like on consoles aren't typically multiplayer to begin with, so while I understand if that's a major point for some, it's a minor for me.