The game industry circle is "almost" complete

[alpha_dk]

Godot said:

halogamer1989 said:

We all know that famous Star Wars line..."the circle is complete".  Remember way back when, consoles were sub-par substitutes for PCs, ie Apple II, IBM, etc. Companies like Atari, and later the 1st big three jumped at the chance to make $$ off users of cheaper consoles as users wanted to pay less. 

Now that the consoles are such powerhouses, I believe that the future may indeed hold a circle is complete notion-that is, as consoles near equal status to everyday PCs, multi-core, high RAM, exteme grafx.

 

In addition, I know everybody knows about this in some respect but thinlk about this: we are currently approaching the limits of Moore's Law in console/PC chips.  Nanotechnology will play a role in this circle's last segmant--I guarantee it.

You may think what you want of consoles but a standard 1000$ computer will most likely run an algorithm on a large collection of data faster than a PS3 or Xbox. Consoles are terrible work environment and that's why they remain in the living room. Also, did you know that Moore's Law isn't everything. It's about the hardware capabilities. However, you need engineers to create an optimized OS that can really use the power we have. So far, the OS on the market suck and we're far from getting what we could really get.

It amuses me that the example you chose to tell us a PC would be better at than a console corresponds EXACTLY to the strengths of the Cell (and other SIMD multiprocessors)...

As in, the Cell would have a very good chance to outperform any $1000 x86 PC at running an algorithm on a large collection of data simply because that is what the processor was built for...