it is probably very fortunate that ps3 uses a seven series, and not 8, as it is becoming clear that nvidia has been hiding serious defects in the series until series 9 came out. the failure rate of most series 8 boards is almost higher then rrod, this has lead to quite a few class action suits....
honestly MS was put in a bind when choosing gpu, as ATI plays better with directx, where the ppc cpu at its core would have played better with an Nvidia chip. where opengl has worked better for ppc chips historically
I do think you are understating the value of unified architecture going forward though. that is a major saving in terms of power and efficientcy, and a play form the powerpc book where more can be done with a lower clock speed, so raw data through is very missleading. much like comparing a ppc chip to an x86
also i have wondered for awhile now why IBM did not design full chipsets to control both boards, as IBM (or motorola/freescale) are the people with the most experience in unifying ppc and gpu before this gen. as nvida, and ati did not design the chipsets in the macs for ppc to gpu communication, only members of the AIM (apple, intel, motorola (now freescale)) alliance did
what should be of more interest is why sony went for a gpu when the cell was originally set to run all fx related tasks. could it have been to convoluted to code for? was the lack of an 8th spe to blame? could they not set up a version of opengl to run on it?
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