My XBox 360 vs PS3 comparison (mostly technical)

[sieanr]

1. Is there no advantage to having 2 memory controllers instead of one?

No

2. PS3 design rushed and 360 not? Please elaborate, and don't forget to explain why the "non-rushed" hardware was the one with well over 20% hardware failure.

Orignally Sony intended the PS3 to have 4 Cells slaved together, each with its own independant bank of RAM. Since the SPUs are similar to the shaders of a GPU, they would serve as both GPU and CPU - offering something interesting and unique for developers.

Relativly late in its design cycle Sony came to the realization that 4 Cells would be too expensive and not offer enough performance for graphics. So, Sony went to ATI to ask for a graphics solution. For a while, it looked like they were going to have a deal, but things feel through.

Sony then went to Nvidia, who offered them a quick and dirty solution. Essentially, the GPU in the PS3 is a PC card tweaked and reworked for the console (specifically a 7800 crossed with a 7600, plus a little 7900)

By contrast, MS had ATI essentially design a custom GPU that was intended to work hand in hand with the CPU from the outset. Because of this, the 360 GPU has quite a few interesting features that aren't in any other GPU and make it quite interesting. And like I said, it was designed to work with the CPU and pooled RAM from the outset.

In the case of the PS3, you have some compromises with how the RAM is split, namely the 128bit bus from the RSX to its RAM and the other 128bit bus to the CPU. In a best case scenario, this will offer better performance than a single 256bit bus, but because of various factor this is unrealistic.

The 360 overheats because of a poor GPU heatsink that was the result of a crappy engineering compromise - probably cost related.