Old shots of the ps3's XMB from GDC06

[makingmusic476]

Gnizmo said:

Onibaka said:

Back then, sony wanted to put 2 cells but no gpu, and this proved to be worse in performance. They also wanted to put 2 HDMI and make it Dual-Screen o.O.

The Cell is not THAT expensive. What really made the PS3 $200 more than x360 was Blu-Ray Wi-Fi   HDMI Bigger HD Bluetooth XDR Ram Wireless recharchable controllers The Cell development costs(the processor itself is not expensive, but the cost do develop it...).

Actually the 360's Xenon is a discarate copy of Cell. Xenom have 3 PPE that are almost identical to the PS3 one. Microsoft designed the 360 to be able to support everything what PS3 does, but at a lower price.

HDD, Wifi, HDMI and rechargeable batteries all together add tens of dollars to a price at worst. Blu-ray was what jacked the price up so much. Stand-alone players retailed for close to $1000 at the time.

They were charging a considerable mark-up on Blu-ray players at the time.  The actual drives were near $200, I believe, with the launch of the ps3 bringing that price down even further due to economy of scale. 

And the above poster is incorrect in his thinking that "Cell was not that expensive".

The issue was that Blu-ray, Cell, and the RSX were all well over $100 each.  This was especially surprising for the RSX, given the Xenos in the 360 is slightly more capable yet cost less at the time.  Going with a specialized 256mb of XDR ram for Cell rather than the more common DDR3 (used for RSX/Xenon/Xenos/most modern computing) also came with added costs.

Sony went stupidly high end on most components, but this hasn't translated to any obvious advantage in hardware capability, thanks to most devs taking years to get to grips with Cell, and thanks to the RSX's non-unified shaders and last minute downclocked speed (550mhz > 500mhz) putting it at a disadvantage vs the Xenos.

You can still do some pretty impressive things with ps3, of course.  Many developers offload things like vertex-processing to the Cell's SPUs, making up for the RSX's shortcomings and then some, but you'll generally only see nifty tricks like this being used in games built solely for ps3, like Uncharted 2.

Though SCE did recently add Sony Santa Monica's Cell-based MLAA implementation to the Edge toolset, according to the guys at Digital Foundry, so we should start seeing that in third party games in the future, given it would supposedly only take "an afternoon of coding" to implement at this point.  We'll see what happens.