is the x-box 720 DOA?

[truthiness]

1) Cell was rushed into production. That being said, it's not the greatest architecture for gaming. It works great for certain things, e.g. IBM's Roadrunner Supercomputer design. Sony's involvement in the chip is really not all that great, other than in funding.

2) Xenon better suited for gaming in general, is easier to understand, and scales pretty well. That being said, The next 360 chip will most likely not be a direct translation of the chip, but will most likely remain in the PowerPC architecture, and will have hardware backwards compatibility. IBM and Microsoft seem to be getting along pretty well in that aspect.

3) Anyone arguing about how awesome Cell is, and about how versatile it is for all sorts of applications has no idea why cell was designed. It works well in some ways, and it has its place. In the same way, SUN's Niagra architecture has its place, but sucks at a lot of things.

4) Anyone speculating on the power of a next generation console, other than that Nintendo most likely won't break the bank to have the most powerful console, is sort of nuts. Especially when you are making comparisons about the relative powers between the next Microsoft and Sony console. I'm not aware of anyone mentioning anything about IBM or anyone else leaking what's in the woodworks, and I doubt there is a whole lot to say so far.

5) Anyone who argues that Cell, at least in the form of the PS3, is somehow going to be a better gaming performer, even if you could somehow schedule all code perfectly and figure out the perfect compiler for that headache of an architecture, would still not be better at producing 3d architecture as a 8800GTX. Specialization for graphics hardware in graphics tends to be a, uh, advantage. As for making any argument that the RSX is more powerful than a 8800GTX is ludicrous, plain and simple.

6) Yes, you can indeed game on a PC for many hours a day, for years to come, because cooling is much easier to handle in a PC chassis. No one is trying to sell a PC as a game console, and a PC is a much less specialized machine. That being said, money pays off, and a high end PC blows away a console.

7) Cell is not god. Seriously. It's a nice architecture that works well in certain ways, but it is not the end all be all for cpu architectures.

8) Before you post again, look up and read what ALU, Registers (both physical and virtual), cache, pipeline, smt, out of order and in order processing are. Seriously if you are going to make this a pissing contest about powers of things you don't understand, at least do it with the right terms.