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Million on 11 March 2008
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MikeB said:
The basic 360 design is more similar with multi-core PCs and share very similar dev tools as available for Windows. There is less of a learning curve involved.

The PS3's Cell processor is a radically new design offering much more potential but requires legacy game engines to be redesigned. The rest of the system isn't that different as compared to PC development. Developing for the Cell processor requires a little more planning and well designed code.

It's not that difficult according to developers, but if you have a big badly designed game engine a lot of work needs to be done to redesign the legacy engine to get the most out of the platform. The Windows/360 development encourage less well designed game engines, with regard to Windows it's easier for devs for you to upgrade your system with more memory and higher clocked CPU instead of optimising the game engine themselves.

Also for example note that according to for instance Epic WindowsXP is horribly inefficient itself, already draining up 50% of available CPU cycles from single-core systems, when the system you are developing is this horribly inefficient it doesn't really encourage devs to get the most out of the remaining resources.

Basically devs can easily understand the PS3 architecture, some not so ambiteous devs however may feel discouraged looking at the redesigns required for their legacy engines. But the processing potential is better than for the highest specced consumer PCs. The Cell doesn't only provide higher theoretical specs in this regard, the chip can also function far more efficiently to get near its theorectical peak. The key is really the SPUs being 'systems on a chip' rather than just an ordinary multi-core CPU design.

Interesting , my main problem is the whole "theoretical" thing , it's all good and well being the most powerful so and so but if that power is hard to utilise then what does it matter...

 I hope Sony's putting more resources into helping the developers not only for 1st party titles but the 3rd party developer aswell. The only problem with multi-platform titles is that I don't think they'll feel the need to make it superior to 360 titles.