MikeB on 09 July 2008
@ makingmusic476
Final devkits for both platforms only went out ~1 month before their respective launches. This gives developers a fully year head start working with the 360. It's 2.5 years vs 1.5 years. Developers haven't been working with the Cell all that long, let alone compared to the how long they've been working with the Xenon.
Agreed, but also the 360 dev kits were more mature (for example for the 360 launch title Kameo already 85% of available CPU cycles were being harvested, source: Microsoft).
It's not that IBM/Sony did a bad job on their early development tools, the Cell design is radically different compared to previous CPU designs, it's more revolutionary than the Xenon, which has a more evolutionary design, has more in common with past multi-core CPU designs on the PC and Microsoft took many Windows tools with them onto the 360.
