| SlorgNet said: Carmack is a brilliant programmer, but id has traditionally been focused on PC games. So his perspective is mostly PC-centric, which tends to be misinterpreted as being pro-Microsoft. Remember, his generation of programmers specialized in writing code for single-core architecture. The PS3 is a true multicore system, and that was a huge challenge for the coders. Fortunately, Insomniac, Kojima and others have proved that multicore is no longer a barrier to make great games. |
The Xbox 360 and modern PCs are also multicore. The difference is that the Cell is asymmetric, as opposed to symmetric CPUs.
For games, PS3's Cell has one general purpose-oriented core and 6 number-crunching smaller cores (which aren't fully utilized by any PS3 game as far as I know). The 360 has 3 general purpose cores, all identical.
The higher number of cores on the PS3 and their limitations as less sophisticated cores make the Cell have higher throughput, but much harder to fully tap in complex applications like game engines. Game engines have lots of different workloads, many of which aren't fully parallelizable or have serial dependencies among them.
If we want to put things bluntly and clearly, let's just say it this way - Sony is giving developers a lot of work with little to no added benefit compared to what they'd get with a more streamlined and cheaper architecture (like the 360's).
My Mario Kart Wii friend code: 2707-1866-0957
