We all knew this a long time ago, it still doesn't matter if third party's won't take advantage of it.

@ HappySquirrel

Plus God of War relies on a fixed camera that is very zoomed out most of the time, it is easier to make something look good if it is far away, plus it has very simple textures and relies on LOD'ing to keep up the speed and there are never many enemies if the background is detailed,  The game is designed to look as good as possible well requiring as little power as possible

NOtice how the desert in the first game camera becomes basically over head?

or how when the background looks fantastic it is always far away and there are never more than 5 or 6 enemies, or how the smaller enemies have mitten hands?  Or how the enemy A.I. is circle around then strike?

God of War 1 and 2 are well designed but they are as technically impressive as RE4,

except your ignoring that it is geared specifically toward gaming and graphics, much like the gekko was a moded 750CXe

Comparing Wii with Xbox is like comparing PS3 with Xbox 360. As a result of smart first party development given sufficient time, PS3 will yield better results than 360 but those conditions are usually not met, whether the time limitation or its not a 1st party developer, PS3 yields worse or equal performance.

Wii is certainly better than Xbox in most aspects; however its much easier to develop games for xbox due to its similarity with the PC artitecture and in terms of raw power, xbox might be slightly better due to graphics horse power. But when the wii architecture is utilized smartly, it will yield results clearly superior to Xbox. Though one should not expect something more than twice of wii or xbox at best case scenario! It would be too optimistic otherwise.

The Gekko processor was based on a Power3 architecture with major modifications (32 additional instructions for example) ... What we know about the Hollywood processor is that it is based off of the Gekko and is (approximately) twice as big, which implies that there were major modifications.

Saying that the Hollywood processor is basically a particular PowerPC processor is exactly like saying that the Cell or Xenon processors are basically a particular PowerPC processor; after all the Xenon (and I believe the Cell) was based on the Power3 architecture with heavy modifications.

@ HappySquirrel

GC > PS2 absolutely... compare god of war is a heresy... RE4 had half of the polygon count in PS2 compared to the GC version and considerable frame rate drop when engaging many enemies.

This is where I think the article is mistaken. The so-called "core gamer" DOES seek the eradication of the casual: to push everyone but them away from gaming again just as they did ten years ago. There is no true threat to the core, not even if casuals are catered to, but the core imagine a threat that people who Aren't Like Them will get into gaming, and this scares them to death, because for all that Nintendo was inflammatory when they described the core demographic as "anti-social teens," one thing they weren't is incorrect. The industry and its core demographic is ailing, and the cure is an infusion of new blood and the resulting socialization of the core.

One of the main reasons so many companies have been moving towards IBM for their embedded solutions is because IBM has designed their processors in a modular way so that they can be highly customized. This means that someone who needs a very inexpensive processor (for something like a dryer) can have a very scaled back feature set, while someone who is looking for more performance (HD image processing on a TV) can have an advanced feature set to get the highest performance to price ratio possible.

The Gekko processor was manufactured using a 180nm process while the Broadway processor was manufactured using a 90nm process, and the Gekko processor's die size has twice the area of the Broadway processor where a straight manufacturing process reduction (to 90nm) would produce a die size that was a quarter of the Gekko's processor; this means that the Broadway processor is (approximately) twice the size of the Gekko processor, which implies that the Broadway processor has heavy modifications which (should) make it much more powerful per clock cycle.

We really don't know what these modifications are, and without knowing that it is nearly impossible to determine how they have impacted the performance of the processor. If Nintendo doubled the on chip cache on the Broadway processor it is likely that the number of cache misses could be dramatically reduced and the processor would become far more efficient.