To me so far it seems a lil pointless.. I dont enjoy this trojan horse stratergy. SH-4 on the DC cost 30 bucks to make at launch and was pretty powerful. the cell is now around 3 years old(development point of view), has gone through hardware evolution shrinkage and still costs 60 bucks..

Its a bit of a criminal waste of technology.. if the developers cant use the power the chip has- its useless- no matter how many cores it has. Unfortunately SONY no longer enjoys the position in market share to force developers to work harder for better results.

M$ took a simpler strategy with the 360 and used a weaker/simpler CPU

I wanna see more heavy rain/killzone2 type of graphics but I have this feeling by the time developers get the hang of the ps3 the next-box will be out with the same strategy..

simpler components/lower costs is the way, the wii n xbox360 prove that!

It's six SPUs available to developers. The seventh (or first) is devoted to the PS3 OS. The eighth is a redundant SPU to increase chip yield (inactive).

I think a lot of developers aren't necessarily interested in making the PS3 version play "the best" so much as having it play comparably to the 360 version.

If they can do that on a port without having to depend heavily upon multiple SPUs, do you really think most developers are going to bother trying?

If you're a PC developer who is publishing games for a console in search of better sales, it makes loads more sense to develop for the 360, which for all intents and purposes, IS a standardized budget gaming PC, in many ways easier to develop for than the PC itself due to no need for hardware scalability, so long as low memory resources or optical drive playback issues aren't game breakers.

@Jo21: In practice there's two main reasons:
1. The amount of memory.
Consoles normally tend to be most heavily constrained due to the lack of RAM/VRAM.
2. Open platform.
You don't need to make a game for the "current" hardware, you can make your game for future hardware. If the game comes out and doesn't run on current hardware, it's only to take a couple of months before there's hardware available that can run the new game.
I recall from a bit over ten years back, that one game came out, that didn't run on the latest hardware. Of course, a little tweak during developement could have fixed the issue.

Actually its more like a bit PS3 and regular PC. iOE, unified memory, PowerPC all those make it more difficult to develop than regular PC. But anyway when making something to work on X360, its quite easy to port it for PC. Otherway around it could be a bit more painful tho. And of course X360 to PS3 or otherway around is always painful. :)

@Greenmedic: I know six can be used for games, but the sixth would be a shared SPE.

And 360 isn't standardized gaming PC. It has 3 PPC processors, neither seen in PC:s. What it has common with Windows, is DirectX.

AMD 3 core CPUs. Of course no games actually take advantage of that architecture.

The old G5 Macs utilized quad core PPCs on two chips, but again, since those were only available for workstation grade computers, no games really took full advantage of that architecture either.

I don't think anyone is going to argue that the 360 architecture is "harder" to develop for than any other platform. If a developer made that claim, it would be a first.

Nope, the seventh SPE is reserved for the OS (games can never use it AFAIK, so there's no such thing as a shared core on the PS3). This means the game has one PPE and 6 SPEs for itself. Apparently, KZ2 is using the PPE fully and 4 of the 6 SPEs (but not fully).

EDIT - I just did a google search and all the links seem to confirm what I wrote.

the same as the white engine according to square enix.

4 years of development huh? If they've only reached this level of use they would have probably been better off with a 2+4 design rather than a 1+ 8 design.

@Jo21: Chrystal tools.