Major differences are unlikely. The Cell may be incredibly fast if used right, but the CPU is just one component. RAM and the GPU on both systems are much closer in terms of power, with the 360 having the slight edge in those. So the PS3 can have the best graphics, but it will take a lot of skill, and even then it won't be leaps and bounds over the 360.

isn't the mem difference marginal as it is? the only difference i know of is the PS3 OS uses more ram, but even that has gotten better. i know the ram is split on the PS3 and unified on the 360, but the PS3 can allocate system ram for the GSX to use, so what's the big deal?

This guy is definitely putting in agenda out in front and a lot of his info is off base.

With that said a lot of his info is also dead on, and sadly it will be ignored because he couldn't let the facts stand on their own. Nobody to blame but himself.

Last i heard both systems 512mb ram and the PS3 has by far more powerful and better ram.

360 has 512 normal ram
PS3 has 256 normal ram and 256XDR ram clocked at 3.2GHZ which is faster then any gaming ram on the market, which is 1.3ghz or something.

I read the article and I totally agree with the part, that is sony ps3 is suffering because is unbalanced.

The architecture of the PS3 is mighty impressive, and probably a bit more powerful than the 360, though not enough to really matter for a couple of years. But what does matter a great deal right now is BluRay. Many of the design decisions for the PS3 were due to BluRay - they needed a machine capable of ripping through massive amounts of data very quickly, and that's what led them to their multicore design.

One small example of just how underutilized the PS3's power really is: once I accidentally popped out my "Resistance" disc during a play session. The level I was on kept right on going -- everything had already been loaded into memory. In other words, Insomniac created a splendid hit game which didn't need to constantly stream data and very likely isn't pushing the SPUs all that hard.

Uncharted streams everything from the disc (textures, audio, EVERYTHING), and as a result has no load times whatsoever.  Naughty Dog = teh awesome

@Griffin,

Do you understand the relationship between timings and clock speed for memory? If you do, you should have mentioned that while 3.2Ghz is very fast indeed it only refers to part of the equation. Information about memory timing, especially CAS Latency is crucial to fully understanding the speed of the memory.

Just to explain a bit for folks:

Memory Latency is the amount of time that passes between data being requested from the memory and receipt of the first bit.
Memory Clock Speed is essentially how quickly new bits from the same address are recieved.

Hopefully it should be clear that the use for the memory is important in deciding what kind of memory you need. In the case of games a great deal of the memory usage is consumed by small variables tracking a great many minor things. There are also a fair bit of larger files to be fair, but their use is much less frequent making their impact less also.

Now, please realize I am not disagreeing with your assessment that PS3 memory is indeed the faster of the two. I am just trying to make sure that the entire situation is understood before people run off and think they know something based on incomplete information.

The thing is, the author of the article provided nothing at all to back up his claims.  He should be aware of the myriad of other technical comparison articles out there that do not come to the same conclusions -- merely stating "the PS3 has less fillrate" and "the Blu-ray drive is twice as slow" don't make them true.  At least fazz gave some reasoning. 

And that works both ways.  Nobody knows the "dirty" specs for the 360, Wii or PS3 memory (that I can find.)  Though with XDR memory, the latency is usually pretty low.  The GDDR3 that is used for the RSX is most likely "run of the mill" comparable to most nVidia utilized memory.  If I were to guess, I'd say the memory in the 360 is probably the same.

The specs we do know: 

PS3:
-- 256MB XDR @ 3.2GHz --
    <-> to/from Cell @ 25.6GB/s
-- Cell @ 3.2GHz --
    ~200GB/s EIB that connect the PPU to 7 SPUs
-- Interconnect @ 35GB/s --
    <- to Cell @ 20GB/s from RSX
    -> from Cell @ 15GB/s to RSX
-- RSX @ 550MHz --
    8 Vertex shader pipelines
    24 Pixel shader pipelines
    137 shader ops per cycle (24x5 ALU + 8x2 ALU)
    100 billion shader operations per second
    400-750 million polygons per second *400 triangles (up to 750 using strips, etc.)
    4.4 GigaPixel per second fill rate
-- 256MB GDDR3 @ 700MHz --
    <-> to/from RSX @ 22.4GB/s

360:
-- 512MB GDDR3 @ 700MHz --
    <-> to/from the Xenos GPU @ 22.4GB/s
-- Xenos @ 500Mhz --
    48 Unified shader pipelines
    2 shader ops per cycle (2 ALU per pipeline)
    48 billion shader operation per second
    500 million triangles per second *not polygons
    4 GigaPixel per second fill rate
    <-> On die dedicated memory "logic" controller @~32GB/s
       <-> connected to 10MB On die memory @ 256GB/s
        *essentially "free" AA up to 720p.
-- Interconnect --
    <- to Xenos @ 10.8GB/s from CPU
    -> from Xenos @ 10.8GB/s to CPU
-- CPU @ 3.2GHz --
    3 Core General Processing CPU