AnandTech had an interesting follow-up article to their recent PS3 Vs Xbox 360 comparison. The article has since been pulled but the general gist of the article is summarized over at ars technica. According to AnandTech, developers who they were in discussion with said they were not happy at all with the performance of both the PS3 and Xbox 360 CPUs.
According to some developers that have got their hands on the development kits, if either Sony or Microsoft went with an Athlon 64 or a Pentium D in their next-gen console, they would be significantly ahead of the competition in terms of CPU performance.
Another disturbing claim made by AnandTech was that the Xbox 360's CPU will deliver only about twice the performance of the original Xbox's 733 Mhz processor.
We of course asked the obvious question: would game developers rather have 3 slow general purpose cores, or one of those cores paired with an array of specialized SPEs? The response was unanimous, everyone we have spoken to would rather take the general purpose core approach.
Citing everything from ease of programming to the limitations of the SPEs we mentioned previously, the Xbox 360 appears to be the more developer-friendly of the two platforms according to the cross-platform developers we've spoken to. Despite being more developer-friendly, the Xenon CPU is still not what developers wanted.
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