Lasse Penttinen
30 Jun 2005 11:30
Anandtech first published and then pulled a rather sensationalist article which slandered processing power of the next generation gaming consoles of Sony and Microsoft. The article suggested that Anandtech had discussed with developers who had been in touch with the hardware, and therefore had first hand information. According to their sources the designs are cache crippled and exotic.
The most ironic bit of it all is that according to developers, if either manufacturer had decided to use 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.While the original article has been removed, some of it is available at Arstechnica
While the developers we've spoken to agree that heavily multithreaded game engines are the future, that future won't really take form for another 3 - 5 years. Even Microsoft admitted to us that all developers are focusing on having, at most, one or two threads of execution for the game engine itself - not the four or six threads that the Xbox 360 was designed for... In the end, the more multithreaded nature of these new console CPUs doesn't help paint much of a brighter performance picture - multithreaded or not, game developers are not pleased with the performance of these CPUs.