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Originally Posted by Iguana Man
I don't get Ruineds response above with the bold. 7 vs. 3, is that BS or what?
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Basically, the PS3 has one big/main processor and six mini-processors. The XBOX 360 has three big processors instead. Both in practice all put together have about the same power. Saying "7 is more than 3" shows a gross misunderstanding of the technology or purposeful misleading of the readers by the Sierra rep being interviewed. The latter is very possible based on one of the very first statement of the interview by the Sierra reps - that the project was lead on PS3 primarily because Ghostbusters is a Sony movie, and hence Sony wanted their console as lead when licensing the game rights. It would not be a surprise if Sierra's PR is skewed towards the PS3 for the same reason.
So, while the PS3 has more processors in number than the XBOX 360, power-wise the PS3 is not significantly more powerful because six of them are mini-processors.
And the funny thing is, the rep then goes on to contradict his 7 vs. 3 statement and claim that they needed to dedicate a whole processor to DD5.1 encoding on the PS3 while only part of a processor is needed for DD5.1 encoding on the XBOX 360. Which demonstrates that the processors on the 360 are more powerful as you only need part of a processor to do the same job instead of needing the entire processor to do it as on PS3 - you can't benefit at all from giving more power to a Dolby Digital encode, either the sound is successfully encoded in DD or it is not successfully encoded in DD5.1, no in-betweens. So what the XBOX 360 only needed to dedicate part of one of its three big cores to do, the PS3 needed to dedicate all of one of its mini-cores to do. Which of course means that each of the individual 360 processors are significantly more powerful than each of the six-mini processors in PS3.
IMO - though both consoles have underpowered processors compared to today's PCs - the processor is the weak point/achilles heel of the PS3, not the strong point. Having three big processors (360) is a lot easier to program and balance for than one big processor and six mini-processors (PS3), and as a result dev time on PS3 is longer and it is more difficult to get the same power out of the PS3 as the 360. This is the primary reason why most multiplatform games run better on 360, why Oblivion PS3 was delayed many months from when originally planned, why Rockstar stated they had to delay GTA4 6 months due to PS3 coding issues, etc - its the PS3's CPU, as its GPU is fairly straightforward. Sounds good on paper, but in practice the PS3 CPU is a game developer's nightmare.