Sony exec: nobody will ever tap full power of PS3
In an interview with MTV, Sony executive Phil Harrison talked about the PlayStation 3 and where his company was planning on taking their latest game console.
To start off with, Harrison talked about how excited he was about the new possibilities offered by the online capabilities of the new generation of game machines. "The video-game business for the past 20 years was about shipping closed experiences," he said. Somebody made a game. Gamers bought it. They played it. End of story. Now comes a new trend, he said, where "the start of the relationship with the consumer is when you launch the game."
The major reason Harrison wants to hype up the "unlimited" potential of the PS3's architecture is to downplay comparisons between games running on Sony's console and Microsoft's Xbox 360. The two systems are not completely dissimilar: they both contain a PowerPC core running at 3.2 GHz, both have similarly-clocked GPUs, and both come with 512 MB of RAM. The 360 adds two additional cores running simultaneously, whereas the PS3's "Cell" architecture eschews the extra cores in favor of seven smaller "Synergistic Processing Units" (SPUs) that act as vector processors with a separate instruction set and a tiny amount of on-board memory. Whether or not two extra cores are equivalent to seven SPUs is a matter that has not yet been adequately resolved: many have argued that the Cell architecture has more theoretical potential power, but whether this will translate into significantly better-looking games is still unknown. Many games still don't take full advantage of the Xbox 360, either, and as the two heavyweights battle it out, it will be fascinating to watch what developers on both sides can accomplish. Still, in the end it is more about whether or not the games will be fun, and thus the race is on to sell as many systems as possible in order to create a larger market to encourage widespread third-party developer support.
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