For Sony, it doesn't take much to see that the Cell processor is eerily similar to the Emotion Engine in the PlayStation 2, at least conceptually. Sony clearly has an idea of what direction they would like to go in, and it doesn't happen to be one that's aligned with much of the rest of the industry. Sony's past successes have really come, not because of the hardware, but because of the developers and their PSX/PS2 exclusive titles. A single hot title can ship millions of consoles, and by our count, Sony has had many more of those than Microsoft had with the first Xbox. Sony shipped around 4 times as many PlayStation 2 consoles as Microsoft did Xboxes, regardless of the hardware platform, a game developer won't turn down working with the PS2 - the install base is just that attractive. So for Sony, the Cell processor may be strange and even undesirable for game developers, but the developers will come regardless.

The real surprise was Microsoft; with the first Xbox, Microsoft listened very closely to the wants and desires of game developers. This time around, despite what has been said publicly, the Xbox 360's CPU architecture wasn't what game developers had asked for. They wanted a multi-core CPU, but not such a significant step back in single threaded performance. When AMD and Intel moved to multi-core designs, they did so at the expense of a few hundred MHz in clock speed, not by taking a step back in architecture. We suspect that a big part of Microsoft's decision to go with the Xenon core was because of its extremely small size. A smaller die means lower system costs, and if Microsoft indeed launches the Xbox 360 at $299 the Xenon CPU will be a big reason why that was made possible.

Just because these CPUs and GPUs are in a console doesn't mean that we should throw away years of knowledge from the PC industry - performance doesn't come out of thin air, and peak performance is almost never achieved. Clever marketing however, will always try to fool the consumer. And that's what we have here today, with the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Both consoles are marketed to be much more powerful than they actually are, and from talking to numerous game developers it seems that the real world performance of these platforms isn't anywhere near what it was supposed to be. It looks like significant advancements in game physics won't happen on consoles for another 4 or 5 years, although it may happen with PC games much before that.

It's not all bad news however; the good news is that both GPUs are quite possibly the most promising part of the new consoles. With the performance that we have seen from NVIDIA's G70, we have very high expectations for the 360 and PS3. The ability to finally run at HD resolutions in all games will bring a much needed element to console gaming.