The Xbox 360 has three general purpose cores and three VMX vector units (one per core) while the PS3 has one CPU core, one vector unit, and seven SPEs. These differences found in both consoles' architectures result in the Xbox 360 having more general purpose power than the PS3 while the PlayStation 3 has more floating-point performance (2 TFLOPs against 1 TFLOP of the Xbox 360 to be precise). Isn't this a major advantage of the PS3 over the Xbox 360?

Todd Holmdahl: No. The PS3's vaunted teraflop "advantage" is only an advantage on paper, because the PS3's performance will be limited by its architecture. Real games are about 80% general purpose code and about 20% floating point code. Xbox 360 has three 3.2 GHz general purpose processors to Sony's one, and it is these main cores, not special purpose SPEs, that are best suited for game code.

The PS3's design requires high levels of floating point performance, because the PS3 GPU is unable to do automatic load balancing between pixels and vertices, so performance will drop off during vertex processing. The PS3's design requires that the CPU take up the slack. On Xbox 360, we do not plan for the CPU to do any vertex processing at all, which leaves all of the processor's power for game simulation code.

Floating point performance is much more relevant on the GPU, where Xbox 360 has more floating point performance than PS3. Not only does the Xbox 360 GPU have greater raw shader power than the PS3 GPU (240 GFLOPS versus estimated 228.8 GFLOPS on PS3), it will also use more of its power. The Xbox 360's unified shader model will automatically optimize graphics for each game (vertex or pixel shading), without the developer having to write any extra code. Xbox 360 will also have embedded DRAM to avoid bandwidth bottlenecks and to give developers "free" anti-aliasing to eliminate jagged edges in every game.

Both systems have 512 MB of memory, but we gave developers the flexibility to decide how they use it, while Sony's split memory architecture is more limited in its options. (We actually looked at the split memory architecture and decided not to use it because of those limitations).

Sony's emphasis on certain areas of the PS3's performance is a nice way to distract attention from the fact that they seem to have no response to Xbox Live. Only Xbox 360 has the hardware, software and services to enable the complete gaming and entertainment experience.