Slashdot Mirror
Technology Of Current, Future Consoles Analyzed
ban25 writes "There's an interesting article at Ace's Hardware with an in-depth analysis of the technology behind the PS2, Xbox, and GameCube, plus hints to the future. It covers the CPUs and GPUs of each of the systems, and also has an interesting discussion about embedded DRAM and its role in consoles compared to the high-speed discrete memories found on all of today's top PC graphics cards. The other part of the article covers the next generation of systems and, in particular, the Xbox 2 and PS3. The recent IBM/MS agreement is discussed, as well as the chances of the Xbox 2 having a PowerPC inside, or perhaps even a CELL derivative. On the PS3 side of things, the piece goes into some detail about the patent that turned up last year on CELL."
Uh, because there'd be pretty much no point in buyinig consoles if all the great console games were on the PC. Plus, it's not worth it to change the code for the PC, and then release it, when games don't sell nearly as well on the PC as they do on consoles. A title selling 700,000 on the PC is like a title selling a couple million on a console. It just isn't worth it to spend the resources to port console games to PC and give the consoles less value.
"Furthermore, all PS2s are equally compatible. . . ."
Tell that to Enix and Namco and their Star Ocean 3 and Xenosaga, respectively, both of which ran into problems with some models of PS2s being incompatible because of changes Sony introduced into later runs.