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Conflicting Reports of PS3 Programming Difficulty
xenongamer writes "It appears there isn't any type of concensus regarding the programming difficulty of Sony and IBM's upcoming Cell processor. From the article: 'Although few doubt the relative power of the Cell microprocessor, many have expressed concern over the chip's asymmetric design, which makes programming for it a potential disaster ... One such man was 3D artist Josh Robinson, who was fired from his position at Sony just weeks after making a public, negative comment about PlayStation 3 development on his Internet blog.'"
The PS3 may be simultaniously difficult to program for if you are expecting a traditional, PC style, system, but not super difficult to program for if you're not. So, PC ports might be a bitch, but ground-up stuff may be easier than you'd expect.
Now, all I have to ask is -- how the FUCK is that even possible? The PS3's specs beat the Xbox360's in every possible way!
A lot of the theoretical power in the PS3 comes from multiplying the power of each processor times the number of processors. Actually being able to make use of parallel processing power is notoriously hard. Usually one step of a computation depends on another. Programming for concurrency is in general a nightmare. Games will be buggier and much harder to develop if they want to make full use of the parallel cores. Sorry, no free lunch here.
Comparing the specs of the system is not straightforward. You can't just do something like a 0-60 mph benchmark like you would for a car. I don't think you are up for it, but if you want to get an inkling of the tradeoffs involved, here's a link: Microsoft's Xbox 360, Sony's PS3 - A Hardware Discussion
I feel sorry for the developers who have to make their games portable for both systems. I suspect we will get a lot of lowest-common-denominator games. It will be interesting to see if Sony can make a game that shows off the PS3 in a way that the 360 can't match.