The most ironic bit of it all is that according to developers, if either manufacturer had decided to use an Athlon 64 or a Pentium D in their next-gen console, they would be significantly ahead of the competition in terms of CPU performance.While the original article has been removed, some of it is available at Arstechnica
While the developers we've spoken to agree that heavily multithreaded game engines are the future, that future won't really take form for another 3 - 5 years. Even Microsoft admitted to us that all developers are focusing on having, at most, one or two threads of execution for the game engine itself - not the four or six threads that the Xbox 360 was designed for... In the end, the more multithreaded nature of these new console CPUs doesn't help paint much of a brighter performance picture - multithreaded or not, game developers are not pleased with the performance of these CPUs.
Written by: Lasse Penttinen @ 30 Jun 2005 11:30