Intellidick.com - Pure Insanity

With the release of the PS3, Sony executives (and fanboys) are touting the virtually unlimited power of the PS3 and its’ Cell processor. As interesting of an architecture as the Cell is, it requires a shift in the game development paradigm. Basically, to effectively use all of the power of the PS3, you have to think a completely different way when writing your code.

Let me take a moment to compare this to another technological blunder… the Pentium 4! Yes, that’s right, the Pentium 4.

With the advent of the P4, Intel increased the instruction pipeline with the intent of increasing the clock speeds. There’s a catch here though…. increasing the pipeline means that developers must write more efficient code in order to avoid invalidating that long pipeline. Invalidating the pipeline causes performance penalties… the longer the pipeline, the bigger the penalty.

With that being said, look at what happened to Intel. They tried to drive their product on technology alone… and AMD kicked their butt all over the marketplace by creating a processor with a short pipeline that executed poorly written code quickly. Seeing as most code isn’t optimized down to the processor level, (especially cross-platform portable code) that was a BAD move on Intel’s part and an excellent play on AMDs part.

The point is, sometimes simple IS better. Games are supposed to be FUN. The console should be EASY to use. Piling a load of hardware into a box doesn’t always make for a good gaming platform. (No, i’m not a Wii fanboy, I own a 360 and will be the first to point out it’s flaws as well)

So, we’ll see what happens, but I fear that Sony has created a device that will require too much effort on the part of software developers when porting games between the Wii, 360, and PS3. So basically, if it’s easy to write a game and port it to the Wii or 360 but not cost effective to port it to PS3, then people just won’t. Especially if Sony doesn’t get some consoles out there. Xbox 360 has a really solid head start (similar to the one that the PS2 had over the original Xbox).

Only time will tell.