Sony, you finally showed up to the party with hardware that devs actually know how to use and optimize for. While Cell was cool, it took ages before anyone knew what to do with it. Thank you for going with something more common!
I'm a little disappointed to be honest. Easier to approach, easier to optimize for... but since when has console development been an accessible market? Maybe its a naive outsiders view, but it will take more than a commodity instruction set to make console gaming an easy target.
Who wants to write code for some exotic chip that's only used on one gaming platform? If I'm not mistaken, making effective use of the cell processor requires you to manage the cache by hand. This is the kind of totally unportable feature that requires expert treatment and lots of fine tweaking.
Now, instead, you get 8 x86 cores, with multithreading, and quite probably a GPU you can also use for general purpose computation if you want to. Simplicity is going to be an advantage.
Actually, there've been a lot of complaints from developers that it was much easier to develop games for the 360 than for the PS3. Thus, this is an unsurprising move from Sony.
Yeah, what they especially need is to make the development kits cheaper. MUCH cheaper. It is not just about instruction sets and APIs, just the fact the SDK distribution is restricted AND expensive makes it a challenge for anyone to develop for it in the first place.
Plenty of tiny companies have been able to write games for both XBox Live Arcade and for the Playstation Store. I'm not saying it's easy to get going, but the portion of the difficult attributable to the console is significantly lower than just writing a game.
The real problem with having a separate instruction set and architecture is that it's going to be longer before game engines come out that can be targeted to your system and thus you'll be giving the other guy exclusives that would otherwise have been multi-platform.
Sony, you finally showed up to the party with hardware that devs actually know how to use and optimize for. While Cell was cool, it took ages before anyone knew what to do with it. Thank you for going with something more common!