QUOTE
"The Xbox 360 is said to be a machine that's easy to develop for, but that's because it has a good lineup of middleware and infrastructure. So it should be easy to create something that's up to a certain level [of quality]. But if you try to take advantage of the Xbox 360's full hardware specs, you'll find out about the difficulty in programming for a multicore machine," said Itagaki.
"The Xbox 360 has enough power without all the cores going into use. Even if just a single core is used for a game, it will still be several more times powerful than machines up until now. But we aren't satisfied at that kind of a level. Our programmers are having fun playing around with the machine. They're swinging around all the cores and making a game that shows the powers of the Xbox 360."
Asked to discuss the system's triple core processor, Itagaki makes a joke, comparing it to the Sega Saturn, which had two CPUs and caused plenty of development nightmares. Proper use of the Xbox 360's triple core processor and the six concurrent threads that it offers will be difficult for most developers, especially early on, says Itagaki. However, he also states that even with just one core and one hardware thread, it's possible to achieve many times the performance of current hardware. Of course, this won't be good enough for Team Ninja.
Itagaki reveals that the Xbox 360 was originally set to have 256 megabytes of memory, half its final total of 512 megabytes. One day, MS suddenly bumped up the spec to 512 megabytes. "At that time, I was moved," he says, possibly getting sentimental. "512MB is plenty."
some of his comments from a couple of different articles talking about the same interview, i know this article has been posted in another topic but i thought it would help the point we are all making towards the xenos.
i think whoever was talking down the xenos and cell is just lazy. just because mulitcore/threaded games wont be a reality in the pc scene for some time now, that doesnt mean that developers that are making exclusive games for the consoles wont take advantage of the multi cores/threads the systems offer. even if the first and maybe second gen of games only uses one core and two threads at most, it would be foolish to think that developers making exclusives that wont appear on any other console or pc (PGR4 for example) wouldnt take full advantage of all the cores and threads if the system offers it.
