I dont care what the specs and reviews say... im getting a friggin revolution.. ive been sold on it ever since it was first announced.. yes you guessed it.. im crazy bout some nintendo haha.. but man when they revealed that controller.. good gravy i have dreams bout playin it haha... revoltuion for me!!!

I've got to admit I'm very impressed with Ninty's guts. These devices (positional sensing by use of MEMS inertial sensors) have been around for a few years .. I've used a Gyration mouse which was pretty naff (Ninty has invested in Gyration, and presumably get to use some of their IP). Recently these sensors have really improved, and are small enough to allow us to sense all 18 parameters needed to calculate the current sample's relative position (along with other sensors to correct for those sensors errors & to help the positional algorthms). This was a really bold move, from a company that has a history of spending time to do things right & often different to everyone else (Mario64's 3D world, yes I know Tomb Raider did too but they were 1st to show it so who knows!, the DS touchscreen, yes touchscreens have been around but not really used in games let alone an entire platform setup around it, windwaker's cell shading, gameboy, the NES & game&watch controllers, the low-cost FX chip idea thanks to Argonaut/starfox was also pretty innovative ... the list is endless).

I'm not a Ninty fan, in the sense that I don't buy/play console games, as I said before. But I do respect them, they obviously have some smart/bold people there that are happy to take calculated chances, to push the boundaries .. it's very similar to academic research, in a way ... but obviously harder in the sense that they've got to convince a huge audience ;-). I hope they continue as a hardware & software co, unlike Sega.

Sega's arcade platform is pretty interesting. It's a PC (intel CPU, Nvidia GPU). Presumably, if consoles weren't constrained financially, they would be similar to PCs too (like the original xbox). To me, the hardware isn't the important thing. It's the software. So if I was to buy a console, it'd be purely based on which platform had the most number of my fave games (in my case flight sims, race sims, graphic adventures, RTSs & FPS's!!).

ShadowX, I heard earlier that MS might make two versions of xbox360. One with a cabled controller and no HDD, and one with one wireless controller & an HDD. No idea if they still use a USB-like interface (so all your steering wheels, joysticks, etc work) ... it'd be annoying to have to sell/rebuy all this stuff, esp if you buy relatively expensive ones with decent forcefeedback controllers etc. Anyway, I presume you mean you are gonna get the higher-end version :-). But note that the current specs state that PS3 also has an HDD. In both cases they are detachable & they say end-user upgradeable (i.e. without having to open them up, figure out encryption/interfaces, etc & doing it unofficially)!

Also, the XB will probably use HD-DVD, and the PS3 will use BRD (blu-ray) ... there's still a battle between these formats, though both should be backwards compatible enough to play the older SD DVD movies & DVD/CD audio etc. The XB's ATI GPU should be similar to DX10-type specs so should be more programmable and have high-end pixel shader units. The PS's NV GPU is similar in performance to two current high-end GFs. That too is impressive. I think both have their advantages, both they are pretty much similar! Honestly, I think in terms of AI/CPU and graphics/GPU (and physics) they are pretty much the same. It'll all be about the games, the ease of use/functionality such as xbox live, and pricing/marketing/etc. None of them are particularly impressive compared to current PCs, which will soon have extremely powerful physics (PPUs) and sound (X-Fi) ... but again you have to make compromises with all machines, consoles & PCs, based mainly on price!

I got to agree with you, ShadowX, I too think the xbox360 looks like the best of the bunch, but only since I think xb-live was brilliantly executed, and they are claiming they are improving it for their 2nd console :-).

People have looked at making game engines multi-threaded, but it always ends up being mostly focused on 1 core. So I think, at least near term, both PS3's VPUs & two of the three XB360's PPC chips will go mostly unused! Also, note that XB360's CPUs do have a VPU aswell (the VMX-128 .. which has 128 registers .. I'm guessing it'll be like SSE or Altivec of the old PPCs). Sony claims total system performance of 2Teraflops, and MS claim 1Tflop ... Sony claims the CPUs can output 218gigflops AND THAT THE GPU IS AT 1.8 TERAFLOPS. In other words it's the GPU that they get their numbers from. Unfortunately I've had a play around programming certain simple physics algorithms the current-gen GPUs, and I get about the same performance from my current CPU (and a lot worse if I compile the code with SSE3 optimisations). So though GPUs are theoretically much faster at FPU ops, they are currently too custom, so all the language work arounds slow it down somewhat, to the point where it ends up being similar to the general-purpose programmable CPUs that are clocked at much higher rates (few GHz vs 100sMHz)!! So now I know for sure, this is all total hype. Sure the next-gen GPUs will be more programmable, but they've been mostly talking about how great Cell is and then it contributes a puny % to their overall 2TF figures. I'm not disappointed, though ... I expected this kind of marketing crap from Sony (they do it at every new console) ... I was just expecting it to be because real-world benches never come close to theoretical ones (esp when Sony restrict the caches of their VPUs so badly)! There was all this talk about Cell taking over from PCs. Embedded chips are everywhere, but they are not as capable at general processing tasks like modern PC CPUs are (soft modems, soft HD audio, soft LAN filtering, software MPEG transcoders, etc). And also, XB's ATI GPU is said to be more programmable than NV's future GPU ... working with MS meant they focused on DX10 functionality, unifying pixel & vertex shaders and doing virtual graphics memory. So yes XB360 does look like it's going to be pretty awesome from that respect!

XB360 has 10MB of e-VRAM (on the GPU chip .. thanks to ATI buying up a small graphics company called ArtX I think that was trying to do this about 5 years ago .. allowing a crazy 256GB/s!!), 500MB of 700MHz GDDR3 unified system/graphics RAM (22.4GB/s ... but with only a 21.6GB/s FSB ... that final figure is the most important IMHO ... the eDRAM really just works as a cache to make up for the lack of dedicated VRAM, I think ... if anyone knows for sure, please correct me). PS3 has 256MB RAM at 25.6GB/s, and 256MB GDDR3 VRAM (with the RSX GPU able to read at 15GB/s, and write at 20GB/s). Summarising this, XB360 has 21.6GB/s shared for CPU&GPU but with a superfast but very small cache and potentially twice as much VRAM thanks to DX10 virtual VRAM, and PS3 has 25.6GB/s for CPU & 15-20GB/s for GPU. It's not clear cut to me which will perform better in which games, but looking at shared memory buses between two CPUs in intel's CPU SMP architectures vs AMD's design, it's clear that it CAN be OK but only to a certain performance point. Remember the XB360 must share half the total PS3 bandwidth between THREE PPC CPUs and a GPU ... I would prefer dedicated memory & buses, but they had to make a cost-cutting compromise :-( ... rather than force punters to pay for 2x512MB (or lose billions of Dollars like they did for XBv1)!!