Comments on: Microsoft sets stage for Xbox 2

Executive shows new services, bashes rival Sony's Cell chip at game developer confab.

[iceman2654]

desperate

This kinda shows how M$ is desperate to get attention to their Xbox.

Nope

It's called marketing and advertising. It's what companies do. It's obviously worked here. You read this article, so did I. I'm sure it will be reported in many other sites and mags too.

[Andrew J Glina]

Bruce Lee, not brute force

2 Processors
10 Processors

Which one is "Brute Force"?

[John Kuzak]

2 Processors

http://www.analogstereo.com/renault_laguna_owners_manual.htm

1 Teraflops + HDTV

This is purely hype!

As far as I know about the gamers world, most of them are fairly young (under 30) and don't have a HDTV in house. Even if they do, I would doubt if the onwer (mostly their parents) allow them to play with it. HD era is not coming on the gaming side; it's nice if XBox 2 can output that kind of graphics but, hey Microsoft, if you think everything in hi-def, you are totally wrong.

One teraflops is another marketing push. What on earth make you think 3 processors can provide that much power? Let's do simple math, 1 teraflops divided by 3 PowerPC processors would equal each performing at around 340 gigaflops. A single Cell - a 9-core chip on its own, have a max theoritical performance of 256 Gflops! According to Apple, a PowerPC G5 running at 2.5 GHz could achieve 9 GFlops. Because XBox 2 uses something new and faster (3.0 GHz), let's assume that each core of it can do 12 GFlops. Multiply by 3 and that brings things up to 36 GFlops, 28 times slower than what they promised. IBM didn't spend much money on the XBox 2 processors either, so there is no radical change in this PowerPC version. A major power boost is purely hype.

[Jeff Putz]

You don't know...

"As far as I know about the gamers world, most of them are fairly young (under 30) and don't have a HDTV in house."

You apparently don't know much about the audience then. Research shows the average game player age is 29. Furthermore, a console has to live and be relevant for four to six years on average. Look around... the TV's at Best Buy weren't there when the first Xbox was released. What do you suppose will be there two or three years into the next console's life?