aye twas. there are some conflicting stories around the PS3 development. some say it was supposed to have 2 cell processors. others say it was 1 and only 256MB of ram. early 360 protoypes also only had 256MB of ram and im not sure what the GPU spec was for it at that stage. but, as the story goes, epic showed MS what gears would look like on a console with 256MB of ram and they upped it to 512MB as a result. another story about the PS3 was that developers were not consulted really. one day a box just turns up for sonys inhouse studios and they are told "this is the PS3. make games for this".
i suspect sony saw what the 360 could do and realised that even 2 cell processors were not going to be able to keep up. so they roped in nvidia at a late stage and we ended up with a mess of a console (no blame on nvidia there).
its interesting looking back on it now. but it was a very badly designed console with too much interference from sonys other divisions. no one liked working on it. it never managed to pull away in the visuals or gaming performance department. the cell is dead and buried as a project (GPGPU saw to that). the blu-ray win is a bit hollow. the hardware itself was just not a great gaming machine.
thankfully sony have learned and have since created the vita (an amazing portable machine that developers also like to work on) and the PS4 (also an excellent gaming machine).
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