I freely admit that I’m a Microsoft fanboy when it comes to the Xbox vs PS2 discussion.  Sure, the PS2 has like 10 times the number of games, but 90% of them suck!!  The original Xbox had so much going for it (hard drive, online play, etc) when it came out that I couldn’t even consider the PS2.  Sony seems to be coming back with some improved features for the PS3, but Microsoft is widening the gap, crushing the PS3 with provable hardware superiority:

(from Bit-Tech.net)

• 3 CPU cores, each with a form of HyperThreading for 6 simultaneous instructions
• The graphics engine of the Xbox 360 is nearly 2 years in the future for PC cards
• Heatpipe based liquid cooling = quiet in the living room
• Wireless controller that charge batteries via USB (plug in when not in use)
• Built in Media Center Extender (dammit – now I have to buy a Media Center PC)

( from the “Xbox Live Director of Programming”, a 4 part series )

• Xbox 360 has more general purpose processing power and more memory bandwidth than PS3
• The PS3 excels at floating-point operations, which are less important in the time of GPUs
• Xbox 360 has a faster GPU w/double the texture samplers of the PS3
• Xbox 360 has over 5 times the RAM bandwidth for SPEED!

More hardware based reviews here
CNet previews the Xbox 360 here
PlayStation.com shows off the PS3 tech specs
CNet previews the PS3 here

All of this has me so excited that I’ll probably be in line somewhere at midnight to get mine (provided I don’t pre-order or win a free one).

— Matt Ranlett

posted with BlogJet

[Edit] – Microsoft has announced that the Xbox 360 WILL be backwards compatible with existing Xbox games.  The announcement was made at E3, ending months of speculation.  The post I’m linking to is actually from a Microsoft Xbox developer working on backwards compatibility.  This is fantastic because I currently own 24 Xbox games (I buy them off of Ebay at an average $9.00 per game, including shipping).  That would be a big waste if I couldn’t play my existing games on the new console.