I think that writer fundamentally suck even more ... and I should have known when I read: "The reason a comparison to PC architectures is important is because it provides an evaluation point to gauge the expected erformance of these next-generation consoles. We've heard countless times that these new onsoles would offer better gaming performance than anything we've had on the PC, or anything we would have for a matter of years. Now it's time to actually put those claims to the test, and that's exactly what we did. " Look at the PC "gaming" architecture today ... 1 GB, 1.5 GB of ram? What other "non-gaming" PCs require such amount of ram onboard. You can always get the high-end models, but so what? Not everyone drives a Benz, BMW or Volvo. It does not indicative of anything. He then uses the original xbox story to say this and that, like there should have been 128MB system ram on it and stuff. Apparently he has no memory of what's going at that time; such as many Windows PC computers ran with 32MB system ram. People had 1MB, 2MB, 4MB, 8MB and 16MB video ram card. PentiumII/III 233 to 450 MHz were common-place. The rest of the article talks about how console's CPU and GPU are not as good as those on a PC "gaming" computer. So, what is the price tag of the console system? Well, right now, for the price of a current Pentium 4 processor (LGA775 or S478), I can get a low-end computer system (no monitor, keyboard and mouse). (like some Sis/Via inegrated chipset board, AMD Sempron and etc.) Then he goes on about how the general purpose CPU on the console is not very powerful. By this time, I have completely lost confidence in any of his credibility on the topic. He is not talking about "consoles"; he just want another PC computers review. Ultimately, I don't think he understands playing video games. If anything is not designed to render a 3D environment as real as possible, in a first-person-shooter style, it is no good.

huh ? what a surprise ... I am totally shocked ... I was just about to sell my PC for a PS3/XBOX360

Many of you have the idea behind a console wrong, as does the "writer" of this article (if it truly is Anand). A console is not designed AT ALL do any kind of processing other than game related processing. Granted the designers may allow you to use the machine to watch DVD's (which is more based on GPU processing than CPU in consoles), as well as browsing the web, which in most cases does not require much power at all. People are not going to be rendering movies on their PS3/Xbox360, they will not even be re-encoding/transcoding movies. The machine is not designed for this. Consoles main purpose is to run the "specified" code as efficiently as possible. This could mean "dumbing" down of hardware, this "dumbing" process also allows them to lower costs of the systems because yields of more "basic" components are much higher than that of higher end parts. There is a price point for consoles which is around the 300-500 dollar range (for just the console). If they introduced higher-end parts to consoles they would in-effect be creating a PC and just labeling it a console, there is notreason for them to do this as the cost for such a unit would be around the range you would need to play the games on a nice PC. This will not make them money on the people that just want to "play". There is nothing "sinister" about consoles using parts specifically designed to perform as they want it. They aren't forcing anyone to buy their console or a PC if they want more "power" and useability. Now I'm not a big fan of consoles, but if console makers got one thing right, it was the ability to "hook" the non-PC gamers. These are people that don't necessarily want the detailed world of PC gaming. Nor do they want to have to keep up on the latest hardware trends. Simple fact is, consoles are "custom" PC's, designed to do a few things right, a PC-gamer has no right to "criticize" the parts used in the machine, because YOU are not the one coding for that hardware. Any "hardware" specific coding gets vast performance benefits from that dedication no matter how powerful the actual hardware is, just look at "Graphic Driver Optimization" done by both nVidia and ATI. Hope that helps some of you realize what consoles are built to do. But hey make up your own mind, don't like the product? Don't buy it :) Peace!

The only person(s) saying "consoles gonna kill PC gaming" is who? That's an "self-interpreted" / "self-imagined" statement at best ... All empirical data point to these 2 things are not related to each other, in terms of target audience, game genres, price and etc. (ask how many people use keyboard to Playstation2 games) For the xbox point, it is really a moot point. There is no such thing as enough. Especially when you talk about the bottom-less pit of PC gaming ... there is not a "finished" product , ver. The point which I tried to make concerning the 64MB decision is that it is not as bad as he thinks, given the cirumstances. What cirumstances, think back now. You won't say you have a honda or porsche; but I bet you say you'd have a killer rig in your signature, not some gimpy Celeron 1.1Ghz with integrated graphics. For the marketing part, I think I already covered it, and the "so-called" flop, mhz, and etc. numbers game is nothing new. The fatal flaw in the article lies upon its bias of favouritism towards PC gaming. How can you compare an actual product that is gonna have a standardized with a final spec; gonna be mass-produced; gonna have a set price; gonna have an specific, intended use, with that jerry-rigged, general-purpose, no-budget-limit, no-time-limit, montrosity of a PC "gaming rig"? P.S. I want to apologize for my bad writing, because I don't wanna waste time writing, and I don't have a need for expressing my opinion for other people's approval. Actually, I spent too much on this rubbish already ... ouch.

What is totally ghey for me about these consoles is a lack of mouse/keyboard support....if all thier games had that i would throw pc away....for gaming that is !!cus id much rather game on my 57" high def with a wireless mouse keyboard while on recliner then in my 100$ fake leather chair at a desk......they say they dont want consoles like pc's but that is lame excuse just have the games/consoles support this feature and let consumers decide what is best for them...who agrees with me?

They are not going for MAX FPS on consoles. They want games to look good and perform within reasonable limits, and quite frankly a console between 300-500 still blows away any PC at the same price point in terms of performance. And multi-cpu makes no difference to coders when processor affinity is properly used. You scream that the code must be in order for the "game", fine. But they have two choices for multi-cpu's, they can "multi-thread" the application, or they can use processor affinity to reserve power for specific processes. Now forcing console developers into coding for multi-cpu's only helps force PC developers into the same mix. There are many ports between PC and console, and they would want them all to run as good as possible. So in fact forcing dual-cores was a "smart" move on console designers part. But thank you for proving my point that yes in fact consoles aren't meant to be PC's, they aren't meant to do multi-tasking as well. And I still highly doubt that was Anand that wrote the article.