It is true that PS3 uses a powerful Cell processor, but its complex architecture make the Game Developer headache to harness the power of PS3 processor in order to make good game.

According to Next Generation, IBM, one of the creator of Cell sending their engineers to help game developers to learns ins and outs of the multi-core Cell. A workshop being held at High Moon’s Carlsbad, Calif. offices brings together IBM engineers and game developers across multiple Vivendi Games studios, including High Moon, Radical Entertainment and Swordfish.

High Moon chief technical officer Clinton Keith says that that IBM’s expertise goes beyond what Sony’s support can offer in regard to the Cell. “They created the architecture for the PS3 and they’ve created a lot of the developer libraries. We’ve had access to those [Sony] engineers… but they’re not the hardware engineers,” continues Keith. “We want to hit [the Cell] on all fronts. We’re talking to the guys [IBM] who designed this chip and have been working on it for five years now.”

The analogy behind was clear enough to say that PS3 have a powerful processor but lack in powerful Graphic Subsystem. That why Xbox 360 is one step ahead. Microsoft has established in programming libraries. The Xbox 360 processor directly executes .NET bytecode.

Building a machine that can’t be used efficiently is definately a poor machine. Because the Cell architecture is so convoluted that Sony was unable to make decent libraries for it, they have to rewrite in order to achieve faster performance than the Xbox 360 version.

Sony have spend additional time and money re-writing all the code required to boost extra performance out of this new architecture, which I thought Microsoft have done a good part on Xbox 360 code. As I can say, Microsoft is a company that made itself by creating developer tools, and as a result they made a system that is much easier to develop for.

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