PS3 IS A GHETTO PC.

XBOX360 IS REAL CONSOLE.

JM: Basically, the Cell's SPEs are "accelerator processors" that function in addition to the primary processors. [To take advantage of the SPEs], we look for tasks that don't require insane CPU power but could be done in the background, in parallel. There are some threads in our multi-threaded code that we can dedicate to a single SPE, and the process will run happily in background while the main CPUs are dealing with AI and game play. If you program the Cell CPU the correct way, it is like having all these simple things in parallel. That's the thing about regular PCs; computers are really dumb, but incredibly fast. PCs can perform one little logical thing like crazy [makes rapid, back-and-forth ping-pong motion], and so we need to find those little logic checks that we can kick out to the SPEs. Doing so frees up the primary CPUs from having to do those mindless, but necessary, tasks

cell is nothing special.

Another advantage was having the Gears of War guys come over; they knew where good memory trade-offs could be made. The PS3 has two memory chunks, one for texture detail and one for geometry complexity, so...we can't share those pools like you can on the Xbox 360. So there were two stages; get memory in line and then get geometry in line. Once we accomplished those, the optimizations rolled back into a faster PC experience [when played] on a lower-end machine.

GamePro: Interesting. So the PS3 really is closer to a PC's setup, with separate RAM pools for graphics and system memory...

JM: ...Exactly. It reminds me of old DOS memory management. You know, "I wish I could get that one kilobyte out of the texture memory and put it into the geometry memory instead."

XBOX360 HAS MORE RAM BECAUSE IT'S UNIFIED.

http://www.gamepro.com/sony/ps3/games/features/158468.shtml