Any other gamers and gadget geeks here?

---

if you look at the current generation of video games, you'll see that though the xbox is technologically superior to the ps2, the ps2 still sold many more consoles. the ps2 also happened to come out a year earlier and has a more comfortable controller. now if you look at the next generation, you'll see that the ps3 is technologically superior, however, the xbox 360 is coming out a year earlier and by the looks of it will have a more comfortable controller.
the better product doesn't always decide the winning sales (just look at vhs and betamax).

digging it so far. I'm not much of a gamer (due to my issues with patience) but I'm having fun!

How is a celeron(32-bit) technologically superior to a 128-bit superscalar processor?

From Microsoft's 2000 press release on the X-Box:In reply to:As a "future-generation" device, Xbox will deliver rich, compelling graphics, and will enable a user's playing experience to be better and faster than any other games console available. It will push about 300 million polygons per second -- more than three times the graphics performance of its closest competitor, Sony PlayStation 2, which was recently released in Japan.Perhaps the most significant difference between the two consoles is the hard drive built into Xbox, supporting 8GBs of hard disk space; PlayStation 2 does not have a hard drive. The hard drive will give Xbox gamers more realism, speed, expandability and storage, providing for richer game experiences. Fans of sports games, such as basketball, will no longer have to wait for their console to catch up to the action. "He shoots, he scores!" will be in real time.Of course, press releases are usually self-serving.By the way, didn't Microsoft switch to the Pentium at the last minute, before releaseing the X-Box?

ever notice dabating consoles is like debating theology? You'll never change anyones' mind.Our PS2 is fine for us. I probably use it the least. I really like the controller but can't resist sticking down my pants when it starts rumbling.

Yeah, but you can take a console apart and and see what parts it uses and hook up logic analyzers and reverse engineer it. In fact, I have a friend who did just that. He'd be retained by patent holders to see if video game makers were violating patents. He spent plenty of time giving depositions and testifying and so on. Unless there was a Ten Commandments monument in the court, they were not theological arguments. (For the record, he worked for Sanders Associates, which licensed some of the original video game patents to Magnavox, which licensed more stuff, etc.; then he started his own consulting business. Believe it or not, the original research was directed toward military applications.)

In reply to: Believe it or not, the original research was directed toward military applications I've been in electronics long enough to just take that for granted. Almost every new consumer item is actually an obsolite mil-spec item.

I worked at the same company, and I got to play with a protype tank warfare simulation "game", and then it stopped, because I didn't have the right security clearance / need to know to continue. Compared to the arcade games of the time, it had kickass graphics.

In reply to: ...can't resist sticking down my pants when it starts rumbling. I thought I was the only one who did that. eyes shift

maybe technologically wasn't the right word to use, what i meant was that it is capable of displaying better-looking graphics.and the celeron is superscalar as well, just like every processor made since 1998.

...using that super-fancy nVidia graphics chip.

I think I heard that they are changing to an ATI chipset for the next generation of Xbox, making it not backwards compatable with your exsiting game library.

Microsoft is pulling an Apple (680x0 -> PowerPC -> Pentium)? They're going in the wrong direction.

Last I heard, the XBox360 was going to be running a POWER5, which is IBMs top of the line server processor (I'm an AIX admin, so I get to play with the IBM big-iron here at work). It's a massively powerful processor, but it's still going to get owned by the cell.

Interesting. I worked with smaller-scale PowerPC (4xx series) chips in telecom gear a few years back. Because Pentiums at the time ran so hot, and the equipment was air-cooled, you could only fit a couple of Pentiums on a card, but you could fit a bunch of PowerPCs...which meant a lot more compute power in a given space. We had a "consulting" relationship with Intel, so we knew about the then forthcoming M series, but it was too far into the future.