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Comment by aftbit | Hacker News Reader

> What's shocking is Sony knew this from the PS2 era and gave it up! This applies to the whole early XBox story. Microsoft learns the right lessons... Sony learns the wrong ones.

XBox vs PS2: XBox was faster, but PS2 launched earlier, was cheaper, and had more games, so won the generation.

XBox 360 vs PS3: Sony reacts to Microsoft by making the PS3 more powerful than the 360 and more expensive. Microsoft reacts by getting more games and really doubling down on Halo (the biggest draw to XBox back then). XBox wins the generation.

Note: this is from memory, didn't check sources!

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FWIW the "PS3 is faster" is still debated to this day, mainly due to the Cell's "weird" architecture

If you remove the SPE's from the equation (which many developers did) the PS3 has a much slower 2 Ghz Dual Core PPC64 CPU, while the Xbox has a 3.2Ghz Triple Core (6 thread) PPC64

The extra threads aren't directly as useful as games back then were almost entirely single-threaded, a trend that has only begun to really change course in the last decade or so (partially due to the Xbone and PS4 having anemic Bulldozer derived CPU's that had weak single-thread performance)

>PS3 has a much slower 2 Ghz Dual Core PPC64 CPU

IIRC it's not even a dual core but a single core with two threads.

Sony really dropped the ball with the PS3 chip.

It's a shame they invested hundreds of millions or even billions in this new, hot, complicated to use chip, only for it to be completely surpassed by off the shelf x86 parts.

Sony though the chip would be so good they could sell it to be used in super computers for years to come, but by the time it was out, x86 had basically caught up and no customers cared about buying their cell processor.

>XBox wins the generation.

The winner of 7th generation was clearly Nintendo with their Wii: over 100 million units.

And the funny thing is 2nd place: PS3! Just at the end of the generation it managed to outnumber X360.

Yup, MS really threw it all away with their Kinect play.

And then they took this strategy into the XBox One generation: everyone gets a Kinect! For $100 more than the competition! And it's always listening, and you have to have it connected for the system to boot!

Piling onto that with "we're getting rid of game sharing or the resell market" and "our new console is going to be your entertainment hub, i.e. it's going to be jammed full of shit most gamers don't want!" and the launch was just... ugh.

Xbox One premiere was a disaster since the design reveal. I saw it and was like "you must be kidding". Original X1 doesn't look like magnetowid - my magnetowid looks way better! Xbox One S is what X1 should have been since the very beginning.

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