Speaking to technology/PC enthusiast website Ars Technica, Matt Lee, a software engineer within Microsoft's Game Technology Group, made some very interesting comments regarding the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and the vaunted Cell processor.

In particular, Lee said that the Cell processor's Synergistic Processor Elements (SPEs) make the chip more suitable for other operations, not necessarily gaming. "I don't think the Cell is as well designed for game development as Sony would have you believe. Some aspects of the SPEs, such as the lack of branch prediction, make them particularly unsuited to running most game code, which contains a lot of branches," he commented.

Lee continued, "They appear to be designed more for serialized streaming math code, more common in video codecs and audio processing, the traditional domain of digital signal processing chips. The memory architecture of the SPEs, specifically their lack of automatic cache coherency in favor of DMA transactions, seems like a lot of overhead is needed to feed work units to the SPEs and copy the results back to system memory."

The Microsoft engineer also believes that porting from the Xbox 360 to the PS3 will pose a challenge for developers. "I think porting from Xbox 360 to PS3 will be reasonably difficult, since the Xbox 360 has a lot more general purpose processing power that can be flexibly reallocated, and all of the Xbox 360 CPU cores have equal access to all memory. The asymmetric nature of the Cell could easily lead to situations where the game has too little of one type of processing power and too much of another," Lee remarked.

"And the content might suffer as well, since you'll never see a PS3 title with more than 256MB of textures at any given time, due to the split graphics and system memory banks. When we announced 512MB of unified memory on Xbox 360, I think all of our game developers (and the artists too) did a little happy dance. It's easier to use and gives developers much more flexibility in how they allocate memory for various resources."

Certain notable programmers and developers (e.g. John Carmack) have already said that the power of the Xbox 360 and PS3 will be roughly equal, and not surprisingly Lee subscribes to this theory as well.

"In terms of performance, I think that the PS3 and the Xbox 360 will essentially be a wash. We ran the numbers a while back and the two systems come up surprisingly close in theoretical peak performance, despite the one year difference in release dates," he said. "However, I know for a fact that we have a great advantage in software and services—our development environment and tools are years ahead of the competition, and this will ensure that Xbox 360 game developers can easily realize all of this performance and make superior games. Xbox 360 is a great system to develop on, a real pleasure—and I believe our developers agree."

You can check out the full interview here.