Xbox 360 and PS3 power claims should be "taken with grains of salt", apparently
"Hardware wise, there's a lot of marketing hype about the consoles. A lot of it really needs to be taken with grains of salt about exactly how powerful it is," claims Carmack "The Xbox 360 has an architecture where you essentially have got three processors and they're all running the same memory pool and they're all synchronized, and cache coherent, and you can spawn off another thread in your program and make it go do some work. That's kind of the best case and it's still really difficult to turn into faster performance or getting it to get more stuff done in a game title."
"Sony sort of takes this position where, [they say] 'Okay, it's going to be difficult, maybe its going to suck to do this, but the good game developers are going to suck it up and make it work.' There's some truth to that," continues Carmack, "There will be the developers that go ahead and have a miserable time and do get good performance out of some of these multi-core approaches. And Cell is worse than others in some respects, here."