Something else I worked on for Gamasutra at TGS - I was one of the only Western journalists in a CEDEC Premium talk with Epic's Tim Sweeney, and it was great to see him being honest in the Q&A, freed from perhaps over-restrictive PR shackles.

Some extracts: Sweeney "...did comment specifically on how difficult it is to program for multi-core processors and the even more complex Cell chip used in the PlayStation 3. He noted that it "takes about twice the effort and development cost to develop for a multi-threaded CPU," compared to a single-core CPU. Even more than that, according to Epic's analysis, fully exploiting the PS3 Cell chip "required about 5 times as much cost and development time than single-core.""

But it's not all bad for PS3: "While Sweeney seemed to be disquieted by the complexity of developing for Cell, he did praise Sony elsewhere in his keynote for an "enlightened business model" when it comes to online PS3 capabilities - one that will apparently allow Epic's users to create Unreal Tournament 2007 levels and content on the PC, and distribute them via the PlayStation 3." Apples for everyone!