[citation][nom]Kelavarus[/nom]I'd have to agree about the design. Dropping even the single analog stick seems like a mistake, I would have thought they'd finally put a second on there and make it decent. 4 core cell in a handheld that could be using 3G or WiFi? Battery life is indeed worrying.Playing PS3 games? Uh... 4 core means it's half as powerful as the PS3. And I doubt even a modern graphics solution could account for that missing power to be able to play PS3 games.[/citation]
Half the cores certainly does not correlate to being half as powerful. For one, the cell is an asymmetric processor, with one core completely different from the others. You'd also have to know the clock speed of the processor, as well as the memory configuration and video processor before you could make any assessment at all. Even if everything were exactly the same, a processor with half the cores would perform significantly better than half as fast, simply because adding cores does not go up linearly with performance if you don't improve the things that go with it, which isn't easy, particularly as it pertains to cache. Increasing cache size isn't so difficult - the problem is you make it slower doing so (for example, the Gulftown six core has a slower L3 cache than the Bloomfield, and the Penryn (6MB) needed an additional clock cycle to access L2 cache compared to Conroe(4MB), 15 to 14. So, it's not nearly so simple, especially since programmers complain how difficult it is to use the all the resources of the Cell processor in the PS3.
Having said that, given the small screen, and limited battery space, it's much more likely they would have tuned this thing for extremely low power, and probably lowered performance below half of the PS3, at least while using batteries. Of course, they could make it so it clocks differently based on whether it's connected to a wall outlet or batteries, but I'm not sure if that makes sense for Sony to do. It might.