It seemed suspicious. First, 3.2GHz sounds too good to be true, especially for a tripple core Xenon. Cell could have been more believable with one 3.2GHz core and several SPEs. However its not really different from the "slow" Xenon cores, then there's the small amount of cache for Cell (512KB L2?) shared ofcourse, making it worse. And only 1mb of cache amongst 3 cores of Xenon. We have X2s with at least 512KB per core, some with 1MB...
Then you notice the designs of the systems. Even a 2.2GHz Athlon X2 4200+ would require a much bulkier system design to house the required cooling system. A whole 1GHz "slower" and less one core compared to Xenon, oh and no SMT so 6 possible threads to the X2's 2...then why is the X2 or a PD so much hotter? Plague of the theoretical.
So these systems cannot be great for general purpose computing, certainly not anywhere near as good as a good desktop PC, I'm not suprised. I knew from the start that they could only be good for what they were designed to do. Hacking them to run something like Linux might work but it wouldn't make an easy or cheap super computer. What suprised me is the claim that they won't be that great even for gaming. I'd figured that developers could simply write the efficient code required to harness the power of these relatively inflexible processors.
Now I'm not as suprised as I would have been if I hadn't already heard about Nintendo's claim back during E3 that the Revolution wouldn't be a power house like the other two systems, it'd only be "a couple times faster than GameCube" - in terms of processing power. Using the same IBM PPC chips and an ATI GPU, Nintendo might actually be in the best shape here if this article comes back to life and M$ and Sony become a laughing stock. Nintendo never lied with their GameCube. They reported numbers that were less than PS2 yet the GameCube's games are easily better looking on average. They didn't want to hype up the power of their Revolution because they probably knew its real world performance was nothing to brag about, they're playing the card of "we'll make a capable machine, its up to the game developers to make good use of it and provide fun games."
If the article is correct, M$ might be the better off of the two. Xenon's low cost might really give Microsoft the big advantage, allowing them to sell consoles for a considerably lower price than PS3. Cell does appear to be another Emotion Engine joke. Way overhyped and while it sounds good, it isn't truly functional as intended. For Sony's sake, the article had better be at least half false, so much money on Cell wasted for what could be nothing but hype factor, which could easily be crushed by fanboyism - it wouldn't take long for XBox and Nintendo fans to rise up and attack the PS3, letting Sony fans know their overpriced system is no better than the underdog's. I believe that Sony survived this past round and remained king of the hill because they came out with their console, the PS2, first. They were able to use the hype they created to amass a large early adopting fanbase - winning them even more "must have" exclusive titles which, in turn, sell even more systems. The same was also true for PSX (PS1), it was out first of the generation and thus was out the longest to generate the larger player base. N64's use of carts killed its chance to kill Sony's rise to utter dominance.
Now Sony won't have that headstart, and their major hardware advantage seems all but gone, and they will most likely have pricing problems to boot. Sony falling out of 1st? Right now it doesn't sound like it will be a sure thing but I think there's a pretty good chance they'll definatley lose ground.