When Mercury news reporter Dean Takahashi spoke with Bill Gates at CES, the wide-ranging conversation turned to gaming, and Bill had a few harsh words for Sony and its cluelessness. When asked if any of Sony's next-generation PS3 games would look better than the Xbox 360's Halo 3, Gates replied:
"No. They were going to have the Cell be the video processor. But they didn't know what they were doing. They said the Cell is the video processor. But they turned to Nvidia at the last minute, but Nvidia can't do embedded DRAM. Go look at the bandwidth problems. Go ask the guys running ... now. They took their year and burned it by not having a decent CPU strategy and then turning to Nvidia at the last minute. It's a very unusual thing."
Gates also admitted that the release of the first Xbox was a year late, and didn't have the best games then, either. Overall, it's a surprisingly candid interview, with lots of good comments about IPTV on the Xbox 360, too.