Comment Re:PS4 hardware (Score 1) 152
No, it was not. =D
You make a very poor judgment of the last decade developers. And somewhat lack of history knowledge.
What did PS3 a good start was the huge Microsoft failure on delivering a faithfully working hardware (that Red Ring of Death issue, remember?). Any other company would had fold, but Microsoft had (and still has) a huge cash cow to milk (Microsoft Office), and that was the sorely reason XBox didn't fold at that time.
But Microsoft people aren't stupid (for the most part, at least), and XBox was fixed. And they did a really big thing: the Microsoft Live. This really changed the game, and Sony got a really nasty bite in the ass. Sony took too much time to get the PSN up to the Live level (still doing it by the way).
By the way, The XBox 360 is also a PowerPC machine - the same core used on sony's PS3. And the NIntendo Wii (and also the WIi-U). And also on GameCube, Apple's failed Pippin and a lot of others dead on arrived videgames. There's absolutely nothing weird on PowerPC being used on videogames. Sony made things complicated for developers by tacking 6 specialized coprocessors inside its chip - what, for programmers used to have just one (MMX, 3DNow!, etc), was clearly a new level of computing. However, parallel computing appears to be here to stay (look at the ARM chips) - and having EIGHT general purposes CPUs competing for the same resources is not for the faint of the heart (Microsoft took years to learn, look at that crappy piece os software called Microsoft Windows). The complexity is still there - we just shifted it to another side.
Videogame Makers choose their hardware based on price, power and next years availability. Power PC had won the maker's heart in the past, but by some reasons IBM choose to abandon this race, giving the PowerPc a low priority on to research and development. AMD, on the other hand, spend a lot of efforts and money by upscaling their CPU to the current levels. The decision on using AMD's x64 over the previous PowerPC one was taken based on CURRENT chip power, CURRENT chip pricing and guarantees for chip supply for the product's lifetime.
The current new chip is easier to program? Beneficial side effect, nothing more. Not a single videogame maker will sacrifice any of the previous requirements to make the developer's life easier. We are not in the 90's anymore, there's a lot more people with programming skills nowadays, and a lot of them will be willing to deal with any extra complexity to take your job from you. (sad but true)