Neowin.net

Team Ninja guru also further confirms Microsoft will make a major announcement in Japan later this month.

In an interview published in the latest issue of Famitsu Xbox Magazine, Tecmo producer and Team Ninja head honcho Tomonobu Itagaki talked more about his impressions on the Xbox 360. When asked about the console's triple-core IBM PowerPC processor design, Itagaki called it a "buffed-up Sega Saturn," as the old console was also multi-processor, coming with two, 32-bit CPUs. He said that a single-CPU machine is easier for programming, but multi-core structures have become the recent trend.

News source: GameSpot

Cont...

It's not clear whether Famitsu is simply basing an assumption on the inclusion of the drive on Kutaragi's previous comments, or if the magazine actually has new information about Sony's thinking on the matter.

If PS3 doesn't ship with a hard drive, it will give an edge to the Xbox 360, particularly in terms of massively multiplayer games - an increasingly popular genre which currently requires significant amounts of storage on the client side. Sony may be hoping, however, that the PS3's superior capabilities for removable storage, which includes slots for Memory Stick and other types of high-capacity memory cards, will allow MMOGs to be played on the console even without a drive.

It's also possible that Sony may adopt the approach which many commentators expected Microsoft to follow with the Xbox 360, by launching two versions of the PS3 - one without a hard drive and with limited media capabilities, and a more expensive model with a hard drive and full media functionality.