A friend of mine worked for EA and he kept on complaining how it wasn't possible to write reasonable portable code that supports PS3 without negating performanc

A friend of mine worked for EA and he kept on complaining how it wasn't possible to write reasonable portable code that supports PS3 without negating performance benefits of its 1 principle / 6 satellite CPUs architecture. Technically, it is possible to abstract it, but the abstraction layer would end up absorbing a lot of game code and thinning the portable part considerably. In other words, you want good performance - you will have to write thick abstraction layers.