David Shippy and Mickie Phipps’ new book “The Race for a New Game Machine” has all the videogames industry drama that a person could ask for. The Wall Street Journal recently put up a tight synopsis of the book, detailing how Microsoft was able to nab fundamental specifications for the Cell and have their own chip created around them for the Xbox 360.
According to the book, Sony decided that the Playstation 3 needed to have a brand new processor, unlike anything their previous consoles featured before. In 2001, a partnership was formed between Sony, Toshiba, and IBM to create the chip from scratch. In 2002, Microsoft (looking to build the 360) went to IBM, saw some of the key specs for the unreleased Cell, and contracted IBM to build a processor around those specifications to put into the 360.
The kicker is that Microsoft ended up winning the time war, without having to spend the R&D money that Sony did. Because of a manufacturing error with the first round of chips that Microsoft protected itself against, they were able to release their console in 2005 – Sony’s original target year.
This book doesn’t have spies, ninjas, Master Chief, or pictures of cats in precarious positions with hilariously misspelled captions to explain the predicament. It does have an awesome story to tell, though.
Contest:
9:00 PM on 01.01.2009
| 
Are those the same processors that were the main reason gaming on a mac sucked?
Sony is gawd... blarty blar har... LIVE is filled with newbs... blar blar...
cant we all just get along??
Troll. But in case you're being serious... the processor in the 360 is a triple core, making it impossible to be an old Mac processor. Now some of the tech that went into it may be IBM's PowerPC architecture (which would explain why its so easy to develop for) but hardly the old G5 models.
Kratos IS Keyser Söze.
Nariko has a dong.(Sleep Away Camp FTW)
What I'm trying to say is, Sony and MS took very different hardware approaches to achieve games that look more or less the exact same.
People hate Microsoft for the same reason they hate the United States. They're number one.
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/xbox360-2.ars/2
The first image shows the layout of the Xenon, Three PPC derived cores all lined up next to one another to do the grunt work.
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/cell-2.ars
Again, the first image shows the layout of the Cell, One PPC derived core, controlling 8 Cell SPE's. The PPC is there to split up tasks, the SPEs Do the grunt work. Gives the ps3 immense floating point ability.
They are very different beasts.
The 6 week delay in sampling pushing sony back a full year? Steaming, again. MS sent out mac G5's as early devkits before they got their hands on xenon, Sony had to wait for cell before they could do the same. MS knew they needed a GPU from the start and ATi delivered their next gen (at the time) part for the 360 a year before they relased the same tech for the PC. Sony thought the cell would be powerful enough that they wouldn't need a GPU, when it became clear that it wasn't going to happen they had to tack an NVidia GPU into the PS3 halfway through development. There's your year long delay.
Developers have treated the ps3 and 360 the same, a cpu and a gpu, one crunches, one draws. And get very similar looking games.
guess I'll go look for a pdf of this :-)
At least we can play our games.
It's based G5 CPU, how is it even accurate?
Microsoft started to steal software l-o-n-g before Apple and is one of the primary reasons why the word "innovation" means jack shit any more.
Now can we be a bit more positive and consider that the Wii has good M-rated games like No More Heroes, that Microsoft has original content and good exclusive games, and that Sony is the most powerful console, a Blu-Ray player, and has LittleBigPlanet and Metal Gear Solid 4, as well as many non-exclusives like Rock Band and Grand Theft Auto 4?
But to remain on topic, it sucks for Sony. If they had launched the PS3 in 2005, I'm sure the console would have been a lot more successful.
That right there kills your wish. Positive statements about the Wii are not allowed on DToid. Don't you know that by now?
I'm not sure that it would have worked for Sony in 2005, though. There would have been even fewer HD TV owners than in 2006, and HD whether gaming or watching Blu-ray is really what pushes the PS3 over the PS2. The problem is that Sony pushed the PS3 as the perfect HD media solution while ignoring the fact that (A) they were just incredibly overpriced and (B) people need to add a minimum of $1,000 (back in 2005) to get a decent HD TV.
I understand where you're going with that, but honestly I don't think that it would have helped nearly as much as you think because of the additional expenditure to play the PS3 in full glory.
I haven't seen anything special the PS3's Cell processor can achieve.
So far it seems it was all hype over nothing.
"The innards of my game systems could be cat gut, and I wouldn't blink an eye. It doesn't fucking matter, and I don't give a fuck. I play all systems and don't have any silly or immature fanboy cheer or defense for any of them."
This gripes my balls equal to if not more than rampant fanboyism.