Book details how Sony paid for Xbox 360 dev, let Microsoft borrow its car, acted like a doormat
By Joseph L. Flatley 
posted Jan 1st 2009 9:02AM
posted Jan 1st 2009 9:02AM
This year we've seen the PS3's Cell processor pitch in and help break the petaflop barrier, exploit a major security hole in SSL encryption and enable adolescent hijinks on PlayStation Home. Obviously, this is one serious piece of kit. According to The Race For A New Game Machine, written by two of the folks responsible for designing the thing, the Cell (a partnership between Toshiba, Sony and IBM) was the product of a deal that opened the door to IBM selling key parts of the chip to Microsoft before they had even finished building it -- even though this was clearly not part of the plan. Essentially, Sony's R&D money was spent creating a component for their rival, helping the Xbox 360 make its launch date of November 2005, while the PlayStation 3 was pushed back a full year. It seems somewhat fitting that the troubled game system should have such dysfunctional origins, no? [Via PS3 Fanboy]
oh........THIS EXPLAINS EVERYTHING
/sarcasm
I think you mean last year...
your gonads on fire aiyeeee!
I agree with you; it doesn't explain everything. But it certainly account for some of the PS3's troubles. Can the average grandmother who is buying her grandson a game console for Christmas differentiate between the specs of both products? Of course not. She will generally go with whatever seems most convenient and reliable; (price aside) the 360 had a whole year to establish its gamer base that wasn't devoted to one side or another, and the earlier release certainly contributed to that.
Why does everybody point to sales figures like they're the most important thing? I'm not an investor, I don't really care.
What I care about is that there are great games for me to enjoy on the platform. The PS3 has those. Sales figures don't necessarily mean there will be great games for the platform - just look at the Wii. There are some fun titles there, but not nearly as many as the sales figures would lead you to believe.
You sales figure junkies go right ahead and laugh. I'll be too busy playing LittleBigPlanet, MGS4 or Killzone 2 to notice.
KarlW
The Xbox also has a significantly higher game attach rate per unit than does the PS3.
Someone can correct me if im wrong here, but last I read, it was something like
7.5 games per unit for X360 versus
3 games per unit for PS3
Also, if you look on any top 10 rated and selling games list, the X360 titles by far occupy more slots than PS3 games do.
Wait, did you just imply that the 360 was reliable? Seriously?
Please explain what exactly game attach rates do to affect my enjoyment of games.
Besides, those figures are likely rubbish anyway. I'm sure many people buy the PS3 as a Blu-Ray player or media hub and never play a game, lowering the attach rate. That doesn't mean there aren't any good games for the system, and it doesn't mean I can't have fun playing a PS3.
Game attach rate means that there are usually more games that people want and are therefore worth playing on the X360 than there are on the PS3.
Case in point:
There are only 9 games on the PS3 with an average score a 9.0 or higher http://www.metacritic.com/games/ps3/scores/
Thera are 17 games (2x as many) on the X360 with an average score of 9.0 or higher http://www.metacritic.com/games/xbox360/scores/
This disparity, a 2:1 ratio, could very well be correlated to attachment rate per console as well.
Still think it's irrelevant and has nothing to do with anything?
Karl,
What you are missing is that you are not looking forward. You state you are not an investor and I assume not a game coder either. If you made a living creating games you would be interested in creating for the console with the biggest base. It really is that simple.
Then what happened to the Wii? It has the biggest user base, but most games for it are pathetic.
It's not as simple as that. You don't just need games, you need good games. Typically from innovative developers like MediaMolecule, not production line rubbish from EA.
Wow... Think for a second. The user base under the Wii is much different than the user base under the XBox and the user base under PS3. Therefore, the type of games produced for the Wii will differ and thus you think they suck because they are not for you. Still, the fact that the Wii has such a big audience does suck in a way for you because it means many game makers decide to build games for the Wii instead of the PS3 and possibly make them for a different audience as well. Thus, you get less games. Same applies to the XBox going back to earlier comments.
@Karl, Hamidxa and Maeztro
It's nice to see informed open debate on Engadget for once, rather than insulative arguements.
Surprising for a console conversation!
Keep up the good work :)
A whole year wasted IMO ... as far as gaming goes its still very much behind .. Great Bluray player ill give it that ...
Its always good to have both. Play the 360 and when it RRoD's ship it back and enjoy the few good PS3 exclusive games while a new 360 is on its way.
Except when my PS3 had its own RROD and had to be sent back and then its harddrive crapped out a year later (I could play games but could not watchs DVDor or Blurays it was odd)
So then im stuck with my Wii ... Zzzzz
"...its still very much behind"
no it is not. http://www.metacritic.com/games/ps3/scores/
@returned
The only exclusive ones on that list are MGS4, Little Big Planet and Ratchet and Clank with an 89.
http://www.metacritic.com/games/xbox360/scores/
By the time you get to an 89 scored game there are 10 exclusives for the 360, plus all the shared one that the PS3 has, plus a couple shared ones that were better on the 360.
Yes there are fun games on the ps3 and it's a perfectly good system but don't try and BS people into thinking at has as many good games as the 360.
I waited to get PS3 until now, I've got to say it really is very good! Its certainly as good as 360 and clearly holds great potential, much more so than the 360 can offer.
Yeah like potential like HOME .. its awesome .. um .. well .. no its really REALLY bad
the most fun i had was doing the running man with 5 dudes .... that is not my idea of fun
i did type "i jizzed in my pants" a few times that was fun for a few seconds
O SNAP! IBM you got told!
QUIET! I think I hear fanboys approaching...
you sure sound self-centered
On face value, I disagree with the analysis... though I haven't read the book. The Xbox 360 benefits from IBM's cost-reducing strategies in the Cell division, but the chip is basically a standard PowerPC G5. The real loser here was Apple; IBM spent their time on this project, instead of making good on their promise of 3 GHz desktop PowerPC chips for Apple.
meh IBM has more than enough research departments to work on two chip designs at once, it's just that they hit the same problem that Intel hit at 3GHz only IBM didn't have a backup plan like Intel with the Pentium M.
I am not too impressed with the Cell either, seems like both 360 and PS3 have some severe heat issues. PS3 gets pretty hot while the 360 regularly dies with RROD. And a general purpose multi-core CPU plus a dedicated GPU seems like a simpler and better architecture...
MS would have been given the thermal specs of the chip, the design of the box was presumably MS own and so they are themselves at fault for the overheating issues.
The the tri-core 3Ghz processor in the XBox 360 was what Apple was wanting, they just couldn't get it into a macbook form factor, as Apple wasn't prepared to do the desktop in a laptop design like other laptop MFRS did.
@Nikster
How exactly does the fact the PS3 runs hot make the Cell unimpressive? It's actually an incredible processor, particularly the PowerXCell 8i variant or whatever it's called that has native double-precision/64-bit FP. The real problem is that developers haven't yet taken full advantage of it yet, and it certainly doesn't help that the market has been essentially split by the success of the Xbox 360 nor the fact that the 360 is so easy to develop for.
Regardless, I'm sure both will have a good life, but I'm really interested in the NEXT generation. First of all, the consoles are planned way ahead of their production and even then they don't use the highest end GPUs. The PS3 essentially has a ~7800GT. The next consoles I assume are coming at the end of 2010 give or take. I can only imagine the awesome cards Nvidia and ATI will have by then.
Even the current gen is awesome. A GTX280/4870 used in a consistent platform (aka can be optimized perfectly) would easily run games with high polygon count and great textures at 1920x1080.
"It seems somewhat fitting that the troubled game system should have such dysfunctional origins, no?"
It's funny because without the link, no one would know which troubled game system is being talked about :]
Exactly what I thought. I had to click the link to find out lol
Ha! I was about to post that exact same thing.
I can't wait for game consoles to go intel with opengl.
Sorry Oliver..that's not going happen....
Just like the original Xbox! I guess we know what machine you're getting now.
I can't wait for the Universal Console...........the NINTENstation360!!!! Imagine what all three developers could create together. I would buy that in a heartbeat.
...what a bunch of crap.... "IBM hiding their work" ... under any commercial contract, when an employee is working on a project for company "A", that company, i.e. 'A" virtually always insists that no part of their work is shared with any other company, say company "B"... so it's not hiding, it's called basic business 101. If IBMers shared information of the three project between themselves, they would have violated contracts.
The authors are simply business immature.
All three companies, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo got massive tech benefits from their IBM relationship...and BTW, that's why these three companies gave their business to IBM.
Indeed, no way would information be shared. Different teams would have been setup to work on the SONY, MS and Nintendo projects.
Also the CPU that MS uses is pretty much a standard 64bit PPC, but with three cores. IBM has been selling dual-core versions for a long time, so it was not a big departure from already established chips.
The Cell on the other hand is a different beast and surely required much more work on both the chip architecture and the software, so the fact that it was available later then the (almost) standard chip MS uses is not a surprise.
A new "partner" entered the picture. In late 2002, Microsoft approached IBM about making the chip for Microsoft's rival game console, the (as yet unnamed) Xbox 360. In 2003, IBM's Adam Bennett showed Microsoft specs for the still-in-development Cell core. Microsoft was interested and contracted with IBM for their own chip, to be built around the core that IBM was still building with Sony.
All three of the original partners had agreed that IBM would eventually sell the Cell to other clients. But it does not seem to have occurred to Sony that IBM would sell key parts of the Cell before it was complete and to Sony's primary videogame-console competitor. The result was that Sony's R&D money was spent creating a component for Microsoft to use against it.
Mr. Shippy and Ms. Phipps detail the resulting absurdity: IBM employees hiding their work from Sony and Toshiba engineers in the cubicles next to them; the Xbox chip being tested a few floors above the Cell design teams
it sounds like cell was far too over reaching. IBM was allowed to sell the "easy bits" to other companies and Microsoft was able to build a console around what was already finished, right now, rather than waiting for some magical super-chip to be created. The Xbox360 is still very traditional in it's architecture compared to PS3. They used a Graphics chip from a different company that's similar to PC ones rather than designing a brand new chip like Sony was trying to do.
The real issue in the console war is "exclusivity" and Microsoft is the established player in making things "exclusive" to Windows for years... they just updated PC game tools for Xbox and 360... Sony or Nintendo have nothing to compete with Microsoft on the tools front especially when Microsoft brought their PC experience and developer contacts into the mix. Of course Microsoft gutted it's PC games market for 360 and it's not really coming back, People are spending less money on $300 game consoles and not $300 video cards meaning that PCs are just used for business work... which is where Macs shine right now.
@ mabhatter
"meaning that PCs are just used for business work... which is where Macs shine right now."
Dude: nobody uses Macs in business. In graphic design and other creative niche stuff, Macs are used. But other 'business' is all about Windows followed by Linux (with most Linux being server-side)
@mabhatter
"The Xbox360 is still very traditional in it's architecture compared to PS3. They used a Graphics chip from a different company that's similar to PC ones rather than designing a brand new chip like Sony was trying to do."
I don't know if you don't know what you are talking about or just wrote it down wrong, but you are confusing two different components. The PS3 and XBox360 both use traditional PC graphics cards (and traditional 3D APIs), it is only their CPUs that are specialized. The X360 uses a custom 3-core PowerPC chip from IBM, while the PS3 of course has the Cell.
@loosely_coupled
The PS3 GPU (RSX) was quite similar to PC GPUs at design time, but the X360 one (Xenos) definitely wasn't. (eDRAM framebuffer connected with huge bandwith, unified architecture waaay before DX10...)
"was the product of a deal that opened the door to IBM selling key parts of the chip to Microsoft before they had even finished building it "--------------Sue the pants off IBM, that'll teach them a lesson.
No need just switch partners with different company THAT will teach them a lesson
Reminds me of how what became the Playstation started out as a CD add-on for the SNES. Then Nintendo backed out, which is probably the biggest mistake they have ever made since worst-case scenario, it would have probably stalled Sony from making a console until the generation of the PS2.
Saying the PS3 processor helped break the petaflop barrier is a tad misleading. The one in the petaflop system is a different generation of part. The PS3 cell processor is 10-16% as fast as the new variant at 64-bit floating point arithmetic. It's like saying the Pentium 60 helped to make your Core2 gaming rig.
And before people ask if this could be used in future PS3, I would seriously hope not. The whole point of consoles is to provide an even, constant experience. Meaning the first adopters have the same game experience as people who buy years later.
Also, I wonder about the relationship between the 360 part and PS3. PS3 wasn't their gateway into modern consoles, Gamecube's processor was. The Cell design's enhancements over PPC970 don't appear in Xbox360. That design pretty much was already in the Apple systems and in their JS blade servers.
The PowerXCell 8i in Roadrunner is *very* similar to the version in the PS3. Essentially the only difference is that the SPEs are pipelined for dual precision (at the cost of minimal transistors over the original version), and the onboard memory controller is for DDR2 vs XDR. Sure you're not going to be breaking any DP Petaflop barriers with Cell v1, but DP isn't at all required for a ton of hugely beneficial scientific work, and we see PS3's clustered and otherwise standing in and doing supercomputing work in the areas of astrophysics, crytography, and life sciences. If we're making analogies, it's more like the next model year or a limited edition of the same car, rather than anything so vastly drastic as a Pentium 60 vs a Core2. I mean c'mon.
As for Cell and the XeCPU, neither has anything to do with the PPC970, and indeed the PPC core of the PS3 and the cores of the 360 look extremely similar; some extra instructions and beefier VMX units are basically the only differences to the 360's favor. Either IBM felt that the work on the PPC was still their domain due to its being an internal POWER development, there was an incredible coincidence and both teams drew from the same legacy project, and/or they were just lazy at developing these POWER cores. I believe bits of each aspect.
@makoto42
First of all, the new CELL 8i variant is still the same architecture as the original in the PS3, but the SPEs have been modified to do native 64-bit/double precision FP and its memory controller can connect to 64GB of DDR2. While this is certainly an excellent addition for many HPC and cluster applications, the last thing in the world that needs double precision calculations is gaming. The importance of 64 bit FP for science is that their simulations runs hundreds of billions of complex calculations... when you are having to round off the results so many times, you want as much precision as possible. With single-precision/32-bit floating point numbers, 23 bits are used for representing the significant digits (about 7 decimal digits) so the inherent loss of information when rounding is about 1 part per million. With 64-bit, you get 52 bits or 16 digits in decimal, so 1 part per one-hundred trillion.
Conversely, although modern 3D games do a ton of calculations, they don't need a ton of accuracy (relatively speaking). PC and console GPUs and drivers are optimized for maximum frame rate and perceived image quality and not absolute precision. This situation is reversed however for the professional CAD/CAM OpenGL GPUs from nVidia and ATI.
Oh, wow. You can't make this stuff up!
I'm buying this book, tomorrow.
While picking up this book, i also recommend IBM and the holocaust.
Basically talks about IBMs computing inception and how quickly, easily and efficiently a single company made for the most atrocities of war. And how after so many people died they came out on top ...
When IBM was still having major offices in chicago (near the wrigley building not field wrigley Building... they would send employees to "computer science classes" where the instuctors had no idea what a "coputer" really did... IBM is a strange company from end to end.
This means you can trust no one.
The book seems to skip the other side of the fence complete.
First let's address the PowerPC, MS took hold of the PowerPC 'that IBM was hoping to sell to Apple, and made some modifications via MS funding and MS Engineers.
Now for the contrast...
The writers of this book need to look at the NVidia Geforce 7900 in the PS3, as the money and DESIGNS that helped NVidia create their DX9 cards came from a company called Microsoft.
It was also MS's engineers that helped NVidia with the Geforce4ti chip design, that is the upper desktop version of what is in the original XBox - being the first 3D GPU with PS, etc.
It was MS money and engineers that 'designed' and funded Geforce4ti and all the future Geforce GPU designs that came from this - from teh first DX9 GeforceFX series cards all the way up to the end of the Geforce 7xxx series.
When NVidia was crying to MS for more money per GPU for the original XBox, MS explained, that they had given them the technology that is behind their entire PC line of GPUs and funded the creation of this technology, giving them their market edge and success and wasn't going to give them more money per GPU MFRed for the XBox.
Both NVidia and Sony got the benefits of MS money and MS GPU development. This is why when MS did the 360, they helped ATI but kept the design ownership of the GPU they created.
And again, the XBox 360 GPU design was the first in another generation of GPUs with features like a unified shader that are now standard in almost all desktop GPUs.
So I really don't care how much money Sony gave IBM on the Cell processor.If Sony wants to bitch about it, they can chip in on the development money and designs MS gave NVidia that was the precursor to the Geforce 7900 used in the PS3.
Sony also delayed the PS3 more themselves than anything IBM could have down, as they were determined to get GPU level performance out of their Cell design up until 2005 when they found they couldn't get the performance numbers needed and pulled in NVidia to adhoc in the Geforce 7900 to the design of the PS3, delaying it further and adding to the cost.
And we aren't even getting to the horrid Sony development tools that were still lacking, and if they were waiting on good supply of parts from IBM, they could of at least had their development tools DONE and polished instead of the crap they gave game developers. - In contrast MS's development tools were ahead of the hardware and used modded G5 Mac hardware running Windows XP64.
This is about the craziest and most insane article, and probably book I have seen in a long long time. They spend time bitching about the Cell processor development time IBM gave them and seem to forget all the goodies they got from the MS Engineers when it comes to the core of the GPU technology used in the PS3.
Geesh.
Can you back up your bullshit with anything? Like what exactly did Microsoft "give" to NV or how did they help?
Most of the R&D in graphics card development goes into GPU architecture research (and process optimizations, but NVidia outsources their fabbing). While it's pretty certain that NVidia did receive help from Microsoft to help optimize their graphics card to DirectX 9 APIs (and vice versa NVidia helped Microsoft develop the APIs), it's only a drop in the ocean of the work required for making actual GPUs, and if you'd bothered with basic research you'd see that Microsoft a) has no real GPU design expertise b) used to produce crap graphics APIs (eg. Direct3D < 7 retained mode, older DirectXs) until graphics card makers showed them the light.
This is some serious bullshit/exaggeration.
1. IBM also spent money on the Cell. Of course they use advancements made during it's development for other products.
2. The Xenon (360 CPU) is based on the PowerPC architecture, with three cores, SMT and modified AltiVec/VMX units. It's nothing revolutionary new, just improved and more specialized than the PowerPC-CPUs that have been around for years. The Cell is a single PowerPC core (with an AltiVec unit) that also acts as sort of a controller for the 7 coprocessors (SPEs).
Of course Xenon's development may have received some benefits from Sony's Cell money. But blaming Sony's fail on the traitor IBM and thief Microsoft is making things way to easy.
Microsoft offers an environment that does not brake with traditions but nonetheless offers some serious power through optimizations and well-placed additions. Sony's architecture is new and revolutionary and offers even more power, but requires more work (= more money) to be spent by the developers for the same results. In times when developers have to go multi-platform to earn enough money giving them a platform that is significantly more expensive and difficult than the others is foolhardy. Despite the Cells theoretical capabilities very few are willing to spend enough money to use them to their full extent.
pwnt!
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123069467545545011.html
"But a funny thing happened along the way: A new "partner" entered the picture. In late 2002, Microsoft approached IBM about making the chip for Microsoft's rival game console, the (as yet unnamed) Xbox 360. In 2003, IBM's Adam Bennett showed Microsoft specs for the still-in-development Cell core. Microsoft was interested and contracted with IBM for their own chip, to be built around the core that IBM was still building with Sony.
All three of the original partners had agreed that IBM would eventually sell the Cell to other clients. But it does not seem to have occurred to Sony that IBM would sell key parts of the Cell before it was complete and to Sony's primary videogame-console competitor. The result was that Sony's R&D money was spent creating a component for Microsoft to use against it."
-------------------
Unbelievable. You'd think there'd be legal agreements so air-tight that this wouldn't even be allowed to occur.
Sounds like a very interesting book to me.
Parents hate to see their children becoming couch potatoes when playing games.
Nintendo realizes that and adapted to real-life conditions.
It's that simple really.
As parents, would you care about terraflops for your kids to become even more couch potatoes?
And the depression and low-self esteem that ensue right after that?
BOOK is a TROLL.
IBM can do whatever they want, they OWN CPU, Sony and Microsoft both knew that the IBM CPU can be used against them via their competitor (unless they sign a agreement with IBM stating that.) Otherwise Sony is just idiot, or the Book author is just Trolling (I think the latter.)
Karl:
"production line rubbish from EA"
I'm sorry, but I can't take your opinion serious anymore. I think you meant Activision and NOT EA.
All the babble aside. My 360 Elite is on the way to TX for repairs (my second 360). So i gave Microsoft $100 for Christmas, as if they didn't have enough money, and I am playing my PS3 right now without a hitch. Before people start trying the bash me, I love my 360 but they should have made them better.
The x360 is surely unreliable, i just bought my 3rd last month.
Reason :
1. each console last a bit longer than a year before it self destructs itself.
most of the time its not fixable or cost is higher than or close to new one.
2. Most of my games are already X360
3. ......... Xbox LIVE .............
I hate the X360 but i Love Xbox LIVE !!!!!!! without it, i can play each game for max 1 week.
with Xbox live, Ive been playing halo for 5 years
Who Cares????
Les
Truth is the PS3 was delayed because Sony tried to unify the CPU and GPU because they thought their 'Cell" was amazing and it performed horribly. So cry all you want about RROD but LIVE is 10000000000% better then PSN. Thats why xbox sales are so much better. M$ knows what they are doing they didn't become the worlds largest (and profitable) software company by having a bunch of idiots at the wheel. Im sure this will just fall into their future plans for something else.
Les
Just a quick one about the Wii and console sales...
Avid gamers purchase either the PS3 or XBOX360 based on their preference of games. Those who like online games buy an XBOX while those that like platformers and sports games to play off-line buy a PS3. Those that don't want high def movies get an XBOX while those that desire the latest in hi def get a PS3.
Wii sales are explained easily: both of these sets of people buy Wii's! Most gamers I know have a PC, an XBOX360 or PS3, and a Wii.
This business of IBM is pure savvyness and great business sense on their part. Sony is at fault for allowing IBM to sell to competitors. To call the PS3 a failure is premature because no one has seen the real power of the console due to Sony's stupidity. I believe that the XBOX360 sales figures for the same period of time on the market as the PS3 are pretty comparable to Sony's sales.
Just remember that in the end, we all benefit because there is choice in the market and we all have the ability to buy what suits our needs.