How Sony's Development of the Cell Processor Benefited Microsoft

The Wall Street Journal is running an article about a recently released book entitled "The Race for a New Game Machine" which details Sony's development of the Cell processor, written by two of the engineers who worked on it. They also discuss how Sony's efforts to create a next-gen system backfired by directly helping Microsoft, one of their main competitors. Quoting: "Sony, Toshiba and IBM committed themselves to spending $400 million over five years to design the Cell, not counting the millions of dollars it would take to build two production facilities for making the chip itself. IBM provided the bulk of the manpower, with the design team headquartered at its Austin, Texas, offices. ... 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."

Comments

And they both stole from Apple and Nintendo?

[Sarusa]

This is really kind of misleading. The PowerPC, which is at the core of the Cell and is what MS uses as the cores of the Xbox 360, has been IBM's baby for years.

The Xbox 360 uses 3 of the cores. The Cell uses one of the cores plus 8 SPEs (6 of which you can actually use in a game). If you will recall, the Wii uses a PowerPC too, a slightly beefed up Gamecube CPU which IBM made for Nintendo even before they made Cell. And of course Apple used to use PowerPCs (and IBM itself did and does, for servers).

Anyhow, without the Cell's SPEs, there's not a lot to really 'steal'. The lack of SPEs is what makes the Xbox 360 so easy to program for, but the SPEs are what really define the Cell and make it such a floating point crunching monster (better suited for supercomputing than writing video games for in my opinion, and that's not intended as a dis here).

OTOH

[symbolset]

It looks like the engineers who actually make stuff are in charge. I know that's not as good to you as lawyer-based engineering, but some of us prefer physics-based engineering, for spice. OK?

Please don't sue me.

Re:I don't think it's quite as they tell it

[sleeponthemic]

Sony's payback comes when Playstation3 programmers learn to fully utilize the Cell architecture.

That statement is fast becoming another hallowed urban myth of gaming.

Techspecs aside, do you really believe the hype when absolutely nothing has come out on ps3 that blows the 360's capabilities away? Haven't they had enough time? Where is the practical proof? Folding at home performance? Not really applicable.

Not to mention the fact that no developer making cross platform games is going to go very much further on a ps3 version. There's just simply no point.

Re:It also helped MS

[Otis_INF]

Well the idea of sony was to advance the PS2 design further, in my opinion a broken design having two SIMD Vector processors doing everything

It's not broken, it's just an advanced system so a developer who wants to write really fast code has to know how it works. If you look at God of war 2 for example, what the engine can do on a system with 32MB of ram and a pretty slow CPU, it really shows that a skilled developer who knows what s/he's doing can get the results desired.

I.o.w.: a 'lamer' can't get the performance desired. Well, what a shame, ain't it? If one really understands what it takes to write 3D engine code, it shouldn't be hard to understand that what the PS3 offers is in theory not really broken, but an opportunity to really get results which are beyond what one could imagine.

Sure it's hard to write that code, but that's no different from writing solid, performing, scalable data-access code for example. It doesn't require thousands of developers to write that code: only a few are required, they can write the hard part, the rest of the developers can build on top of that. After all, a game is often mostly written in a script-like language of the engine or C/C++ utilizing engine libraries, not a lot of people developing games are really writing engine cores.

Re:It also helped MS

[drinkypoo]

I really don't know what the hell Sony was thinking with putting a brand new kind of processor in a console. I'm willing to bet in 10 years there are compilers and systems out there that make real good use of the Cell. However that does you no good with games today.

It IS a bit hilarious isn't it? The Playstation murdered the Saturn in part because it was easier to develop for, with one CPU (a MIPS core at that!) and one graphics chip. Then Sony completely blew it with the PS2, made the most complicated video game console to program for ever and Microsoft made huge inroads. Then they blew it again with the PS3. A majority of developers willing to speak on such issues despise both systems. Sony would be out of the video game market completely at this point if it weren't for Xbox 360 RROD.