Advertisement
Sony "helped design" 360 processor News
PlayStation 3 Xbox 360 News by Oli Welsh
A new book has revealed how Sony's huge investment in the PS3's Cell processing unit may have helped Microsoft develop the Xbox 360.
The authors of the book, 'The Race For a New Game Machine', are former IBM microchip designers David Shippy and Mickie Phipps. According to the Wall Street Journal's review, they worked on the processors for both machines, and say that IBM's design for core components of the Cell directly influenced the work the computing giant did for Microsoft on the 360's processor.
To add insult to injury, the Microsoft chip was commissioned later and delivered sooner than the Cell. The 360 hit the market first and established a lead over the PS3 that Sony is still struggling to crack. Although the book's authors claim both companies were winners in the end, the Wall Street Journal calls the debacle "one of [Sony's] greatest business failures".
"In 2003, IBM's Adam Bennett showed Microsoft specs for the still-in-development Cell core," said the Journal. "Microsoft was interested and contracted with IBM for their own chip, to be built around the core that IBM was still building with Sony."
The Journal reckons this was a lack of foresight on Sony's part. "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."
In the book, Shippy, the chief architect of the Cell, says he felt "contaminated" as he worked with Microsoft engineers on the architecture for the 360's chip "with lessons learned from his earlier work on PlayStation".
The Journal reviewer contends that USD 400 million development of Cell was considered such a disaster within Sony that it led to PlayStation boss Ken Kuturagi being "fired" shortly after PS3 was released.
The extent to which the design of the Cell really influenced the more conventional PowerPC architecture of the 360 processor is debatable. But with Sony still selling the high-priced PS3 at a loss while Microsoft is able to slash the cost of its machine, there's no doubt that those "lessons learned" were expensive ones for the Japanese giant - and were picked up on the cheap by its competitor.
Advertisement
Want to comment on this article? Log in, or register!
Poster
|
Kirly_Wombat
05/01/09 @ 11:19
0
pfft allot of companies "borrow" a lot from eachother anyway, it only makes the news if one doesnt like it because the other "borrowed" too much and sues.
|
|
Der_tolle_Emil
05/01/09 @ 11:19
0
Typo: are former IBM microchip desingers David Shippy and Mickie Phipps.
Edit: Vorlon: Why so aggressive?
Edited 1 times,
most recently on 05/01/09 @ 11:20
|
|
0
Wow, vorlon - you need to lay off the coffee.
As facets of the PS3 story are gradually revealed it's becoming more and more of a clusterfuck. (Unless something really special comes out this year, I think I might sell my PS3. It's useful for attracting dust in the living room, but bugger-all else...) My mate's PS3 laser died just in time for Christmas so he couldn't watch is new Blu-rays. He was overjoyed as you might imagine. The thing is about 9 months old - probably less - and barely been used. So much for Sony's superior reliability. |
|
0
"Will no one learn lesso.ns from our history? It sounds similar to how Nintendos cd platform became the Playstation 1. "
What goes around comes around I guess. Sony really should have been more careful with this and been stricter in their rules when they contracted the work in the 1st place.
Edited 2 times,
most recently on 05/01/09 @ 12:09
|
|
0
vorlon-man might be a bit shouty, but he's broadly right. This mystical "core" of the Cell is a pretty standard Power core and they've been around independently of the Cell for quite some time. I'm not sure, other than trying to generate sensational headlines, exactly what the point of this story is.
|
|
0
i'm not sure how well this story stands up to scrutiny. as has been said other than the long serving powerpc cores, the two cpus don't share much in common. structurally it is well documented the two processors are very different and the real strength of cell, the spus are evidently exclusive to sony's design. how much of a success or failure the work on cell was to the japanese giant is the real contentious issue in this story. otherwise it all just seems like attention seeking to me.
Edited 1 times,
most recently on 05/01/09 @ 12:21
|
|
0
vorlon-man - here's one:
Why don't you follow that last line of your own advice. EG don't ask you to pay to read this, they didn't come round to wherever you are and force your eyelids open with matchsticks, threatening to hurt your loved ones unless you read this apparently offensive article - which quite clearly has QUOTED the damn thing from somewhere else anyway. Calm down, shut up and leave the more intelligent and mature readers of EG (i.e. those actually old enough to hold a reasonable conversational debate about the merits of an article) to it. |
|
Norfolk'n'Clue
05/01/09 @ 12:16
0
Weezer, I guess your mate should have phoned up the sony replacement line. this happened to a friend on the 28th. He had a new one delivered to his door on the 1st. Not bad service, really.
|
|
0
What a load of complete bollocks...
PPC has long been soley IBM's technology... nothing to do with Sony... is there anything they wont try and take credit for? Its pathetic IMO, like some bloke down the pub telling you he invented sliced bread. Also vorlon-man: both 360 and PS3s cores were based off the G5s which were out before either chip was completed, none of these chips are exactly the same though... 360 is custom tailored like the PS3s is(infact the 360 core easily has more features and hence is more powerfull since it was designed to handle more tasks without the need for PPEs). There will have been one influence(which is probably what they mean whilst being deliberately deceptfull about their wording) the 360 team would have known how high the bar was being set in terms of raw power/efficiency/real world performance maybe, so they knew what they were aiming for.
Edited 4 times,
most recently on 05/01/09 @ 12:24
|
|
Coughthulu
05/01/09 @ 12:36
0
Sony entered into business with both IBM and Toshiba to develop the Cell. There's no way such a business agreement would have said "Oh, and you can't use any of the tech you create in any other business", it'd cripple IBM's ability to use it for future products.
If IBM did anything dodgy, surely Sony would be jumping up and down screaming "LAWSUIT!" by now? |
|
BillyBrush
05/01/09 @ 12:45
0
Having a competitor see specs for the key part of your system as it was being developed? Nooooo, not news at all....meaningless!
ha |
|
0
this article is a bit off in my view.
apple funded most of the powerpc development before switching to intel. it does seem that they (sony and ms) helped clocking the powerproc higher since it used to be a pretty slow processor. only after sony and ms funed research the powerpc got a pretty big perfomrance boost. |
|
BillyBrush
05/01/09 @ 12:48
0
correct re the lawsuit stuff....it was always to be sold to other companies, however that's a bad move on Sony's part tbh as they let MS in to see what was going on and make their own chip, 400mil investment is probably too much for something 'exclusive' to one product however you never want the competition knowing where you'll hit, and they did
|
|
0
Sort of related to the 400 million dollar development cost:
"Japan's Sony Corp (6758.T) is likely to announce closures of Japanese factories and major divisions early next month, the Times of London said on Monday, but the company denied any such plan existed" http://uk.reuters.com/article/technology... This would be more serious than the job cuts already announced since it would mean Sony pulling out of entire markets like TVs. |
|
superdelphinus
05/01/09 @ 13:03
0
it's not IBM's fault - it's whichever lawyer who drafted sony's agreement, although presumably IBM wouldn't agree to clauses that limit there right to sell their own technology to 3rd parties. A little sh1t company might do but not IBM. I don't know enough about the industry but i presume there are 100s of examples where a piece of technology is designed for a specific company but that r&d work leading up to that is sold to other people - one i can think of is Intel and Apple
|
|
0
Well if the engineers are saying that they felt they had been influenced by their work on Cell when designing the 360's chip... what am I saying. Of course they were. It's like with programmers - and oddly we were talking about this at work today before this story was published. Programmers move from company to company, and we always have contractual provisions to keep the code we write for them confidential etc. etc. But our ability to code comes from our experience, so there will always be similarities in our work for different people.
I would imagine that CPU designers working on different projects even at the same company for different clients have the same sort of thing going on. You do one design, you learn things that then feed into another one. Simple. So of course Sony's R&D money contributed to the 360's chip... and every other chip IBM have designed since, probably. |
|
0
Calgon - " nothing to do with Sony... is there anything they wont try and take credit for? Its pathetic IMO, like some bloke down the pub telling you he invented sliced bread. "
Except the book is written by two ex-IBM guys, so saying that Sony or indeed anyone else is trying to take credit for anything suggests you haven't read the article properly. |
|
Doctor_What
05/01/09 @ 13:36
0
@ Weezer: that's bad luck for your friend. Running on the stats of people I know with the machines, of the 360 owners (around 100 people, give or take) around 85% have had to have a replacement due to RROD, some of them multiple times. So far none of the PS3 owners (around 40 people) have had a problem. Yep, it's not a scientific survey, but I think the numbers are still enough to speak for themselves. I use both machines regularly, the PS3 more than the 360, and the 360 has RROD'd once so far.
Anyway, as for the article, if does sound like the relationship between the Cell and the 360 is being overblown. More startlingly though... $400 million on developing the Cell? What the hell were they thinking? |
|
rhinoxious
05/01/09 @ 13:44
0
Cell wan't developed for Sony by IBM remember, it was a joint venture to create a new processor architecture that was ideally suited for certain kinds of applications (though not games sadly as it turned out), which all three companies would use and profit from.
|
|
0
teabagger Oh do shut up... they are based off the G5 which was released before either console core, have you even taken a look at the differences between them? I doubt it, unlike you I dont beleive everything I read so easily, especially when its something I have a little prior knowlege of. Its like I said there will have been some influence on a very basic level(ie how high do we aim) but its been exagerated to... well look at the headline... complete bollocks(they obviously have a book to sell, what better way to make something sound more interesting than it really is than to bend the truth a little... it reads like a pub conversation with Johnny-Bullshit), as someone said Apple helped design it too then and Nintendo and anyone else thats worked with IBM/PPC.
Btw Sony needed IBM's expertise in the field to even get feasible blueprints for Cell, not the other way around, Sony aren't even on the radar in the chip industry.
Edited 5 times,
most recently on 05/01/09 @ 15:19
|
|
0
teabagger, he probably hasn't. i suspect he partly read it and pretty quickly came to his predictable and unfounded conclusion that it was blasphemous sony's doing. the guy lost all credibility regarding objectivity a long time along. he's a self-righteous moron.
Edited 3 times,
most recently on 05/01/09 @ 14:28
|
|
0
"In the end, the WSJ writeup implies that Sony was a patsy because IBM sold a PPE-based chip to rival Microsoft... It was always my own impression that Sony was a patsy because it bought a floating-point coprocessor that was great for supercomputing workloads (IBM's target market for Cell) and shoehorned it into a hard-to-program game console. The fact that Microsoft was smart enough to demand something more traditional and easier-to-program is sort of a side issue, even if that "something" did use a major part of the Cell. "
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/200... |
|
BadBoyBonner
05/01/09 @ 14:25
0
I think the real problem is that Sony invested $400 million in a bespoke design that nobody seems to derive much (if any) benefit from over and above the 360's design which is far closer to what had gone before it.
Investing less into a more traditional design, that was cheaper to produce it seems was the way to go i.e. 360. In fact - Sony may very well have been better off doing a Nintendo - re badge the PS2 with a better controller and "over-clocked" the chips with a larger memory footprint. So did the $400 million investment return good value? A resounding No. |
|
0
Rash' doesnt really know what he's talking about most of the time he's just a closet fanboy(PS3 obviously) that feigns objectivity and maturity when he posses neither... case in point he spent about 2 weeks crying in 360 review threads about the 9 out of 10 LBP got before he'd even f***ing played it... and he talks about credibility? Pffft!
As for me reading the whole article, the headline I pointed out in itself was worth the response. :/
Edited 2 times,
most recently on 05/01/09 @ 14:34
|
|
0
Gurgeh, i don't know how accurate that quote is. as i said it's well documented that cell's most important components are the spus.
edit. i just read that article and the only thing patsy is the suggestion sony "bought" the design. the chip was co-developed by sony, IBM, and toshiba. it was a collaboration not a purchase. somebody needs to do their research. that's basic knowledge. boy standards have dropped on that site.
Edited 2 times,
most recently on 05/01/09 @ 14:49
|
|
0
Newsflash - technicians work on one thing, learn, work on more things. How exactly is this news? There's nothing dodgy about this, no matter how many lawyers you throw at things, you can't wipe the memories of engineers every time they move projects, nor would you want to.
However, Sony's lessons have been clear irrespective of this 'revelation' - don't overengineer, don't make things more complex than they need to be, and don't assume lots of people will pay top dollar for highly custom technology. The top prizes rarely go to the people who make the cleverest, most complex technology, they go to the people that make slightly less revolutionary ideas work well, simply, for a good price. |
|
0
Metalnut - "Newsflash - technicians work on one thing, learn, work on more things. How exactly is this news? There's nothing dodgy about this, no matter how many lawyers you throw at things, you can't wipe the memories of engineers every time they move projects, nor would you want to. "
That was the point I was about to make, but put alot better than I ever could have worded it. People learn and then apply what they have learned on new projects, its the way of the world. |
|
farticusmaximus
05/01/09 @ 15:13
0
"vorlon-man's just pissed that Santa got him a PS3 instead of an Xbox 360 hahahaha"
I'd be pretty pissed if I asked for a games machine and got a movie player instead. I'd have a boot for Santa's sack and shove the PS3 up his arse!
Edited 1 times,
most recently on 05/01/09 @ 15:13
|
|
0
Calgon - I don't believe I made any comment regarding the processor designs, so trying to shoot me down over that is rather silly. Indeed I really don't know a great deal about processor design. I was simply taking issue with your anti-Sony comments which don't seem justifiable given that this whole article is based off a book by ex-IBM employees and, as far as I know, Sony haven't at any point said anything along the lines of "Whaaaaa! we part designed the 360 chip".
Of course, that would be obvious if you were here for any other reason that having a go at people. First ignore of 2009. Well done indeed. |
|
0
Teabagger well thats fair enough ignore me, I hadnt read the article before commenting, I read Eurogamers headline and their take though so it seems as though EG didnt read it properly either.
Really though it wouldnt be beyond Sony to play this game, they have made similar remarks before in their playstation business, so my suspicions arent/werent totally unfounded.
Edited 2 times,
most recently on 05/01/09 @ 15:35
|
|
0
"This is just laying the groundwork so in a few years time the tiny shrill hardcord of PS3 fans can whine that Microsoft "stole" the PlayStation or something. Apple does this all the time. Microsoft aren't allowed to innovate, despite the 360 being the most innovative console released, well, ever."
Are u serious? |
|
GamesConnoisseur
05/01/09 @ 16:01
0
Of course the headline is very leading in sense where 'Mwhaha fool Sony invested in something that MS profited from' and the implication that X360 processor is more on or less on parity with The Cell!
The lesson here is that $400 million investment off the back of PS2 dominance havent yet yielded much benefit, especially when X360 is much capable of holding its own and Wii's runaway success off the back of old gamecube hardware with some frills! /Where is Apologie? |
|
The Bodybuilder
05/01/09 @ 16:17
0
>"Errr... PCs do not use PowerPC chips. "
So why are they called power PCs, huh? HUH? /knows nothing about processor engineering or design. |
|
0
@Calgon
I doubt much of the 360's CPU is based off the G5 at all. It's the same ISA, but that doesn't mean it's the same architecture. The G5 is a complex general purpose, out-of-order execution CPU designed for general desktop/server workloads. The cores in the 360's CPU are simpler: no out-of-order, simpler branch prediction, they're designed for streaming media workloads like games. If Arstechnica's article is correct, the Cell's PPE and the Xenon's three cores are basically the same thing, so presumably that's the part of the Cell's design that MS got so cheap. |
Want to comment on this article? Log in, or register!
