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A comment on How Sony inadvertently helped a competitor and lost position in the videogame market.

Re:How Sony inadvertently helped a competitor and lost posit... by potatolicious on Wednesday December 31, 2008 @08:16PM (#416113)
Does anyone have any concrete info on what similarities the Cell and Xbox 360 CPU share, besides the fact that they're both by IBM?

I was under the impression that the 360 CPU is based on the old PowerPC designs that IBM already had in-house, and is a far more traditional CPU (albeit with 3 cores) than the Cell.

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Re:How Sony inadvertently helped a competitor and lost posit... by sachinag on Wednesday December 31, 2008 @09:17PM (#416144)
The Wii/GameCube one definitely is based on the PowerPC designs - I hadn't heard that about the 360 chip. Lo and behold, you're right: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/power/library/pa-fpfxbox/?...
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Re:How Sony inadvertently helped a competitor and lost posit... by wmf on Thursday January 01, 2009 @03:30PM (#416646)
The PPE core is a completely new design (it isn't even similar to the G5, let alone derived from it). The WSJ article is correct; the PPE was originally part of Cell and it was later improved (with additional instructions) and used in the Xbox 360 processor. Even though they both share the PPE, the two chips have radically different architectures because of the SPEs (or lack thereof).

I found it interesting to watch these design processes from inside IBM; I'll have to check out the book.

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Re:How Sony inadvertently helped a competitor and lost posit... by zitterbewegung on Thursday January 01, 2009 @09:22AM (#416410)
The Cell is based upon a PPC G5 core with 7-8 SPU's or in other words cores which are specially designed vector processors. All of the cores run at the same clock speed (3.2 ghz)
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Re:How Sony inadvertently helped a competitor and lost posit... by lallysingh on Thursday January 01, 2009 @12:26AM (#416256)
AFAIK, it's a 3 core PPC G5. The XBox team was using the g5 powermacs to do development.
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