fun fact: $ony funded the development of the 360's cpu almost entirely

[Kalahari Inkantation]

But not by choice, of course.

The PPE was designed specifically for the Cell processor but during development, Microsoft approached IBM wanting a high performance processor core for its Xbox 360. IBM complied and made the tri-core Xenon processor, based on a slightly modified version of the PPE with added VMX128 extensions.

These cores are slightly modified versions of the PPE in the Cell processor used on the PlayStation 3.

they spent hundreds of million of dollars and years of r＆d designing this cpu, only for m$ft to show up at the last second and piggyback off their work basically for free lol

and it's particularly ironic and painful for $ony because the 360 came out a full year earlier than the ps3 did, for $100 less, and the 360's cell-based cpu design ended up being generally better than the ps3's in practice LOL

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. Mr. Shippy says that he felt "contaminated" as he sat down with the Microsoft engineers, helping them to sketch out their architectural requirements with lessons learned from his earlier work on Playstation.

The deal only got worse for Sony. Both designs were delivered on time to IBM's manufacturing division, but there was a problem with the first chip run. Microsoft had had the foresight to order backup manufacturing capacity from a third party. Sony did not and had to wait another six weeks to get their first chips. So Microsoft actually got the chip that Sony helped design before Sony did. In the end, Microsoft's Xbox 360 hit its target launch in November 2005, becoming its own success. Because of various delays, the Playstation 3 was pushed back a full year.

and then the cell went on to be an expensive and embarrassing flop in all other industries it was supposed to revolutionize

For Sony, the Cell processor was such a debacle that two weeks after the Playstation 3 finally appeared in stores, the company fired Ken Kutaragi, the head of its gaming unit, who had championed the Cell and built the Playstation line.

ultimately, despite The Infinite Power of the Cell™, the 360 ended up being the more powerful console

tl;dr Xbox Won

[Samus Aran]

congratulations you played yourself @ sony

[C.Mongler]

my ps3 is too heavy

[ME##]

It's rather embarrassing that even with a basically free CPU Microsoft didn't do any thermal testing on their console

[Kalahari Inkantation]

ItÃÆ'Ã,¢Ã¢ââ,¬Å¡Ã,¬Ã¢ââ,¬Å¾Ã,¢s rather embarrassing that even with a basically free CPU Microsoft didnÃÆ'Ã,¢Ã¢ââ,¬Å¡Ã,¬Ã¢ââ,¬Å¾Ã,¢t do any thermal testing on their console

it's rather embarrassing that m$ft absolutely ed up what's probably the easiest part of console development in general: literally just arranging the components into a box

i am 99% certain that they were rushing to just get the thing out the door before $ony could, which meant exactly 0 time for qa testing lol

so the first ~30 million or so 360 owners in practice ended up being m$ft's beta testers, and to be completely honest i still can't believe that m$ft got away with such blatant neglect to the extent that it did lol

still, there is no denying that they just had way more foresight when actually shopping for/developing the 360's components, and it resulted in a console that was in practice significantly more powerful than sony's overdesigned, heinously overpriced, massively delayed sh@box of a system lol

it's honestly nothing short of an absolute miracle that the ps3 was able to recover (at least with regard to userbase) in the end, and doubly miraculous that the ps3 somehow even ended up having the better library lol

[Thyme]

lmao damn david what kind of apostrophes do you use

[ME##]

lmao damn david what kind of apostrophes do you use

honestly whatever dumbshit my phone is on

[ME##]

ItÃÆ'Ã,¢Ã¢ââ,¬Å¡Ã,¬Ã¢ââ,¬Å¾Ã,¢s rather embarrassing that even with a basically free CPU Microsoft didnÃÆ'Ã,¢Ã¢ââ,¬Å¡Ã,¬Ã¢ââ,¬Å¾Ã,¢t do any thermal testing on their console

it's rather embarrassing that m$ft absolutely ed up what's probably the easiest part of console development in general: literally just arranging the components into a box

i am 99% certain that they were rushing to just get the thing out the door before $ony could, which meant exactly 0 time for qa testing lol

so the first ~30 million or so 360 owners in practice ended up being m$ft's beta testers, and to be completely honest i still can't believe that m$ft got away with such blatant neglect to the extent that it did lol

still, there is no denying that they just had way more foresight when actually shopping for/developing the 360's components, and it resulted in a console that was in practice significantly more powerful than sony's overdesigned, heinously overpriced, massively delayed sh@box of a system lol

it's honestly nothing short of an absolute miracle that the ps3 was able to recover (at least with regard to userbase) in the end, and doubly miraculous that the ps3 somehow even ended up having the better library lol

ippon and Europe for only buying PS3s. 


Also you've got to love how flip-floppy the American consumer is since we just went right back to Sony after supporting Microsoft last gen