“War breaks out again in the video game business this week as Microsoft Corp. , Sony Corp. and Nintendo Co. all take the wraps off their next-generation game consoles. But the biggest winner may be IBM Corp.,” Bob Keefe writes for The Atlanta Journal Constitution. “For the first time ever, all three gaming consoles — Microsoft’s Xbox 360, Nintendo’s Revolution and the successor to Sony’s PlayStation 2 — will be powered by microprocessors from a single company, IBM.”
“IBM designed the chips , each different and unique, primarily in Austin, Texas, where about 6,500 people work mainly in software, hardware and semiconductor design. The chips will be produced at IBM’s East Fishkill, N.Y., factory and by third-party suppliers overseas if needed,” Keefe writes. “IBM is well-known within the semiconductor industry for cutting-edge chips. Its PowerPC chips also are used in the Mars rover vehicles, some of the most sophisticated business workstations and Apple Computer [Macintosh] machines. But the game consoles will take IBM chips more mainstream.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The AIM alliance (between Apple Computer, IBM and Motorola) was formed in 1991 to create a new computing standard based on the PowerPC architecture. To the many people who have already written off the PowerPC: you jumped the gun, it’s time to take another, closer look at what’s happening in microprocessors today.
Is this likely to have good knock-on effects for the PowerMac?
Looks like Steve was right to pick IBM’s processors. Take that intel.
Great, when I’m not reading MDN posts and I haven’t yet recovered from my last wank, I can fritter the hours away playing “awesome” games on a screen instead of doing real activities in real life. Is it any wonder I can’t get laid?
Come on over, Gareth. I’m gonna rock your world!!!
Good days for Apple’s friends=Good days for Apple!
With the increase in revenue from next-gen consoles, IBM will be able to spend more to develop faster chips. Then the prices go down for the chips, and so do the prices of Apple computers, making them more accessible to Windows users who are fed up with all the spyware/adware/viruses of their Intel- or AMD-powered computers.
MW: red
As in: “Bill Gates must be RED in the face that his company has to use Apples to develop for the Xbox 360!”
Holy Crap! Does this not mean that we will eventually see Mac OS X run on a non Apple PC? Who needs Intel and AMD?
Apple could come out ahead, far ahead, as programs will be easier to write for other platforms. Game software manufacturers are probably jumping up and down knowing that all 3 game consoles will have very similar CPUs. This will make their life a lot easier. With Apple’s computers being of the very same heart, it will be far easier to port their games over to Macs than to do complete rewrite to an Intel or AMD box.
Wonder what the mood is at
1) Intel – (lost their “Win” partner)
2) Dell, HP, et al (lost their “Home Media Ctr PC’s)
Betcha, they are knocking at Steve’s door to deliver OS X to x86 and give them an extension on life!!
I noticed a little while ago that TiVo’s also used PPC processors. Granted, they have slow clockspeeds so they can keep the cost down, but PPC is starting to be used in a lot of places.
OK, with these game machines running at speeds that literally make the latest PCs look like calculators from the 70’s, what is going to happen to the PC Market??? More specifically, are Macs gonna be this fast in a year??? If IBM can do this for all 3 game companies, why the f$%k couldn’t they do this for Apple?
Would someone please clear this up for me?
Also, the leap in performance is so huge, doesn’t it look like INtel is totally screwed here? If they are, how the hell is the PC market going to migrate to PPC chips? Wouldn’t that be an enormous undertaking?
btw, mr. angry, Steve wasn’t around when Apple decided to move to PowerPC. He was doing the NeXT/Pixar thing
PC versions of console titles will need to be ported into x86 code, making them perform like Doom 3 for OS X.
“”Bill Gates must be RED in the face that his company has to use Apples to develop for the Xbox 360”
to quote Bill himself (at least from the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley): “It doesn’t matter.” Bill will use anything he needs to create the ‘next big thing’. he’ll stand on anyone’s shoulders to get the edge, which is good business. Might be why he’s the richest man in the world, eh?
It sounds like the Mars Rovers were built by engineers with an eye for quality parts. The spunky things just won’t die.
I thought the Cell Processors that the PS3 are using came from Sony’s R&D… Hmmm, I know I read that somewhere…
Oh yeah.. I should also point out that this is not particularly good news, as it will make the G5 chips even harder for Apple to come by, since IBM will undoubtedly show preference to the much more lucrative and widespread gaming industry.
Yeah, so why isn’t Apple making a gaming device? They clearly saw the future with the PowerPC chip years ago… let’s see Apple bring some excitement to the gaming world! Apple could DOMINATE the gaming world if they really wanted to!
Bill is the richest man in the world by default, the old guy from Wal-Mart was by farrrrr the richest guy. He died and left hi fortune to wife & kids, which makes them 5 of the 10 richest people in the world. I really don’t think Wal-mart is always bringing us ‘the next big thing’. However they are damned competitive.
They do make a lot of money from gaming consoles, and xmas 2005 and all od 2006 look to be a great year for consoles. I really hope that the money that IBM will make off the consoles translates into better and more chips for Apple. Do the console systemsn upgrade their chips to faster speeds when they are avaiulable or do they stick with the same specs til they release the next genereation console?
“Apple could come out ahead, far ahead, as programs will be easier to write for other platforms. Game software manufacturers are probably jumping up and down knowing that all 3 game consoles will have very similar CPUs. This will make their life a lot easier. With Apple’s computers being of the very same heart, it will be far easier to port their games over to Macs than to do complete rewrite to an Intel or AMD box.”
This is the biggest misconception that’s running in the Mac community these days, that games will be “easier” to port to a Mac. Fact is it will NOT be any easier….the PowerPC chip variants of Xbox/PS3 is radically different than the PowerPC chips sitting inside your G5. They all share specialized, simplistic multiple cores compared to a highly complex, single-core general purpose PowerPC 970. The graphics subset is unique for each console as well. Development for XBOX 360 are on XN kits with a barebones NT kernels and a version of DirectX 10 (which is not even available for PC yet). It would be easier to port over to PC’s in this case from scratch.
“OK, with these game machines running at speeds that literally make the latest PCs look like calculators from the 70’s, what is going to happen to the PC Market??? More specifically, are Macs gonna be this fast in a year??? If IBM can do this for all 3 game companies, why the f$%k couldn’t they do this for Apple?
Would someone please clear this up for me?
“
I’ll clear it up for you, since many Mac users can’t seem to grasp the underlying technology of these new chips. These are S-P-E-C-I-A-L-I-Z-E-D, simple low-transistor count powerPC cores compared to highly complex, general purpose PowerPC CPU’s. In fact, the most powerful of these chips, CELL, has only ONE core (PPE) that would be comparable to a regular G5 core. The other 7 cores are simple SPE’s that process functions like an assembly line robot. In all cases of these PowerPC chips, Xbox or Cell, they generate less heat, therefore they can be clocked higher.
…..”The PPE is a new core unlike any other PowerPC core made by IBM. The PPE is kept simple purposefully, although it has the base functionality of any modern day, general purpose microprocessor. The role of the PPE in Cell is to handle the tasks that any general purpose microprocessor would run; basically, anything that you could run on your Athlon 64 would be run on the PPE.
The PPE features a 64KB L1 cache and a 512KB L2 cache and features SMT, similar to Intel’s Hyper Threading. The PPE features a strictly in-order core, which the desktop x86 market hasn’t seen since the death of the original Pentium (the Pentium Pro brought out-of-order execution to the x86 market), so the move for an in-order core is an interesting one. The PPE is also only a 2-issue core, meaning that, at best, it can execute two instructions simultaneously. For comparison, the Athlon 64 is a 3-issue core, so immediately, you get the sense that the PPE is a much simpler core than anything that we have on the desktop. IBM’s VMX instruction set (aka Altivec) is also supported by the PPE. Much like the rest of the Cell processor, the PPE is designed to run at very high clock speeds.
There’s not much that’s impressive about the PPE, other than it’s a small, fast, efficient core. Put up against a Pentium 4 or an Athlon 64, the PPE would lose undoubtedly, but the PPE’s architecture is one answer to a shift in the performance paradigm. Performance in business/office applications requires a very powerful, very fast general purpose microprocessor, but performance in a game console, for example, does not. The original Xbox used a modified Intel Celeron processor running at 733MHz, while the fastest desktops had 2.0GHz Pentium 4s and 1.60GHz Athlon XPs. Given that the first implementation of Cell is supposed to be Sony’s Playstation 3, the simplicity of the PPE is not surprising. Should Cell ever make its way into a PC, the PPE would definitely have to be beefed up, or at least paired with multiple other PPEs….”
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2379&p=3
Apple could dominate the gaming market (or at least could have) if they had half of MS’s billions to waste and half of their leverage. Unfortunately they don’t. However hopefully they will now be able to plug into games a good deal easier and quicker than before and at least the gamers will know who is using the (potentially) best chips for games.
Are the G5s for Apple made in the same East Fishkill, N.Y. factory? I hope IBM doesn’t leave Apple hanging by switching focus to what appears to be the much more profitable path for them, the console market. Motorola did this more or less with the G3/G4.
But on the other side of the coin, this might push IBM to speed up development times and/or apply this console technology into the desktop processors, which could benefit Apple.
From the rumors and specs so far, looks like the PS3 might be the clear winner.
Apple could not dominate the console market, entry into that market for a new player is near impossible. Look at MS, they lost a ton of money getting into the business and I bet the xBox division still isn’t profitable. There’s no money in the hardware (console itself) and you have to remember Apple is a hardware company. MS can attempt to make up the losses on the xBox hardware by manufacturing and selling the software (i.e. Bungie, still angry with the acquisition, long live Marathon).
Remember the Pippin fiasco?
The only way I could see Apple getting an edge is to somehow create a machine that works with iTunes Music Store and the iPod, iMovie Film Store (when it arrives), TiVo, Airport Express and your desktop Mac. Imagine OS X on a console? But the key ingredient for consoles is the developers, most major game developers wouldn’t want to create content for yet another console, they already have their hands full with three of them.
TiVo also runs on Linux…
thanks Sammy…
So what kind of impact do you think the development of IBM getting all 3 contracts and the more widespread use of PPC will have on Apple?