Sneak preview of "The Race For a New Game Machine" book

David Shippy designed "the brains" of the PlayStation 3's Cell processor. In a new book entitled "The Race For a New Game Machine", he and his co-worker Mickie Phipps document what went into building it, and the subsequent derailment of the project, which, evidently, saw IBM (with which Sony was a partner for the project) making the processing chips for a certain two other rival game consoles.

Toshiba was the other partner in the plan; together they intended to spend $400 million over five years in designing the microprocessor, discounting costs for the production facilities themselves.

And something interesting happened: Microsoft approached IBM to make the chip for the then-unnamed Xbox 360. IBM's Adam Bennett showed Microsoft the specs for the still-in-development Cell (generally a no-no), and Microsoft, liking what they saw, contracted their own chip, to be built around Sony's core.

Toshiba, IBM and Sony agreed from the beginning they would eventually sell the processor to other clients at some point, but to show it off and sell parts of it to a rival company, while still in development no less, seems bizarre, to say the least. As the Wall Street Journal puts it: "The result was that Sony's R&D money was spent creating a component for Microsoft to use against it."

It gets more absurd: IBM employees hiding their work from Sony and Toshiba engineers in cubicles next to them; the Xbox chip being tested a few floors above the Cell design teams; Microsoft, due to a problem with a first chip run and being smart enough to order backups from a third party in advance, ending up getting their chips six weeks before Sony.

The desingers state "Both Sony and Microsoft were extremely successful at achieving their goals," but the Journal's Jonathan V. Last writes while they "set the standard for technical virtuosity" (overdoing it, maybe?), Nintendo's Wii (the least technically powerful) is the leading console in sales by far.

Indeed, PS3 sales are down 19% from this time last year, while sales doubled for the Wii, and rose 8% for the Xbox 360. "The lesson," says Last, "lost on Mr. Shippy and Ms. Phipps, is that technical supremacy divorced from sound strategic vision is no virtue. It can even end up in disaster."

Now just to figure out how they managed to get this thing published...