Sony's expensive Cell chip development with IBM helped Microsoft when Microsoft went to IBM for its Xbox 360 chip, according to a piece in The Wall Street Journal: How Sony inadvertently helped a competitor and lost position in the videogame market. It's based on a book published today: The Race for a New Game Machine by David Shippy and Mickie Phipps (Citadel, 240 pages, $21.95). The story says:

In 2003, IBM's Adam Bennett showed Microsoft specs for the still-in-development Cell core. Microsoft was interested and contracted with IBM for their own chip, to be built around the core that IBM was still building with Sony.

All three of the original partners had agreed that IBM would eventually sell the Cell to other clients. 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.





It's not clear which bits the author has in mind, since the Xbox 360 chip is based on IBM's PowerPC architecture. The only logical conclusion is that the Cell is also based on the IBM PowerPC architecture. Anyway, I'm not going to argue with Shippy. IBM's Introduction to the Cell multiprocessor says:

He was one of the lead architects for the POWER2*, G3 PowerPC, and POWER4* processor designs. He is currently the chief architect for the power processing unit for the Cell processor. Mr Shippy holds numerous patents, has received an IBM Tenth Plateau Invention Achievement Award, and has been recognized as an IBM Master Inventor.

The WSJ story concludes:

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. The lesson, 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.

Well, the PlayStation 3 was a debacle in other respects, too: even if the Cell chip had been ready earlier, Sony would still have been waiting for Blu-ray development, and the system was launched before the Blu-ray software specification was finished.