Why Did Sony,MS and N All Use IBM
- Thread starter MillerMan
- Start date
Martin Eddy
Regular
MillerMan said:
AFAIK price is the reason. IBM had a lot of idle FAB space. The idea being better to be producing a lot of chips at a small margin than producing no chips at all.
AMD can't produce enough chips for their own needs let alone produce a custom design chip for somebody else.
As for INTEL I'm sure they have the capacity to produce enough chips, but with they're track record as of late, i.e. Prescott who would want to put one of their CPU's inside a small closed box that is a console?
MillerMan said:
There are actually very few choices if you want to build a high performance embedded system. And even less if you want to own the mask at somepoint.
Used to be Mips was your only real option, now it's pretty much IBM.
Intel is an expensive choice because the processors require significant support logic, and more importantly, you don't own the mask so you can't later integrate the processor with other logic to reduce costs.
Martin Eddy
Regular
Alstrong said:er.....what about Centrino or even it's multi-core successor?
True, but we're talking about 4 years ago that initial talks began.
CosmoKramer
Newcomer
madmartyau said:
..at which time Prescott was not for sale.
madmartyau said:
Correct, except that Intel iirc was initially seeking the 360 contract & was simply underbid by IBM's more than generously competetive prices. According to an IBM rep, they wanted to help subsidize their design & exhorbitant costs & R&D for their supercomputers. I would say that a monopoly on next-gen consoles across the board could help to accomplish this.
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This is probably because IBM offers much better deals:
a much lower price for a much more games oriented design(although much less developpers friendly) as well as the ownerchip for the games company.
Personnaly i would have prefered that MS went for 2 distincts C.P.U:
*An Intel low power chip for A.I,game logic and backward compatibiliy
*A custom IBM chip for physics,animation and procedural synthesis
but it seems that MS is quite concerned(much more than Sony apparently) about the cost of XBox 360.
a much lower price for a much more games oriented design(although much less developpers friendly) as well as the ownerchip for the games company.
Personnaly i would have prefered that MS went for 2 distincts C.P.U:
*An Intel low power chip for A.I,game logic and backward compatibiliy
*A custom IBM chip for physics,animation and procedural synthesis
but it seems that MS is quite concerned(much more than Sony apparently) about the cost of XBox 360.
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