Interestingly, the Xbox 360 (Xenon) CPU cores were based on the Power Processing Element (not the Synergistic Processing Elements) from the Cell processor.
From [0]:
"When the companies entered into their partnership in 2001, Sony, Toshiba and IBM committed themselves to spending $400 million over five years to design the Cell, not counting the millions of dollars it would take to build two production facilities for making the chip itself. IBM provided the bulk of the manpower, with the design team headquartered at its Austin, Texas, offices. Sony and Toshiba sent teams of engineers to Austin to live and work with their partners in an effort to have the Cell ready for the Playstation 3's target launch, Christmas 2005.
But a funny thing happened along the way: A new "partner" entered the picture. In late 2002, Microsoft approached IBM about making the chip for Microsoft's rival game console, the (as yet unnamed) Xbox 360. 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 video-game console competitor. The result was that Sony's R&D money was spent creating a component for Microsoft to use against it."
Sure, but the PPE was "just" an iteration on their existing PowerPC core line - that wasn't really the focus of the "unique" Cell changes in the first place.
If they just asked for a 3-core SMP version of a PowerPC and the Cell project never existed, I suggest it's likely it would still look very similar to what was released in the xbox. VMX already existed, POWER5 already had SMT.
I don't see there being a huge amount of new technology made for the Cell's PPE for the Xbox project to import in the first place.
> Sure, but the PPE was "just" an iteration on their existing PowerPC core line
I'm pretty sure the PPE was an entirely new core design. It used the PowerPC ISA and had features similar to earlier designs, but it was new. From [0]:
"although the central processor is based on IBM's PowerPC architecture, it's a new design, not an existing PowerPC core. Cell's central processor is similar to the current PowerPC 970 chip, although it's not an exact match. "
> If they just asked for a 3-core SMP version of a PowerPC and the Cell project never existed, I suggest it's likely it would still look very similar to what was released in the xbox. VMX already existed, POWER5 already had SMT.
I don't think at the time IBM had anything else that Microsoft could've used. It's PowerPC 7xx wouldn't have been an improvement (or not enough of one) over the Pentium 3 in the original X-Box. The PowerPC 970 was hot / power hungry - the dual-core models that Apple used requiring liquid cooling and weren't out until 2005.
The POWER5 with SMT was in development, but it was designed for IBM's servers and existing customer workloads. I don't know if it could've modified it to add another core, plus the VMX128 stuff that Microsoft needed, if IBM would've been willing to do that, or if that chip would've been too expensive for a console.
Interestingly, the Xbox 360 (Xenon) CPU cores were based on the Power Processing Element (not the Synergistic Processing Elements) from the Cell processor.
From [0]:
"When the companies entered into their partnership in 2001, Sony, Toshiba and IBM committed themselves to spending $400 million over five years to design the Cell, not counting the millions of dollars it would take to build two production facilities for making the chip itself. IBM provided the bulk of the manpower, with the design team headquartered at its Austin, Texas, offices. Sony and Toshiba sent teams of engineers to Austin to live and work with their partners in an effort to have the Cell ready for the Playstation 3's target launch, Christmas 2005.
But a funny thing happened along the way: A new "partner" entered the picture. In late 2002, Microsoft approached IBM about making the chip for Microsoft's rival game console, the (as yet unnamed) Xbox 360. 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 video-game console competitor. The result was that Sony's R&D money was spent creating a component for Microsoft to use against it."
( From the WSJ )
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20150129121858/http://www.wsj.co...