The Race For a New Game Machine
by David Shippy · first published 2010
83% recommend17% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Insider account of designing the Cell and Xenon chips behind the PS3 and Xbox 360, written by IBM chip designers; appeals to readers interested in processor engineering and how big hardware projects unfold.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
"A fast-paced tell-all...one of the great business stories of our young century."—Steve Cherry, IEEE Spectrum MagazineThe Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 game systems have changed the face of home entertainment. But few know the amazing story inside the consoles—how David Shippy and his team of engineers at the Sony/Toshiba/IBM Design Center (STI) forged the tiny miracle at the core of it all: a revolutionary microprocessor chip that set a new paradigm in personal computing. At stake were the livelihoods—and sanity—of an unsung group of tireless visionaries. At war were the giants Microsoft and Son
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The book "The Race For A New Game Machine: Creating the Chips Inside the XBox and the Playstation 3" by David Shippy has some commentary on Apple with their relationship with IBM and the Cell. It's an interesting book and gives some reasons…
on “Why Apple ditched PowerPC, and what it says about Apple ditching Intel” ↗…Microsoft for Xbox 360, and Microsoft ultimately beating Sony in market-launch with a chipset Sony partially financed...[0] There's a nice book about it from two of the IBM Chip-Designers called "The Race for a New Game Machine" by David Shippy and Mickie Phipps [0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2009/jan/01/sony...
on “Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor Part 2: The Bad Update Exploit” ↗"The Race for a New Game Machine"[1] is a pretty good read on the development of the Cell and Xenon[2] processors. Giving up the out-of-order seems like a really bad decision and the internal fighting at IBM, if accurate, is really…
on “Cell (microprocessor)” ↗…project and other places he ended up. And Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine, about the engineering effort behind the Data General Nova. This one literally has a Pulitzer. I also enjoyed The Race for a New Game Machine, but not as much as the above books.
on “Ask HN: What are more books like “Masters of Doom” or “Showstoppers”?” ↗"What the Dormouse Said" is a classic, highly recommended. Much more niche is "Race for a New Game Machine," highlighting the IBM design team responsible for the chips powering the Xbox 360 and PS3.
on “Ask HN: What are more books like “Masters of Doom” or “Showstoppers”?” ↗I know that the Xenon was being simultaneously taped out with the Cell PPE, so it doesn't derive from another cell derived core. The book "The Race for a New Game Machine" goes over the timing pretty well.
on “Xbox 360 Architecture” ↗There’s a great book about the development of Cell and Xenon (which went into the Xbox 360) called “The Race for a New Game Machine” that was co-written by a couple folks who worked on them at IBM.
on “AMD CEO Lisa Su reminisces about designing the PS3's infamous Cell processor” ↗There is a counter argument in the book "The Race for a New Game Machine" that makes the case that the early release was a key factor in passing the PS3. If next XBox holds on, it will be money well spent.
on “CEOs Who Should Have Already Been Fired” ↗Apple and assumed they were the driving force behind it's use Quite the opposite. Apple, according to the book The Race for a New Game Machine, was an unprofitable demanding customer. The scale of the XBox 360 and PS3 dwarfed Apple's usage and IBM made several decisions that were contrary to Apple's needs. PowerPC for the embedded market has…
on “Apple Hires Key Chip Designer From ARM as Own Efforts Ramp Up” ↗…was also part of that last minute change after the dual Cell design didn't work out. The Nvidia talks happened sort of in parallel, but that was the last option. I want to say it's mentioned in The Race For A New Game Machine too, but I'm not 100% on that.
on “Playstation 3 Architecture” ↗Yeah, but it had some performance issues. The 970 was such a bummer. I read the book The Race for a New Game Machine, and the crap show around Apple, the 970, and especially the Cell was just so infuriating.
on “The Worst CPUs Ever Made (2021)” ↗"The Race for a New Game Machine" is an interesting book on the development of Cell, if the author comes off a little annoying at times. It was a neat idea to offload certain operations to the SPEs (glorified vector processors) but they…
on “Sega Saturn Architecture – A practical analysis (2021)” ↗…Architecture breakdown [0]) that IBM using the Cell PPE for the 360's tri-cores left a sour taste in Toshiba, but more-so Sony's mouths. It's more than a theory. It's pretty much spelled out explicitly in The Race For A New Game Machine how salty not just Sony and Toshiba were in the broad sense, but also the Sony and Toshiba engineers that the IBM team worked with felt pretty betrayed.
on “IBM Unveils Next Generation Dual-Architecture Processor for IBM Z and LinuxONE” ↗