Name: The Race For a New Game Machine
ISBN: 9780806533728

The Race For a New Game Machine

"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 Sony."Drama and secret deals... This is the real deal."—Bob Molyneaux, ChipBridgeHere is a dazzling, behind-the-scenes account of life in the tech world, featuring memorable characters, high-level corporate intrigue, and cutthroat business dealings. It's a story that's never been told—until now."The real story of a team of people tasked with doing the impossible."—John C. Beck, author of Got Game"Remarkable...fascinating."—Dean Takahashi, author of Opening the Xbox"The story of the whole effort to build the Cell."—The Wall Street Journal

What Hacker News says

rickdeckardMar 2025

Regardless of the D3D-like API-layer (which helped Microsoft compensate for the peculiarities of PowerPC), they're both PowerPC architectures.

You apparently don't know the Story how Sony spent big R&D-money with IBM to transition from MIPS to the custom PowerPC Cell Architecture, while IBM was already selling parts of this development to 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...

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kevvokJun 2024

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.

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monocasaJun 2022

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.

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protomythJun 2020

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 for Apple to ditch PowerPC.

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jawnv6Jan 2020

"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.

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monocasaJan 2020

I have a category on my bookshelf of semi humourous memoirs of engineering projects.

The two classics are:

Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman, about the Manhattan 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.

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