“The Race for a New Game Machine” book chronicles the Sony-Microsoft-IBM love triangle

Kahle and Shippy also had to deal with the derision of IBM’s server chip designers, who insisted their chips should be used in the game consoles. But Shippy laughed that off since he needed extremely high performance balanced with power efficiency. The server chips threw off 100 watts of power, while the game chips could tolerate 10 watts. Otherwise, the systems would need all sorts of expensive cooling systems, fans, and would still probably melt down your living room.

One of the enlightening technical details in the book dwells on an important issue for Microsoft. Very late in the game, Redmond’s engineers asked IBM to do what it could to support emulation, or the ability to run older Xbox games designed to run on the original Xbox with an Intel chip. In my own book, I wrote about how Microsoft went back and forth on this problem. Microsoft’s marketers discovered that a huge number of Halo 2 fans were playing the old game and were likely to continue playing the game online for a long time. That meant that the Xbox 360 had to be somehow compatible with the original Xbox games or Microsoft would anger its most loyal customers. IBM had to write some new instructions to support the emulation. Shippy says there were fights about adding this support, with IBM managers calling bullshit on each other. IBM could have added hardware support for emulation in the second round of debugging. But the company’s top ranks eventually quashed the idea as far too risky.

Amazingly, IBM’s engineers finished the Microsoft microprocessor in 11 months. Again, this was partly because Sony had commissioned work on the core years earlier. IBM finished both the Cell and Microsoft chips on time in September, 2004. But that just meant they were ready to go to the factory and could then begin months of revision and prototyping. IBM had to debug both chips at the same time. Some engineers didn’t realize that some of their bug fixes would actually benefit their rivals. The chips were similar enough that IBM could use a single team to debug both chips, though the engineers had to be careful how they applied fixes to each chip and be wary about spilling secrets from one chip to the other.

Sony’s game developers were at a huge disadvantage. Since there was nothing like the Cell out there, Sony couldn’t get the game developers started on making games until it had chip prototypes ready. Jim Kahle, on the other hand, suggested that Microsoft use the current PowerPC 970 microprocessors that were being designed for Apple as the prototypes for Microsoft’s game console. That’s why Apple wound up shipping a lot of its best desktop computers to Microsoft, which gave them to the game developers to use as development machines for Xbox 360 games. So Microsoft game developers had a year’s head start on the Sony game developers.

IBM was actually surprised that Microsoft exercised its contractual right of lining up a second source of microprocessors. It hired Singapore’s Chartered Semiconductor to make the IBM-designed chip and delivered chips to Microsoft a month earlier than IBM. Sony, meanwhile, had no such luck. It ran into delays for its chip at the factory and, as a result, Microsoft received working chips well before Sony did.

When IBM received the chips in January, 2005, a group of engineers gathered. The chip “had a heartbeat,” Shippy said, as if it were his own baby. When the engineers tried to boot the Windows kernel, or core software of the operating system, it hung. They called Dinarte Morais, a Microsoft engineer who almost single-handedly wrote the operating system for the Xbox 360 and debugged it over the phone as Morais was watching the Super Bowl. Then the chip booted properly. Shippy got to play the first game on the chip.

Sony’s first chips didn’t arrive until late February. In the middle of the night, the engineers got the Cell chip to boot and they celebrated with champagne. The PS 3 chips ran at over 5 gigahertz. The next day, as he stepped out of the elevator, Shippy realized he was in the elevator with representatives of Sony, Toshiba, Microsoft and IBM. A sign said, “Do not discuss confidential information in this area.”

But while the Sony-Toshiba-IBM Cell chip was done on time, a lot of debugging still had to be done. While some chips could run faster, others could not. So IBM scaled the speed of both the Xbox 360 and Sony chips to 3.2 gigahertz, rather than 4 gigahertz, to ensure that high quantities of acceptable chips could be made. On top of that, Sony made a conservative decision to shut off one of the eight vector cores on the Cell chip. That made the chips slower, but it ensured that the chip would be more manufacturable.

The Wall Street Journal article termed the Cell chip a disaster. But that just wasn’t true. Sony messed up for other reasons. The Cell chip came out on time and was almost ready for a launch. But it turned out other factors, such as Blu-ray and the graphics chip, held up Sony. The lesson wasn’t that Cell was a bad idea. After all, Cell is being used in more new products, from medical imaging systems to IBM supercomputers. Rather, Sony just tried to be an innovator on too many fronts and went a bridge too far. The PlayStation 3 was expensive not because of its expensive Cell chip, but because of the Blu-ray drive and other components that could really only be appreciated by audio visual freaks.

Nvidia had to come in at the last minute and create a graphics chip for the machine, because Sony’s engineers had failed to create a companion graphics chip. Shippy said that delayed the system. The other cause of the delay has been well documented: the specifications for making Blu-ray drives had been held up amid bickering with a variety of parties. Lastly, the software development tools were late, so game makers needed more time to make the launch games. Shippy and Phipps briefly discussed this at the end of the book. It was a huge blow to the chip teams when Sony announced a delay. As a result, the Sony PS 3 slipped by a year.

True to its history of risk taking, Microsoft authorized a manufacturing launch against the advice of IBM. It authorized the beginning of chip building even though the design wasn’t fully debugged in the labs. Shippy says it was typical of Microsoft’s attitude on shipping Windows, to get it to market first and worry about the bugs later. Akrout, the IBM senior vice president, pleaded for more time. But the holiday launch was at risk. The first chips came back in May, 2005. The gamble paid off, as the IBM chips coming out of the factory worked. Akrout, one of the stalwart executives on the projects, resigned in April, 2005, mainly due to politics. That shook Shippy to the core. But Akrout landed safely at Advanced Micro Devices.

The Cell and Microsoft microprocessors were huge undertakings that generated more than 500 patents along the way. Sony’s mistakes have cost it huge market share losses in games. Nintendo has taken the No. 1 spot thanks to its unusual motion-sensor-based controller design for the Wii, but Microsoft has moved into the No. 2 spot and Sony is a distant third. Sony has had to scale down its business, cut a lot of game developers, and it sold off its chip manufacturing operations to Toshiba. Kutaragi lost his chance to be CEO of Sony because of the turnabout, and he retired after 30 years at Sony.

Phipps left IBM first, and then Shippy left in early 2006, after all the work was done, to rejoin the chip start-up Intrinsity. Their work was done. Shippy said he wanted a smaller design team, less bureaucracy, shorter schedules and a smaller company environment.

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s culture of risk-taking ran aground as defects known as “the Red Ring of Death” brought down one Xbox 360 after another. (See our series on the Xbox 360 defects here.) The problem was mostly in the hot graphics chip that ATI made and how it was attached to the main circuit board. But Shippy wasn’t enlisted to help fight that fire. So much so that he declined to comment on it when I asked.

Looking forward, Shippy believes it is inevitable that both Sony and Microsoft will try to reduce costs by combining the two critical chips -– microprocessor and graphics -– into one. That’s what Sony eventually did with the PlayStation 2. But that’s not an easy task, and it means that warring companies will have to work together. IBM and Nvidia, for instance, would have to work together to combine the Cell chip and the graphics processor for the PS 3 into one chip. For the next generation, Shippy believes that by 2011 or so the companies will likely launch a new round of game consoles. Those machines are likely to combine microprocessors and graphics chips in the same machine right off the bat. The chips in those machines will have somewhat faster frequencies, but the big performance boost will come from having lots of cores working in parallel on the same chip. AMD says it is doing just that with its Fusion chip project, and I have no doubt that someone like Akrout would try to get it into the PlayStation 4 or the next Xbox machine. It’s going to be a lot of fun to watch. In the meantime, it would be nice if Shippy’s confessional book triggered similar stories from the other players.

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