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Message: <blockquote data-quote="drothgery" data-source="post: 2818062" data-attributes="member: 360">It depends what Intel, AMD, and IBM Microelectronics were offering MS. I'm a lot less concerned about owning all the IP, and about making the system unusual (and therefore hard to hack) than Microsoft was. I also think that MS overestimated the importance of being first to market; I wouldn't have launched the 360 last year, when it was clear neither Sony or Nintendo would (in fact, they're only launching consoles this year because MS did last year; otherwise we'd see the PS3 in 2007, when it almost makes sense to launch a console with a Blu-Ray drive). Heck, I'd've made sure Halo 3 and KotOR 3 were launch titles.But I'd bet that the best thing IBM could make for a console last year that would be a tweaked PPC970FX (the low-power G5, seen in the last PowerPC iMacs). Single core, but with an excellent vector unit. The dual-core version costs too much and uses too much power for a console. Intel could have provided a tweaked Pentium M "Dothan", or possibly two of them for conventional SMP (the Pentium 4 is too power-hungry for a console; the Pentium D is right out); AMD could have provided a tweaked Athlon 64 (though not an X2; too expensive).Cost, cost, and cost. The Wii's strongly rumored to be launching at under $200, and Nintendo has never taken a loss on hardware.I think I explained above why the Cell's terrible for games, except to add that asymetric multiprocessing on the Cell is even harder to do well than symetric multiprocessing on the Xenon or standard dual-core CPUs, that the Cell's SPEs just aren't good for all that much. When Sony was intending to use two Cells in the PS3, and not have a dedicated GPU, they were halfway decent for processing graphics -- but nowhere near as good as ATi and nVidia's dedicated hardware, which was why they had to scramble and sign on nVidia at the last minute.Because it's launching in 2006, not 2005, IBM could probably make a dual-core G5 that fit in a console's power envelope. AMD's costs for Athlon 64 X2s are lower now than they were last year. Intel could provide a Core Duo (a Core 2 Duo would be excellent, but they're launching in the next month or two and will still be too expensive by conventional console economics in November).</blockquote>

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