Xbox 360 benefited from Cell processor?

The Wall Street Journal has written an article on the new book The Race for a New Game Machine written by David Shippy and Mickie Phipps, which claims Microsoft was able to benefit from the processor's development.
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Sony partnered with Toshiba and IBM to develop a processor oriented towards multimedia tasks and software, and the three companies began development of the Cell processor in 2001, to be completed for the PlayStation 3's scheduled launch of Christmas 2005.

In 2002, Microsoft approached IBM to develop a processor for its next-generation console (Xbox 360). IBM's Adam Bennet showed Microsoft the specifications they developed for the Cell processor's core, still in development, and in 2003 Microsoft contracted with IBM for a similar processor.

All three companies agreed IBM would be given the rights to manufacture and distribute the processor. Apparently Sony made no specifics upon their use of the processor during production, and didn't anticipate IBM would sell their parts of the processor during its development, certainly not to Microsoft for its own game machine.

Development of the two processors were so close, in fact, that Shippy and Phipps discussed how they had to hide their additional work from the other two companies working on the Cell, whose co-workers might have been sitting in the cubicle across from Cell's developers. Shippy in particular says he felt "contaminated" using the stuff he learned from the Cell's development on the core processor for Microsoft's next machine, claiming "Sony's R&D money was spent creating a component for Microsoft to use against it."

On top of that, despite how the designs for both processors were completed on time, Sony got its chips 6 weeks after Microsoft. This is because Microsoft hired a third-party chip manufacturer to handle their large demand of chips, which provided the company chips. Sony, on the other hand, stuck with IBM and had to wait another six weeks before the next batch was made.

Information on the book's contents came from the WSJ's summary, and leave out a lot of technical detail, most important of which is the type of parts of the Cell used in the Xbox 360's processor. The authors are credible: both Shippy and Phipps worked on the Cell's architecture, with Shippy acting as the core's chief architect. Shippy was also the lead architect behind previous designs of IBM's PowerPC architecture. None of the information Microsoft or Sony has distributed about their machines' processors could validate the claims made by this book, though both processors did involve IBM's PowerPC architecture.

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BY Christopher Pioli
Source：GAMESAREFUN