Reddit reviews The Race for a New Game Machine: Creating the Chips Inside the XBox 360 and the Playstation 3
We found 2 Reddit comments about The Race for a New Game Machine: Creating the Chips Inside the XBox 360 and the Playstation 3. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Used Book in Good Condition
The Cell processor is incredibly powerful for certain types of operations, and the type of processing games require is not necesarilly one of them. The PS3 was really not designed for game developers, it was designed so that Sony could say it had the most powerful hardware on the market. DigitalFoundry actually goes over some of this history in their DF Retro on the Sony E3 conference the PS3 was revealed in, but basically there were many engineers at Sony thought fought against the idea of using this Cell processor in favor of something more developer friendly and ultimately failed.
Sony and Microsoft moved to x86 this past generation though because 1) it's way cheaper than paying for R&D on something totally new and different (Sony ate it big time during the PS3-gen for that, there's a couple of really great books about that time) and 2) video games have been designed for x86 processors for the past 2+ decades on PC so there is a wealth of resources available to designers and programmers.
It was primarily gaming, with other use cases being an afterthought. Most of the bad decisions came down to Ken Kutaragi.
One of the engineers behind the PPC core used in the Cell and Xenon wrote a book on it (interesting tidbits but meh):
The Race for a New Game Machine: Creating the Chips Inside the XBox 360 and the Playstation 3 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0806531010/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_IrEYDb75CB92V