Nintendo and Microsoft signs up for Cell?

Report claims Nintendo and Microsoft have signed up for the brains behind the PS3.

According to a report, Karl Freund, vice president for product marketing for System p, outlined what IBM, one of Nintendo's close hardware parnets, is heading towards in the future at a recent IBM event in Thailand.

Freund expressed his belief that PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii all offer tremendous innovation, and apparently stated that all three console manufacturers have signed up to use the new Power-based Cell CPU.

Cell is the much-paraded CPU behind Sony's forthcoming console and is the result of a joint venture between Sony, IBM and Toshiba. Details are very sketchy, so stay tuned for any developments.

[THWIP]

What kind of moron thinks MS would use Cell in ANY of it's products? That's the dumbest thing I've ever read ; and, I seriously doubt Nintendo would go that route either.

[BIadestarX]

Microsoft it's already working on their own hardware for their next console. About Nintendo... They would never add expensive hardware to any of their console, since their goal is to be profitable from day 1. All this companies (including Sony) should try to do what microsoft is doing (building their own hardware) in order to reduce cost. Microsoft learned their lesson with the first xbox and even more with the 360. The secret to reduce cost is not not have to play royalties and licenses to other companies specially if the company has the capabilities of doing it themselves.

[eques judicii]

i could see microsoft talking with IBM about using cell in the NEXT xbox... y'know, once all the kinks and manufacturing issues are worked out. As to bladestar, i don't think that microsoft should make their own hardware... I like them as a software company because then they can only be a horizontal monopoly... would really suck if they got vertical acquisition of the market (would they be called microhard?)

[BIadestarX]

I agree as to not wanting microsoft to become a competitor for Pentium, ATI, IBM, and other companies in the PC industry. But consumers can benefit from microsoft not having to buy the hardware from other vendors. If I could buy the next xbox for 30% less, and can force other companies like Sony to lower the price. As a gamer I am up for it. The xbox is a propietary piece of technology if microsoft create the hardware (only) for the next xbox; how is this monopolizing? Also, why is ok for companies like Sony to be involved in the CELL, Blu-ray and not for microsoft to make their own processor for their own device? very interesting..

[kmis87]

Anyone think it's strange that Toshiba makes money on every ps3 sold because of the cell, but they would like them to sell poorly because it would hurt hddvd to sell a lot of ps3's? Sony and Toshiba really should have made a hybrid format instead of doing the whole format wars thing.

[Razzy]

Quite a conflict of interests going on there. I don't know how they could finally agree on the Cell specs but be so far apart on a unified HD-Disk format.

[THE TRUTH]

Sony is in the cell technology along with toshiba and IBM so when you say things like "other" companies should follow MS, its obvious that its MS doing the following in this case!

Sony paid the money (reportedly 400 million) along with these others companies, I don't see MS putting money in Sonys pocket, EVER! Nintendo, um maybe next generation when the price is much lower and by that time technology will have surpased cell. So its not out of the question but it does seem alittle far fetched! Cell is a monster of a CPU though um interested to see the next generation of cell technology!

[BIadestarX]

I agree with you about the Cell, I believe it will be a great piece of technology that will change how other companies like UMD and Pentium should move next. I don't see the cell being as the only CPU in the world; since it is not practical for all applications. Just remember that the Cell was not designed solely to be used for games, it is a general CPU in order to be flexible enough to work in multiple devices.
Which is why I am also very interested to see how would Hardware design for the sole purpose of gaming would be like. Would microsoft add independant physics processors (like some video cards are planning to)?
It is interesting how the xbox 360 was customize specifically for a game console:
• Three symmetrical cores running at 3.2 GHz each
• Two hardware threads per core; six hardware threads total
• VMX-128 vector unit per core; three total
• 128 VMX-128 registers per hardware thread
• 1 MB L2 cache
• 500MHz processor
• 10 MB of embedded DRAM
• 48-way parallel floating-point dynamically scheduled shader pipelines
• Unified shader architecture
Yet, I'm sure that by making their own hardware they would have go even more.
I am under no circustances putting the Cell down, it is great!, but it is only obvious that hardware designed for an specific purpose in mind may very well perform better than a general purpose hardware. An example of this is, PC video cards, which one is better for games? one designed for games or a generic one?

[power of Green]

BS, MS has the money to design all their hardware to their needs. The Cell would limmit their vision.