drkohler said:
I'm not convinced that either Sony followed MS or MS followed Sony. I can very well imagine a scenario where neither Sony nor MS knew the other guy's path. We would have to know what happened three to four years ago in upper management, when development cycles started in earnest for next gen consoles. At that time, MS was on the PPC path, Sony was on an unsure path (continue expensive cell development basically on its own, or do else..). At that very time, AMD was starting to develop and tout its new processor architecture "that will bury anything on the market now and in the future" to anyone willing or even unwilling to hear it. I can very well see that both MS and Sony switched to AMD after hearing and accepting AMD's plans independantly, without knowing of the competitor's decision for quite a while. |
Yep, in fact, rather than Sony following MS, or the opposite, I was imagining instead devs pushing Sony basing themselves on what they already knew, under NDA, about MS, so not revealing why, but following their own interest anyway.
AMD boasting could have persuaded devs, and MS too, that isn't a CPU maker, but I have some doubts it could also persuade Sony, that actually has experience in that field and co-developed Cell with IBM. Without further pressure from devs towards x64, but just their hate for SPEs, the most sensible choice for Sony would have been dropping SPEs and switching to plain and simple multicore Power.
BTW, I always used AMD CPUs, I like them and I wish it the best luck, but as good as they can be all x64 CPUs suffer from the original sin of having to waste resources for Wintel BC.
