... says the Wall-Street Journal :

"The Race for a New Game Machine," by IBM engineers David Shippy and Mickie Phipps, details how research conducted for Sony's Cell processor--used in the PlayStation 3--ended up directly benefiting the development of Micorosft's Xbox 360 chip."

http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/56574

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123069467545545011.html

The book seems interesting ..

"They also describe how the project went off the rails, ending up with IBM engineers creating the processing chips for two rival videogame consoles and, along the way, delivering to Sony Corp. one of its greatest business failures."

"So Microsoft actually got the chip that Sony helped design before Sony did. In the end, Microsoft's Xbox 360 hit its target launch in November 2005, becoming its own success. Because of various delays, the Playstation 3 was pushed back a full year."

"For Sony, the Cell processor was such a debacle that two weeks after the Playstation 3 finally appeared in stores, the company fired Ken Kutaragi, the head of its gaming unit, who had championed the Cell and built the Playstation line."

Confirmed, M$ can't design anything on there own. They steal or buy everything.
Hey, what ever works, I guess...

IBM really screwed Sony over. With partners like that, who needs enemies?

Not only did IBM give key research to MS, they also delayed production of the cell chip.

IBM made Nintendo's processor too, didn't they? They're the industry's most powerful player.

IBM is not know for being the most honest company on the market (I worked with those guys for two years).

But here, it goes a bit too far... I'll order the book and read it

http://www.vgchartz.com/forum/thread.php?id=55133

To quote a Cell expert friend:

"Unfortunately it appears the WSJ has blown the story out of all proportion.

The PPE in Cell is similar to the cores in the 360's processor but this is based on a respin of an existing PPC research design (nothing to do with the POWER4 or the G5). It appears this was offered to MS but it was always IBM's to offer, it's not the same as offering Cell."

And to quote myself in response:

"Agreed, the Cell is very different. Core at its design is IMO really the approach to have each SPE be its own system on a chip with fast dedicated system memory and how data is being moved around the Cell's EIB ring.

IMO the bulk of R&D went into the SPEs and not really into the PPE processor itself. The Cell's strength really lies in how it's all designed to work together, rather just the sum of parts."

The Xenon is a 3 core processor, the PS3 Cell has 8 processors on 1 chip. The overall design is very different, despite some similarities.

The Cell also fits very differently in the PS3 design as a whole, the Cell has low latency XDR Ram to take advantage of through a dedicated bus. The Xenon has to share higher latency main memory access with the Xenos and has to share its L2 cache with all 3 cores. The RSX depends on the Cell to unlock its full potential, the Xenon rather fights for resources with the Xenos for full potential.

The PS3 also indirectly benefits from the 360 using PPC technology.

The article didn't say the chips were identical. It says that the research paid by Sony was used for development. The chips don't need to be the same to make use of the research.

Assuming this happened, I don't see a reason to blame IBM for it.

If there was no exclusivity contract or NDA, IBM is free to use its research for whatever purposes it desires. Why would IBM engineers be separately reinventing the wheel instead of sharing data to increase efficiency?

Additionally, as MikeB said the Cell's PPE and the 360's cores are not very research-heavy. They're basically evolutions of previously existing cores, so I don't see the big deal with this.

PS: This has already been discussed in the thread I linked to before...