The Race for a New Game Machine: Creating the Chips Inside the XBox 360 and the Playstation 3 (Hardcover)

~ David Shippy (Author), (Author)
Key Phrases: new game machine, server group, six gigahertz, Design Center, Jim Kahle, Chekib Akrout (more...)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Citadel; 1st edition (January 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0806531010
• ISBN-13: 978-0806531014
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #361,167 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Smoke salesman, March 8, 2009

By	S. ragno - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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The possible approaches in writing a book like this could have been 2: a technical focus or a business-management focus.
The author fails in both respects, skipping over the technical details and showing little knowledge of business aspects.
The book runs for more than 200 pages of which 190 are "smoke" , filled with poor analogies, boring details about meals and parties, useless corporate jargon.
It makes appear as if designing a complex chip is just a matter of some project manager meetings, avoiding any specific or large-scale electronic manufacturing process description.
Also, why the author doesn't include any drawing in the book ?
After all an "architect" , both civil or electronic, should have used them heavily to help during the project.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Worst-written book I've read in Years, March 21, 2009

By	Totoro "Totoro" (USA) - See all my reviews

The subject matter of this book is fascinating. Having followed the development of the Power PC chips for years, I was looking forward to some insight into the world behind IBM's microprocessor development.

This book is poor on so many levels, yet I will focus on one. The writing. Written in first-person as if it were a dime-store detective novel (not a compliment), I had to suffer through puerile descriptions of how the "author" (he had a writer "help" him): "growled through gritted teeth", and "slapped my hand on the table". Do people really talk like this? No, they don't. And they really shouldn't write like this either.

My best guess is that the book was only about 50 pages after the first draft, and they were faced with a choice:

1. Beef up the book with fascinating technical details or interviews with industry folks.

2. Pad this sloppy prose with fluff.

They went with option 2. It really reads like they were getting paid by the word. Shame on the editor. Stuff like this should never make it to print.

Shame is, there are several *really* good books on technology and video games: "Game Over", "The Last Quarter", "The Cuckoo's Egg", etc. The author even mentions "The Soul of a New Machine" in the preface. You'd think having read that book they would be ashamed to publish the tripe they produced.

7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars no style, no substance...disappointing, February 15, 2009

By	mark daly (baltimore, md) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

i had high expectations of this book, but in trying to appeal to a wider market, the authors watered down any substance.

*focused on trivial interpersonal details instead of engineering problems
*many analogies designed to make book more accessible for non-technical folks were too simplistic and sometimes even wrong
*manic dual-author style often jumps illogically between criticism and praise for the same person's behavior within pages
*lots of repetition of the same ideas
*business statistics about volumes/sales were implicitly only north american, which is ridiculous considering the global nature of the products discussed
*breezed over the radical PS3 hardware redesign that caused sony to launch a full year later than microsoft
*didn't discuss the hot-button topic of unprecedented 360 hardware failures, despite being written so long after-the-fact
*virtually ignored nintendo, despite the wii cpu also being an IBM chip