Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I found the subject material of the book interesting, but I felt that the book could have been so much more. I came away from this with a feeling that Shippy wasn't sure what he wanted from the book and because of that it lacked a particular focus.

My negativity is mostly because I see a lot of potential in the telling of this story and just don't think the book is as strong as it could be. That said its worth reading if you are interested in the histories behind any of these systems or the chips themselves.

Personally I would have preferred the book have a little more focus. There wasn't a lot of technical detail in the book, or detail about business processes or any of the steps involved in the development of these CPUs. It felt more like a conversation that you might have over a long lunch. It left me wanting more.

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

After reading The Xbox 360 Uncloaked:: The Real Story Behind Microsoft's Next-Generation Video Game Console I was looking forward to an in-depth summary of the creation of the CPUs for the 360 and PS3. Ultimately Dean Takahashi's book is far superior, which is unfortunate.

The problem with this book is the tone - the author can't seem to decide if he wants to pitch it as a novel or a non-fiction book, and whether he's aiming at a technical audience or laymen. I understood some of the CPU jargon used only because of my electrical engineering degree, while at times he tried to use comparisons to cartoons like Road Runner to explain complicated concepts. It was very jarring.

It's a shame because this book has a lot of potential and there is a lot of interesting info in it. I think it may have been more successful if the authors had partnered with a journalist to write this. Another good example of a book I read recently that did a better job of capturing the race to market for a complicated technical product was Showstopper, which detailed the creation of Windows NT and is still a fantastic read almost 20 years later.

This book covers the behind-the-scenes development of the PS3 and XBOX 360 CPU. The book seems to be targeted towards business professionals rather than the technology oriented reader. Much of the book is focused on the interpersonal relationships between various team members and management. However, I found the book interesting because it gives the reader a glimpse into the world of CPU development. The reader gets a good high-level understanding of the huge complexity involved in the design, testing and manufacturing of a CPU.
This is not a book about game development or gaming hardware.

"The Race for a New Game Machine" was mainly a tale of lunches and other minor details. It failed to provide either a useful business or engineering overview for readers interested in those perspectives. It did, however, reveal both an appalling lack of business ethics within IBM and very poor human resource management.

The project began in 2001 as a partnership between IBM (lead designer), Sony (customer, and major supplier of video management hardware), and Toshiba (intended large-scale manufacturer) with the intent of creating a new chip for Sony's PlayStation 3 that would be faster and provide more realistic games. About two years into the $400 million project, however, IBM agreed to let Microsoft (Sony's main competitor) also use the chip, with modifications. Microsoft ended up bringing its new XBox 360 to market ahead of Sony, partly due to IBM's bungling the early fabrication testing and development, and partly due to Microsoft's having a backup hardware source and being willing to gamble on introduction without thorough testing.

Shippy easily convinces readers that the hardware design team worked quite hard, including an extended stretch of 80+ hour weeks, but provides no real sense of how difficult their tasks were. Their motivation to meet the deadlines and performance goals was a mix of professional pride and personal reward - but Shippy never tells readers what (if any) those ultimate rewards were.

One very real tragedy is that a number of key players left soon afterward completion (or before), so I'm guessing there were no motivating stock option awards given. Stories of occasional inexcusable IBM management outbursts also left me shaking my head.

The second tragedy is the damage done to IBM's credibility - allowing Microsoft to jump on-board a half-finished project initiated and funded by its primary competitor in that market, and even beat Sony to market.

Bottom Line: I recommend Shippy's book, but only to top IBM management - they could learn a lot from it.

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.

not necessarily essential; too limited in that it was just Shippy's viewpoint and a rather cursory overview of the process that didn't go into technical details that much. I could summarize the book in about 4 sentences and you wouldn't have to read it.

But it's a good grounding into what real engineering on deathmarch projects are like, albeit not half as engrossing as eg. "Renegades of the Empire" (how DirectX was created within Microsoft) or Dean Takehashi's "Opening the Xbox".

A proper 3rd-person work with interviews with the other two thirds of the STI team would make twice as good a story of the development..

Disappointingly, Shippy didn't divulge exactly when & how Apple decided to dump the PPC, though he hints at it a couple of times, nor did he particularly explain that big shipment of PowerMac G5s that were infamously posted to the web during Xenon development.

The author spoke of the situation like it was truly grand in scope and size and yet, you only get a single persons point of view. I only got about 2/3 of the way through the book before giving up on it. Truly disappointing. A very interesting subject that basically boiled down to one person flaunting their accomplishments and talking about parties.

I so wanted to read the book and walk away reminiscing the days of the console wars heating up in the early 2000s with more knowledge into the details of the actual chip design.

Instead, I left feeling belittled because I didn't meet the expectations of the author who in turn fishes for a book that really has no place. The discussions about technical issues in chip design only get a single paragraph yet there are pages and chapters entirely devoted to office politics and IBM culture.

Also, if you're a die-hard gamer who wanted to see the console wars from the inside, you really may be dismayed at the entire book because it doesn't nothing to compare the talking points of the community at large before and after these products ships and does more to make you pick sides according to which corporate mantra you want to buy in. I didn't leave any the wiser understanding any of the choices made, I just felt constantly berated of how not many people are good enough to do what they did when from my perspective it blows my mind for how BAD they were at understanding the gaming industry and it's a miracle they got anything to work..

Yet years later, a lot of what they discuss in this book did little to grow the gaming industry beyond what it was before these chips were designed. Prettier graphics owe more to GPU design than CPU and IBM has missed the mark on GPU and GPGPU consolidation and even Intel and AMD which they harp on continually as not good enough have surpassed these CPU's much quicker than these designers give credit with not only more scalable chips, but lower power ratings and after multi-threading and far far superior graphics chips. Of course with the latest releases of PS3 and Xbox slims IBM has done some work to shrink the chip and incorporate GPU on the same die, but in hindsight, maybe if they did that in 2001 with a little more effort in integration rather then re-writing from the ground up they would have saved Microsoft a few billion in write-offs for RROD and allowed MS and Sony to introduce cooler designs from the get go.

Plus, by all intents and purposes the PS3 has been a colossal failure in doing anything but being a PS3 CPU and that CPU was supposed to take over the world according to the first 4 chapters of this book. Sure, selling 50 million PS3s is great, but ARM, AMD and Intel CPUs wipe 50 million units on the floor and again, they were belittled and ignored entirely in this book.

Perhaps i should have just read it from the eyes of a teenager, but even then, it just does enough to confuse anyone. Its much better as a mid level IBM manager book wanting to know how to play the corporate game than it is a book for die hard geeks to understand the real internal design decisions of the console CPU with any meaning to increase your own knowledge.

very insightful peek into how processors are designed and made and how the current crop of consoles came to exist.