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

by David Shippy (Author), Mickie Phipps (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 (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #230,374 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 9 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

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars It was too limited in scope, March 9, 2009

By	A. Barboza - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good, but could have been better, February 4, 2009

By	C. W. Kraft (Milwaukee, WI) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.