Could Sony have the ground for a major industrial Lawsuit vs Microsoft and IBM?

[androvsky]

Originally Posted by Elandyll

http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/01/b...crosoft-borro/



I find those details sick (if true), but not quite out of character for the love-hate relationship that have Microsoft and IBM.

Engadget's summary of the story is much more inflammatory than it needs to be.

Sony agreed to let Microsoft not only see early prototypes of Cell, but purchase components as well. "All three of the original partners had agreed that IBM would eventually sell the Cell to other clients. But it does not seem to have occurred to Sony that IBM would sell key parts of the Cell before it was complete and to Sony's primary videogame-console competitor.

The story dances around the fact that the part of the Cell that Microsoft ended up buying is by far the worst part of the design. It's a purposefully stripped down CPU, meant to be propped up by the SPU cores for important tasks. All the 360 has is three of the stripped-down CPU cores, which aren't even as fast as a real PPC at half the clock speed. Okay, so some of that speed could be recovered with a good compiler, but the point I'm trying to make is that MS really didn't benefit that much.