Exclusive: The Xbox 360 Uncloaked - Page 2
- May 08, 2006 17:34 PM PST
- Email this!
It was already late to start planning the next generation. Little did the Mountain View team know, but they were again almost two years behind their counterparts at Sony, IBM and Toshiba. In early 2000, a group of five Sony engineers sat down with five IBM engineers in Austin, Texas. They started drawing up plans to create a new custom chip for the PlayStation 3. Michael Gschwind, an IBM engineer who attended the meeting, said they began the architecture of what they would eventually call the "Cell" microprocessor. It was going to be something monumental. In contrast to hot rods such as the fastest Intel microprocessors, it wouldn't have just a single engine for getting tasks done in a serial fashion. It was more akin to bees working in a hive together, said Jim Kahle, the IBM chief architect behind the idea for Cell.
Sony didn't announce until March, 2001, that it had created an alliance with IBM and Toshiba to develop Cell chips for use in a wide variety of systems, including the next-generation video game platform. As it had with the PlayStation 2, Sony was going full custom with the microprocessor and many of the innards for the PlayStation 3. Toshiba was exploring options to craft a graphics chip from the ground up to go with the Cell microprocessor. That meant that Sony was prepared to spend billions of dollars on its engineering teams and the factories for building its systems and its chips. If IBM was going to do this work for Sony, would it really have anybody left to work with Microsoft? And if Nintendo also chose some key partners before Microsoft did, who would be left to work with Microsoft?
Nick Baker gave the new Microsoft game console the code name "Trinity," named after Carrie-Ann Moss's character in the 1999 science fiction blockbuster film, The Matrix. It was a cool name that conveyed the idea that the next Xbox would unlock a virtual world where illusions were so real that they couldn't be separated from reality. They worked under that code name for a time, but eventually someone cross checked it with the active list of projects at Microsoft. Somebody else was already doing Trinity, so the team then changed the name to Xenon, an element on the periodic table that was a colorless, inert gas. Beyond having an X in the name, the code name didn't mean anything, and that was better than Trinity, which had too many interpretations from the Holy Trinity to the Trinity atomic bomb test site to the Trinity character in the movie. It was an inconspicuous birth. For Baker and Andrews, it was a job they had waited years to do. ars to do.
