IBM's Triple Play

Beat the Competition? We Are the Competition

It looked like there might be one other complication in developing Microsoft’s new processor: IBM was working concurrently on competing game consoles for Sony’s PlayStation 3 and Nintendo’s Wii, to be released a year after the Xbox 360.

Developing products that are pivotal to fiercely competitive customers has the potential to create conflicts of interest. But Schram says it was a nonissue in this case for at least a couple of reasons. One is that each IBM development program has layers of security and clearance processes, both managerial and technical, to all but guarantee that the secrets of one lab can’t make it into another. All three customers were satisfied with the security. “We let them know that there were internal processes that would prevent any leaks,” Schram says.

Another mitigating factor is that few games are compatible with various platforms—they generally work on one console. So even if secrets were to leak, the information might be worthless.

Sony’s PlayStation 3 uses IBM’s Cell Broadband Engine, which took four years and more than 400 engineers at four development sites to build under the leadership of Linda Van Grinsven at the company’s Rochester campus.

Like Microsoft, Sony wanted speed and performance, and the Cell chip delivered that in spades: It performs several times faster than the central processing unit in a typical desktop computer. While IBM Rochester’s role in developing the Cell was less extensive than in the immersive Xbox project, it was still crucial.

“The Rochester team focused on the internal busing for the chip,” Van Grinsven says. “In the microprocessor, there are nine different processing units. The busing lets you communicate between those units.”

Meanwhile, the Nintendo Wii project, led by IBM’s Nghia Pham in Rochester, was made somewhat less arduous by the fact that the new processor piggybacked on the chip IBM had designed for Nintendo’s GameCube. The trick was making the new system compatible with the old one.

“We tried to design two chips in one, because Nintendo wanted the Wii to be able to play GameCube games,” Pham says. “So Broadway,” as the new chip is called, “contained the old GameCube processor as well as a new processor for the Wii.” By concentrating on making the chip more energy efficient, the 30-some engineers working on it were able to make it “backward compatible,” as well as fast and durable.

Which underscores a third reason why working on competing products wasn’t a problem for IBM or its customers. Each game console emphasizes different capabilities: high-definition graphics in the PS3, player interactivity in the Wii, versatility to work with a diverse lineup of games in the Xbox 360. Competition, in this case, means differentiation more than imitation.