On Tue, 16 Dec 2003, Andy R wrote:

> A sort of strange thing has happened in the game
> console industry lately though. They all seem to have
> switched (or are switching) to the IBM PowerPC chip.
> Nintendo is already there, but Sony and (ahem)
> Microsoft have already acknowledged that they are
> going to (or are probably going to) use the PPC chip
> in their next generation game consoles. 
> 
> Could this be an admission that there is some kind of
> unified toolkit that they will use (gasp, possibly
> Linux)?

  The devil's in the details. The processor is only one (arguably
relatively small) part of a console; it's the graphics and (to a lesser
extent) memory subsystems that make or break it on the hardware end. The
system architecture has to be supported in order to get a working dev kit
or port of *BSD or other *nix flavour. Device support here is non-trivial
(I've done a bit of driver design in my industry days, and it's bad enough
when you have specs - and a horrid screaming nightmare when you don't).

  While having a common CPU architecture will still greatly aid *BSD and
Linux porting efforts, it's of minimal use for the game dev kits, where
the lion's share of the software work is squeezing every last cycle out of
the video subsystem (including things like hardware transformation and
lighting and so forth in this category). Even for the parts that are
theoretically common (math routines for the PPC), the console vendors
would logically compete (trying to produce better/faster routines than the
competition) rather than cooperate.

  Still an interesting thought, though. A common dev kit is one of the
potential bonuses of a hypothetical open source console, but open console
projects have tanked when tried in the past.

Regards,
				-Christopher Thomas