The Race for a New Game Machine Creating the Chips Inside the XBox 360 and the Playstation 3
The Race for a New Game Machine Creating the Chips Inside the XBox 360 and the Playstation 3
User Ratings and Reviews
5 Stars Beautiful insight
Well… I wanted to know people behind the PS3 and XBox 360 for quite some time. But I was surprised to find (by virtue of this book) that the same set of people created the microprocessors for both the consoles.
The book is a good read.
I recommend it to anyone who is interested in this stuff.
1 Star Worst-written book I’ve read in Years
The subject matter of this book is fascinating. Having followed the development of the Power PC chips for years, I was looking forward to some insight into the world behind IBM’s microprocessor development.
This book is poor on so many levels, yet I will focus on one. The writing. Written in first-person as if it were a dime-store detective novel (not a compliment), I had to suffer through puerile descriptions of how the “author” (he had a writer “help” him): “growled through gritted teeth”, and “slapped my hand on the table”. Do people really talk like this? No, they don’t. And they really shouldn’t write like this either.
My best guess is that the book was only about 50 pages after the first draft, and they were faced with a choice:
1. Beef up the book with fascinating technical details or interviews with industry folks.
2. Pad this sloppy prose with fluff.
They went with option 2. It really reads like they were getting paid by the word. Shame on the editor. Stuff like this should never make it to print.
Shame is, there are several *really* good books on technology and video games: “Game Over”, “The Last Quarter”, “The Cuckoo’s Egg”, etc. The author even mentions “The Soul of a New Machine” in the preface. You’d think having read that book they would be ashamed to publish the tripe they produced.
1 Star It was too limited in scope
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.
2 Stars Smoke salesman
The possible approaches in writing a book like this could have been 2: a technical focus or a business-management focus.
The author fails in both respects, skipping over the technical details and showing little knowledge of business aspects.
The book runs for more than 200 pages of which 190 are “smoke” , filled with poor analogies, boring details about meals and parties, useless corporate jargon.
It makes appear as if designing a complex chip is just a matter of some project manager meetings, avoiding any specific or large-scale electronic manufacturing process description.
Also, why the author doesn’t include any drawing in the book ?
After all an “architect” , both civil or electronic, should have used them heavily to help during the project.
2 Stars no style, no substance…disappointing
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
The Race for a New Game Machine Creating the Chips Inside the XBox 360 and the Playstation 3
The Race for a New Game Machine Creating the Chips Inside the XBox 360 and the Playstation 3
User Ratings and Reviews
5 Stars Beautiful insight
Well… I wanted to know people behind the PS3 and XBox 360 for quite some time. But I was surprised to find (by virtue of this book) that the same set of people created the microprocessors for both the consoles.
The book is a good read.
I recommend it to anyone who is interested in this stuff.
1 Star Worst-written book I’ve read in Years
The subject matter of this book is fascinating. Having followed the development of the Power PC chips for years, I was looking forward to some insight into the world behind IBM’s microprocessor development.
This book is poor on so many levels, yet I will focus on one. The writing. Written in first-person as if it were a dime-store detective novel (not a compliment), I had to suffer through puerile descriptions of how the “author” (he had a writer “help” him): “growled through gritted teeth”, and “slapped my hand on the table”. Do people really talk like this? No, they don’t. And they really shouldn’t write like this either.
My best guess is that the book was only about 50 pages after the first draft, and they were faced with a choice:
1. Beef up the book with fascinating technical details or interviews with industry folks.
2. Pad this sloppy prose with fluff.
They went with option 2. It really reads like they were getting paid by the word. Shame on the editor. Stuff like this should never make it to print.
Shame is, there are several *really* good books on technology and video games: “Game Over”, “The Last Quarter”, “The Cuckoo’s Egg”, etc. The author even mentions “The Soul of a New Machine” in the preface. You’d think having read that book they would be ashamed to publish the tripe they produced.
1 Star It was too limited in scope
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.
2 Stars Smoke salesman
The possible approaches in writing a book like this could have been 2: a technical focus or a business-management focus.
The author fails in both respects, skipping over the technical details and showing little knowledge of business aspects.
The book runs for more than 200 pages of which 190 are “smoke” , filled with poor analogies, boring details about meals and parties, useless corporate jargon.
It makes appear as if designing a complex chip is just a matter of some project manager meetings, avoiding any specific or large-scale electronic manufacturing process description.
Also, why the author doesn’t include any drawing in the book ?
After all an “architect” , both civil or electronic, should have used them heavily to help during the project.
2 Stars no style, no substance…disappointing
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
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Main Content
The Race for a New Game Machine Creating the Chips Inside the XBox 360 and the Playstation 3The Race for a New Game Machine Creating the Chips Inside the XBox 360 and the Playstation 3 ...
