The Race For A New Game Machine:. David Shippy
sported large break rooms with snazzy new-age green glass walls laced with zigzagging copper tubes. Modern kitchen appliances and café-style furniture matched the look.
Kahle and I returned to his office. File cabinets lined one wall, while photos of previous chip designs, various project plaques, and patent awards adorned another. I called it the “I LOVE ME” wall. Every engineer has one. His desk was a familiar mess, cluttered with stacks of technical papers and journals. We sat at his modular, natural-maple desk while he gave me a short history lesson on the Design Center.
“My first discussions with Ken Kutaragi occurred just a few months ago in a hotel in Roppongi, Japan, the location of IBM Japan’s head office. I offered him every chip option we had for a potential PlayStation 3 processor. The idea I liked the best and pushed the hardest was a derivative of the Power4,” Kahle said.
“Oh, man, that would’ve been sweet!” I said. Kahle and I had invested a great deal of our own blood, sweat, and tears into the development of the Power4, and we would have been so proud to watch this baby take over a high-volume consumer market like the PlayStation 3. This highly successful server chip was IBM’s first microprocessor to break the one-gigahertz clock barrier. That long-standing performance obstacle had once seemed insurmountable. From the early 1980s—when Intel’s first 8086 PC microprocessors ran in the low megahertz range—to the turn of the century, it had taken nearly twenty years of evolution to break this barrier.
“Unfortunately, that idea didn’t capture Kutaragi’s interest.” Kahle pointed to a list of products on his whiteboard. A maze of notes and arrows swirled around the barely decipherable column of names. “So I proposed all these other IBM PowerPC derivatives, including the line of embedded cores developed by the team in Raleigh, North Carolina. By the end of the Roppongi trip, I had pitched the entire spectrum of IBM’s processor cores, from the very simple and small up to the very large and complex.”
I studied the list for a moment. “So Kutaragi rejected everything. Did he give you some idea of what he does want?” I was beginning to worry that Kutaragi had some pie-in-the-sky dream that wasn’t achievable in real hardware.
“Oh, yes, he did.” The excitement in Kahle’s voice ramped up. “He challenged us to create something new to leapfrog Intel’s technology, something like a supercomputer-on-a-chip. This is Kutaragi’s bold vision. His chip will be the heart and soul of a bleeding-edge gaming console. He insists on both multigigahertz frequency and very high floating-point mathematical computation capability.”
Floating-point units are included in many microprocessors, but they involve some very complex circuitry with a high transistor count, which translates into costly silicon real estate. Due to this complexity and size, they create much greater challenges for achieving high frequencies.
I nodded my head, nearly salivating over the opportunity to invent something new. This supercomputer-on-a-chip would provide high precision as the chip adds, subtracts, or multiplies very large decimal numbers. “I agree that’s a deadly and difficult to beat combination. Tough to build, though,” I said.
“You bet,” Kahle answered. “A typical game application uses millions of floating-point computations to create animated graphics. Higher precision means that the processor can calculate the physics involved in moving, bending, jumping, crushing, colliding, bouncing, and so on, with a higher degree of accuracy, and thus provide more fluid character movement in crisp, realistic scenes.”
That made a lot of sense to me. I already knew that millions of computations determine every pixel position in every scene that flashes across my computer or TV screen. The faster the position of the final pixel is calculated, the more lifelike and fluid that game becomes.
Kahle understood very well what Kutaragi wanted, but in order to get IBM to commit to a major new processor development effort, I knew he would have to engage in and win a major turf battle with IBM’s Server Group, our former team. I was sure the folks that had worked with Kahle and me on the Power4 processor would fight fiercely to own this processor and would push for a Power4 derivative as the base design. “What do our friends in the Server Group have to say about all this?” I asked.
“Plenty. They argued that one of their own homegrown server chips or a derivative thereof could just as easily fulfill Sony’s game machine requirements and IBM’s requirements for new broadband product development. Why invest millions of dollars into something new when off-the-shelf processors fill the bill?”
“Can’t argue with that line of thinking,” I said.
“True, but I’ve already been down that path with Kutaragi, and that idea won’t fly. He doesn’t want what they have. As much as I dread it, a futile and time-consuming turf battle might possibly be the only way to make progress and clinch a deal with Kutaragi. Even with a corporate approval in my pocket, I have no doubt there will continue to be bloody battles over which in-house team—Server Group or Microelectronics Division—will win the job.”
I sympathized with Kahle’s reluctance to enter into a turf war because I carried my own scars from previous processor wars within IBM. In the mid-1980s, the IBM mainframe processors created most of the revenue in the company. These processors were inside computer products priced from hundreds of thousands of dollars to over a million dollars per system. Processor design houses located in Endicott, Kingston, and Poughkeepsie, New York, as well as Rochester, Minnesota, and Boeblegen, Germany, fought to carve off a piece of the pie and cover the broad range of computing power and cost. Each group, seriously handicapped by the “not invented here” syndrome, wanted to design processors in their own unique way while they created and protected their market niche. Eventually, market demands dictated lower volumes for these mainframes, forcing IBM to cut back on the number of processor designs they could support. This resulted in massive layoffs at some of the company’s oldest established sites, from Endicott and Kingston, New York, to Rochester, Minnesota. Politics, not engineering, drove many of those decisions. The loudest and most aggressive leaders typically won.
At the end of the turf wars, the IBM locations that continued to own major processor design work could justify hiring and maintaining a large engineering staff. Those locations that did not own a major mission were forced to downsize. It was survival of the fittest. With job security in mind, I had jumped at the chance to escape Endicott and move to Austin, which soon became IBM’s center of competence for processor design. Lucky I made the jump when I did. While Endicott entered a long period of instability, Austin was able to continue to hire and sustain jobs for the best and brightest.
Based on my previous experience at IBM, I realized what a prize the PlayStation 3 would be for the owning engineering organization. That organization could justify their existence for years to come, and I could see why Kahle would fight tooth and nail to secure this highly coveted processor design.
Dominique Fitzgerald, a diminutive French woman who served as an executive administrative assistant, interrupted our discussion to inform me that my presence was required in the office of Dr. Chekib Akrout, the vice president in charge of entertainment and embedded processors. Akrout took the reins from Kahle as IBM’s business director for the STI Design Center when Kahle moved into the chief engineer’s slot. Dominique ushered me into the executive office next door, then quietly ducked out.
Akrout immediately stood and walked around the desk to greet me with a firm handshake and a ready smile bracketed by deep dimples. We settled into our seats, one on either side of the big maple desk. My new boss looked much younger than I had expected, probably barely forty. He was well over six feet tall, rather large boned, and dressed in trendy brown slacks and a tan long-sleeved shirt that looked classy and expensive but still casual enough to blend into a blue-jean culture. He spoke with a heavy French accent, but his black hair, olive skin, and dark brown eyes made me think of Greece, or Italy, or somewhere in the Middle East.
“I’ve heard good things about you,” he said.
As the discussion progressed, we became instant friends, sharing a similar sense of humor and a mutual respect for each other’s technical ability. We quickly veered off a discussion about the project and launched into a friendly exchange of personal histories. Born in Tunisia, Akrout