[hawflakes]

Cell used the PowerPC isa as did the Xbox 360. Both were designed in the same IBM facility but separated by a floor. IIRC the Xbox team indirectly learned from the Cell team's mistakes at the process/microarch level.

Cell was definitely more weird to code against and Sony put max theoretical perf above Xbox's approach to be more general purpose chip architecture. So strictly speaking it wasn't like most PCs at the time in the x86 sense but in the three mostly same cores for Xbox vs custom Cell and special ways to squeeze out performance.

[sillywalk]

There's a book about the development of both of them, The Race for a New Game Machine: Creating the Chips Inside the XBox 360 and the Playstation 3 by David Shippy & Mickie Phipps. [0]

It has some details on the awkward position the IBM developers were put in.

Rodrigo Copetti's excellent articles on the PS3[1] and Xbox 360 [2]

and Ars' Hannibal's article on the Xenon Chip. [3]

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/6056634

[1] https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/playstation-3/

[2] https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/xbox-360/

[3] https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/06/xbox360-2/

[monocasa]

Sort of. The xenon cores are pretty damn close to cell PPE cores, just with VMX-128 strapped to them. They even share some taped out blocks, and have almost all of the same microarchitectural issues like the load hit store penalty.

[ppseafield]

Thanks for the clarification. I must have conflated "more general purpose" -> "more like PC".