Here's a couple of news items from the Mercury News that should be of interest to all the games fans out there:
Microsoft taking Xbox into arcades:
Hoping to open another avenue for its video games and broaden its front in the war against Sony and Nintendo, Microsoft is expected to take its Xbox game console into arcades later this year. The project, code-named Chihiro after the heroine of the Japanese anime film ``Spirited Away,'' has been in the works for a couple of years. Microsoft and Sega announced in fall 2001 that they would jointly create arcade machines based on the Xbox technology. But the partners have been quiet since that time.
Now the project is closer to fruition. When Microsoft and graphics-chip maker Nvidia settled their price dispute on chips for the Xbox, the agreement included plans for the Santa Clara chip maker to provide Microsoft with chips for arcade machines. Sony chip could transform video-game industry:
Sony's next-generation video-game console, due in just two years, will feature a revolutionary architecture that will allow it to pack the processing power of a hundred of today's personal computers on a single chip and tap the resources of additional computers using high-speed network connections, with the PS 3, Sony will apparently put 72 processors on a single chip: eight PowerPC microprocessors, each of which controls eight auxiliary processors.
If key technical hurdles are overcome, the ``cell microprocessor'' technology, described in a patent Sony quietly secured in September, could help the Japanese electronics giant achieve the industry's holy grail: a cheap, all-in-one box for the home that can record television shows, surf the Net in 3-D, play music and run movie-like video games.
Microsoft taking Xbox into arcades:
Hoping to open another avenue for its video games and broaden its front in the war against Sony and Nintendo, Microsoft is expected to take its Xbox game console into arcades later this year. The project, code-named Chihiro after the heroine of the Japanese anime film ``Spirited Away,'' has been in the works for a couple of years. Microsoft and Sega announced in fall 2001 that they would jointly create arcade machines based on the Xbox technology. But the partners have been quiet since that time.
Now the project is closer to fruition. When Microsoft and graphics-chip maker Nvidia settled their price dispute on chips for the Xbox, the agreement included plans for the Santa Clara chip maker to provide Microsoft with chips for arcade machines. Sony chip could transform video-game industry:
Sony's next-generation video-game console, due in just two years, will feature a revolutionary architecture that will allow it to pack the processing power of a hundred of today's personal computers on a single chip and tap the resources of additional computers using high-speed network connections, with the PS 3, Sony will apparently put 72 processors on a single chip: eight PowerPC microprocessors, each of which controls eight auxiliary processors.
If key technical hurdles are overcome, the ``cell microprocessor'' technology, described in a patent Sony quietly secured in September, could help the Japanese electronics giant achieve the industry's holy grail: a cheap, all-in-one box for the home that can record television shows, surf the Net in 3-D, play music and run movie-like video games.
