Re: blah, blah, blah ...
I forget why they went to PowerPC for the PS3/X360 generation though.
For Sony it was Hubris, for MS it was just good sense.
Sony were riding high on the back of the PS2, and the world wasn't quite as standardised back then, so they decided to design their own CPU for the next Playstation, called the Cell.
This was developed by Sony, Toshiba and IBM, and contained a Power PC based core, with 6 extra scalar processing units. (This was back in the day before a GPU was doing this kind of general purpose computing).
The story goes that MS went to IBM when they were looking for the CPU for the next XBox (the power PC stuff wasn't slow remember), and IBM said 'Well... we're working on something like that for Sony...'
So the PowerPC core from the cell ended up forming the basis for the 3 core power PC CPU at the heart of the XBox 360.
More info here...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
