Now, I feel foolish - I thought both those consoles ran on RISC chips. (I know that Xbox used to be an x86, but thought that had changed). Admittedly not a gamer or HW gamer buff, my kids are.
The PS3 used the Cell, that was a PowerPC accompanies with 8(?) more specialized cores (in hindsight i dare say they were used like oversized DSPs) on a single die.
The hope was that the PS3 would be a test bed, and that the Cell would be popular in supercomputers. I am not sure if that panned out beyond some images of PS3s being piled into racks.
And the Xbox 360 i think was a 3 core PowerPC design.
Looking back at it i wonder if the reason both Sony and Microsoft went with AMD APUs this time round is that AMD brought ATI. And ATI has a history of building graphics hardware for games consoles.
Offering up both parts as a single die would greatly simplify the board design of the new consoles. Never mind that by using x86 for the CPU there would be no cross-complication complications to deal with.
