The Future of Computing -- and Gaming

Late Thursday, Micro$oft unveiled their next-generation Gaming Console, christened the XBox 360. This highly-anticipated gaming console is expected to be available to the public by the 2005 holiday season -- in less than 6 months.

Dan Knight wrote an excellent article about this news, and speculated on the impact the XBox 360 will have on the future of computers, especially Apples'.

What is so impressive about the XBox 360 are the specs. Micro$oft purchased a number of Power Mac G5's in order to develop the software that will be running on their new gaming console. In a strange twist of irony, the new XBox will be sporting a Power-PC processor, instead of the widely-used Intel architecture.

The new XBox has a triple-core processor, clocking in at 3.2 Gigahertz. The fastest Mac, comparatively, is a dual-processor 2.7 GHz Power Mac. The XBox will also come with a standard 512 Megabytes of RAM, a 500 MHz ATI graphics processor, a 20 Gigabyte removable hard drive, and a 12x DVD-ROM drive.

In short, the new XBox will easily out-perform Apple's fastest machines, and will likely cost far less than Apples' $2999US flagship model. Not only will the XBox 360 out-perform Apple, It will be even more powerful than most (if not all) Intel-based systems.

Two words: Check and Mate.

Where will this leave the computing industry? It has the potential to aid and hurt Apple. Since the architecture is built around the Power-PC Processor, it will be relatively easy to port OSX and other *nix based operating systems to these machines. There could be droves of computer users "switching" not due to Apple's campaigns, but because they have an incredibly powerful, and economical machine at their disposal.

The XBox 360 will likely kill the Mac Mini Market, as they will likely be around the same price points. If you were a consumer, what would you buy? A cute $499 machine that is arguably one of Apple's slowest models, or could have one of the world's fastest machines for the same price?

Furthermore, Apple will have to push for the development of multi-processor / multi-core machines, and have to drop their price-point to make their most powerful models affordable to the average consumer. I suspect that Apple will have to push for the implementation of IBM's Cell processor, which might be their only choice if they want to stay in the computer hardware business.

I also think that Intel is in big trouble. Currently, today's most popular gaming titles are designed and released on Intel / Pentium systems. With XBox's migration to a PowerPC architecture, that will mean many more games will be developed for OSX or Unix-type systems. Could it be that Micro$oft will kill Intel, just as it nearly killed Big Blue in the mid-1980's?

And what about other game console manufacturers? Sega has all but given up. Nintendo has been beaten pretty badly with the failure of the N64, and the lukewarm interest of the GameCube. The only major competitor to the XBox 360 will be Sony's Playstation3, which is currently being developed, and is expected to hit the markets sometime in 2006. The Playstation3 is also migrating to an IBM architecture -- the Cell Processor, which will likely out-perform the XBox 360. I would likely wait for some benchmarks (and game selection) before I would commit to either system.

It is going to be an exciting and turbulent year in the computing world, except this time, I think IBM and Micro$oft have winning hands -- at least this week.