Dang’s Weblog

Recently, Microsoft announced that they would be parternering with IBM on the chip for XBoxNext (okay, stupid name, but I didn’t name it), and licensing IBM’s chip technology. This has caused widespread speculation that XBoxNext will be PowerPC based. I find this not-at-all surprising, as AltiVec, the multimedia engine on the PowerPC, is far superior to SSE2, the one on x86.

Now, the assumption that XBoxNext will be on PowerPC has spured a huge online discussion on backwards compatibility. Will XBoxNext play XBox games? And if so, how?

The Backwards Compat camp says that it’s all about market share. If XBoxNext plays the huge library of expensive XBox games, than people, especially parents, are much more likely to buy it, rather than a PS3, which likely will be backwards compatible with PS2. Also, any new console is likely to ship with very few games, and that makes it much less attractive.

The Non Backwards Compat camp points to the little financial benifit to Microsoft in backwards compatibility (most old games bought are used, and so MS makes no money on them), and the huge R&D costs to developing a backwards compatibility solution.

Both camps have good points, but what if there was no R&D cost involved? Or, more specifically, what if that R&D was carried and amortized by a separte product? Enter VirtualPC, which Microsoft is touting as being a “Multiple Servers on One Box” solution. In fact, MS has so linked it with servers, that no-one in the above discussion to my knowledge, has even considered it. But, VirtualPC was written for the Mac origianally, and so it runs natively on the PPC, and emulates x86. This means that it is tailor made for emulation of the XBox on the XBoxNext. The world in general assumed that support for running on PPC would be dropped by MS, which otherwise has no PPC products. But, what if they bought VirtualPC so that they could leave x86 behind on the XBox, and are using sales of it to amortize the cost of buying and developing it? This gives them all the benifits of backwards compatibility, with none of the costs.

Expect XBoxNext to be backwards compatibile.

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