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There was a Wall Street Journal book review a couple of weeks back that started this discussion - which is about how much research on the Cell chip's PPU paved the way for the Xbox 360 Xenon CPU (seems like the book is trying to claim this).

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3904/processing_the_truth_an_interview_.php

Anyhow, those details are complex and included in the interview, but in part:

"The initial tech that we built -- yes, it was paid for through the Sony-Toshiba-IBM Design Center, and was developed for the Cell chip," says Shippy.

"All three companies… legally all had rights to go and put any of that technology, any of those processor cores into other spaces. All of them talked about doing that… so it was every bit IBM's right to sell any of that tech to other design spaces," Shippy explains. "It is very common to develop an interesting, leading-edge new technology and then utilize that technology across multiple platforms."

"I guess what everyone didn't anticipate was -- before we even got done with the Cell chip and PS3 product -- we weren't anticipating that we'd be showing this off specifically to a competitor."

Does that mean Microsoft got a look at the Cell itself? "No, we didn't show them the Cell chip," Shippy clarifies. "The Cell itself and the fundamental architecture that went into that, actually not -- that was all proprietary for PS3. What was shown to Microsoft was just a technology road map that said, 'hey, we can go do these high-performance PowerPC cores at very high frequency and low power'.

There's also a fun bit about relative console power from Shippy, who was IBM's architect on both Cell PPU and Xenon, apparently:

But can Shippy's insight on both console's processors finally answer the age-old debate about which console is actually more powerful?

"I'm going to have to answer with an 'it depends,'" laughs Shippy, after a pause. "Again, they're completely different models. So in the PS3, you've got this Cell chip which has massive parallel processing power, the PowerPC core, multiple SPU cores… it's got a GPU that is, in the model here, processing more in the Cell chip and less in the GPU. So that's one processing paradigm -- a heterogeneous paradigm."

"With the Xbox 360, you've got more of a traditional multi-core system, and you've got three PowerPC cores, each of them having dual threads -- so you've got six threads running there, at least in the CPU. Six threads in Xbox 360, and eight or nine threads in the PS3 -- but then you've got to factor in the GPU," Shippy explains. "The GPU is highly sophisticated in the Xbox 360."

He concludes: "At the end of the day, when you put them all together, depending on the software, I think they're pretty equal, even though they're completely different processing models."

What about the familiar refrain that the PS3's architecture is overcomplicated, challenging developers to program effectively? "The Cell architecture, from a software programming standpoint, is definitely a new paradigm," Shippy concedes.

"And I think what the game community would argue is that, since it is different, initially it is harder to program the Cell chip -- it's not a traditional multiprocessor environment," he says.

"The real hardcore coders would argue that, once you do understand it and can program to it, you absolutely get the most out of the hardware, and really write some fairly low-level code that's really high performance," he adds.

"I think some of the bigger game houses that will write more high-level code would really prefer an Xbox 360 -- right out of the chute, it's easier to write code for. I think you can really leverage the Cell hardware technology -- but it is harder to get your head around."