Microsoft and IBM have announced that the next generation Xbox will run on an IBM PowerPC chip instead of Intel. This Wired article has more details, including a lot of speculation:
At least one industry analyst thinks the choice may be the first crack in the so-called “Wintel” partnership that has dominated the computer industry for decades.
The analyst might be reading a bit too much into this, but I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing the long-standing “Wintel” platform discarded in favor of more hardware-agnostic operating system software. IBM’s got some really good ideas behind the PowerPC chip, and it would be a shame for only Apple to be taking advantage of them in the desktop computer market.
Even if it’s only the Xbox that makes the jump to PowerPC, it’s a coup for IBM. The next PlayStation and the current GameCube are both PowerPC systems.
