@bhabbott

Quote:

3D0 was designed by Dave Needle and RJ Mical, who helped develop the Amiga 1000. If their work was 'sci-fi' how come the A1000 wasn't? But 3DO was a commercial failure. Turns out just having 'sci-fi' hardware wasn't enough.

3DO's 2 million units sold are enough to fund 3DO M2, which is sold to Panasonic for $100 million.

Japan Inc's industrialists have told Panasonic not to compete against other Japanese game consoles e.g. Nintendo, Sega, and Sony. Panasonic cancels 3DO M2. Japan Inc's industrialists have some sort of "command and control" over Japanese companies; it's not a true free market.

IBM didn't give up on PPC 602, and it continued into PPE. 3DO M2 has two PPC 602.

Microsoft purchased the 3DO MX project, which later led to the IBM PPE-based Xbox 360. The X86-based Xbox was already at an advanced stage of development to switch over to big-endian PPC based game console e.g. Xbox 360 is big endian.

3DO MX has dual IBM PPC 602 and 128-bit graphics ASIC (led by a former SGI engineer). NVIDIA offered a low clocked 256-bit GeForce 4 Ti ASIC as NV2A with a DDR 128-bit bus (effectively 256-bit SDR). NVIDIA licensed AMD's DDR EV6 chipset technology for the nForce chipset.

NVIDIA easily defeats 3DO MX's ex-SGI efforts on performance vs cost.

AMD's DDR EV6 chipset implementation was supported by a certain C65 engineer who specialized in double-rate processing in CSG/MOS 65xx CPUs.

Reference
http://www.winnetmag.com/Article/ArticleID/17783/17783.html
Microsoft buys the 3DO MX project.


Microsoft reportedly working on game console
A Web Exclusive from WinInfo
Paul Thurrott

Microsoft Corporation reportedly intends to allow its next-generation WebTV device to compete with the Nintendo 64 and Sony Playstation game consoles. The story is rather complicated, but it goes something like this: A few years ago, a company called 3DO was working its own next-generation game console, which was dubbed the M2. The M2 contained three key technologies which were pretty impressive for their day: DVD playback, MPEG3 decoding, and a new chipset called MX. When it became clear that 3DO was going to have to exit the hardware market for financial reasons, it sold the M2 technology to Samsung, which created a division called CagEnt that had two years to make money with it.

CagEnt's MX chipset from the M2 technology utilized two PowerPC 602 microprocessors at the time: the same CPU that powers Apple Macintosh computers. In late 1997, Nintendo visited CagEnt in search of a new 3D chipset since its relationship with Silicon Graphics had fallen apart and sales of the Nintendo 64 were slower than expected. In early 1998, Nintendo officially terminated its relationship with ailing Silicon Graphics and offered to buy CagEnt outright.

While details of the sale continued, Nintendo worked with CagEnt to wrap its MX chipset around a MiPS processor, as the company's consoles use NEC MiPS CPUs, not PowerPC. The plan was for the new MX-based machine, complete with hardware 3D, DVD-ROM, and cartridge capabilities to be ready in time for Christmas 1999. Unfortunately for Nintendo, talks with Samsung broke down within a few months.

That's where Microsoft stepped in.

In Early April, the company bought CagEnt through its WebTV division, acquiring all of the assets of CagEnt and its key personnel. Microsoft's plan is to use the MX technology as the core of its next WebTV device, which will clearly be used for more than Email and Web browsing. In fact, Microsoft has quietly been gaining the knowledge it needs to compete in the game console market through its parternship with Sega and it's likely that a Microsoft-backed, Windows CE-based WebTV device could even be co-created with that company.

All this puts Nintendo in a bind, of course, and the company will be unable to create a new console in time for Christmas 1999 now. Its current plan is for the next device to reach stores in late 2000 instead, though its unclear who they will be able to partner with to make such a goal.


Repost source from https://www.neogaf.com/threads/3do-mx-chipset-the-technology-nintendo-almost-used-in-an-n64-successor-for-1999.350196/#post-14521122

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