IBM wins the CPU contract for the Microsoft's X-BOX 2.

[mikeymike]

The type of CPU may not be as important with MS’s dotNET strategy.

Erm, what?  Does someone need to read up on .NET? :-)

MS and IBM.  Can history repeat itself in some fashion? :-)

[mikeymike]

Latest Pentium, would be the Pentium 4-Mobile at 2 GHz, think it averages about two watts

Then it's not running at 2GHz when it's only consuming 2W.  Heard of SpeedStep before?  My laptop rather likes it.  My P3M 1.2GHz can clock down to 650 or 800MHz.  When it's at 1.2GHz, you can heard the CPU fan whirring.  The software allows you to change the clock frequency on the fly.

[mikeymike]

I'd love to know where people get these low figures from, according to the Intel spec sheet it's 30W / 20W depending on clock voltage & clock speed.

The only way you can get low power out of an x86 is to cut the performance. VIA C3 is a good example of this.

And/or reduce the number of instructions the chip is capable of.

[mikeymike]

C3 are waaaay slower than ppcs... they are waaaaay slower than celerons at the same clock rate.

A friend of mine has a Cyrix 700MHz processor that, especially regarding FPU capabilities, equals that of a P166MMX I had a good few years ago :-)

[mikeymike]

Well I wouldn't all get your hopes anyway. Two points relating to if and when the xbox uses ppc.
1) The first xbox hasnt exactly taken over the console market has it. So whats to say the xbox2 would.

I don't think anyone here is hoping either would 'take over the market', but what it does do, which we do want, is that it helps IBM to put more funding into CPU development/production.