Console war has a victor

With Power chips in the Vole Xbox 360 and Wii and a Cell chip in the PS3, IBM is laughing all the way to the bank.

According to the Baltimore Sun, Biggish Blue is likely to sell $3.7 billion worth of chips and associated design services this year. Last year it made $2.9 billion and the year before "only" $2.5 billion.

This is not bad dosh considering that only a few years ago analysts thought that IBM was set to sell off its microelectronics division because the outfit was losing cash.

It is surprising to have such good figures in a year that IBM lost one of its bigger Power chip customers, Apple, which moved to Intel.

But the chip making is only part of the cash that IBM plans to make out of its domination of the console industry. Big Blue also formed a tautologically titled unit called "technology collaboration solutions". This division is set to make $4 billion by taking advantage of the lessons learnt from the collaboration process that Big Blue used with the console makers.

Hardware division chief William Zeitler said that IBM plans to try the same collaboration business plan on other industry sectors such as telecoms, defence and medicine.

Zeitler added that the reason IBM managed to capture the console market was because while the likes of Intel and AMD were trying to show off the sizes of their clock speeds, Big Blue thought the smart money was on a "multicore" design. µ