Why is PPC tops for consoles, dead to PC world?

[FudgeNuggets]

I was pondering the new consoles and realized that the 360, Wii and PS3 all use PPC CPUs, but with Mac going Intel, PPC is dead to the PC world, so what gives? In fact the only console I can recall as not having a Motorolla or PPC derived CPU was the original Xbox. Apple went away from PPC because IBM couldn't provide them with good enough yields or fast enough processors, but the 360 has 3 3.2ghz cores, so that point is kind of moot now. I don't have an answer for this, does anybody else?

[Vipasnipa]

Well, first you have to take a step back and look at the two processor worlds. PPC are RISC based, while x86 processors made by Intel and AMD are CISC (You're right, the Xbox 1 had a nearly bog-standard PIII based Celeron processor). These are two different theories of processing that would require a lot of detail to go into, so to sum it up wiki style: RISC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC) vs CISC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CISC).

Consoles are extremely specialized machines - they do games and graphics. Computers are extremely general machines - they do everything. Console makers choose RISC so they can squeeze every last ounce of performance from their static hardware.

[blueswitch]

If I remember correctly Apple's one big beef with IBM in PPC development was that they couldn't get them into laptops. They had some major thermal disipation problems with the G5's look at how big those mac towers are....Steve Job's had to break his promise twice that G5 laptops were going to be just around the bend...and IBM couldn't get that hot chip into a laptop. Obviously the 360 isn't the coolest running machine...and if you look at the "gut the PS3" post from today and look at that fan don't expect the PS3 to be one either.