Dreamcast can be the biggest impact on the market but that fact doesn't mean it was the only console having an impact on the market.
Dreamcast had pretty much no impact, that was the point I was making.
I'm not saying XBOX was THE best approach to destabilizing Sony's console aspirations, I am merely saying XBOX was effective (albeit less effective) and labeling it an absolute failure seems a tad extreme and unnecessary.
What did it destabilize? Sony didn't change any of their plans at all due to the XBox, and the PS2 ended up more popular then the PSX by a considerable margin. The original XBox didn't impact Sony in any meaningful way.
I feel I provided a viable example of how XBOX provided value to MS's business plans for breaking into the console market, which I don't think you have refuted.
I completely understand what MS was trying to do, what I have not seen demonstrated is that it has been viable in the least. They took a loss leader approach for two generations in a row both times being soundly beaten by inferior technology and value. If their goal was to disrupt Sony then they failed before they took any action at all, not only because they had no real chance at disruption, but also due to the fact that playing into another companies' strategy is simply setting yourself up for failure. Yes, MS has much deeper pockets then Sony, but why waste billions of dollars fighting over the smaller slice of the pie for two generations in a row? If MS had learned something with the original XBox you could make reasonable claims that it was worth it, it appears they did not however.
IMO no different than what Intel must do with Larrabee, no different than what they have been doing with Itanium.
I have to agree with you there, Larrabee is looking very much like Itanium.
That makes Intel a wild-card darkhorse in the graphics world, console markets included. Combined with the wounded animal instincts that Sony is currently feeling and I say all bets are off and any traditional linear thinking regarding Sony's presumed evolutionary path for PS3 -> PS4 ought to be challenged.
I don't see how Sony's financials are going to make them lose any sense they still have, that is the issue I'm seeing. Larrabee is a flat out bad product for the market, just like Itanium. The big difference between Larrabee and Itanium is that Intel dominated the CPU market and still Itanium was laughed out of the mass market segment before it ever got started, they don't have a viable presence in perfromance graphics and haven't since the i740 first hit.
It begs the question though - why hasn't anyone else produced chips capable of scaling to these numbers that Intel is projecting? What is the secret sauce for Intel that makes Intel suddenly capable of doing this while the existing folks (IBM/Sony, Nvidia, ATi) have slowly struggled to increase their computational processing power (relative to where Intel is expected to start at)?
The speculative numbers don't really look that good at all, not sure what you mean exactly. By the end of '09 or early '10 Intel is supposed to have a chip that offers 64% of the raw computational power of something nVidia and ATi offered in Q3 of '08. That is somehow good? What's far worse, Ray Tracing will require significantly more raw floating point computational power then either of those offerings, a lot of fixed function interger ops on the rasterizer are going to need to be handled by FPU on Larrabee(hello ray tracing), ATi and nV are packing TFLOPS power just for their shader hardware and doing it at least a year before Intel is supposed to have this 640GFLOPS ray trace hardware out.
What I am wondering is what makes Intel's approach here so special and revolutionary that it hasn't been done before and won't readily be duplicated in the immediate future as well?
It isn't revolutionary at all, it is them making their own version of Cell. The BCU-100 is a single Cell(chip) setup pushing 230GFLOPS and consuming under 350Watts of power for the entire system, that was launched last year(still has a RSX to handle graphics). Not only is Larrabee not revolutionary, it isn't even evolutionary from what we have seen, it is a fairly blatant knock off of what Cell has been for years. Will Larrabee end up being ahead of Cell when it comes out? Not sure honestly, I imagine that Intel would be pushing hard to make sure it is, but then there is the issue with how superior using a MIPS style processor is in general compared to x87 FPU for this type of computing anyway. Also we have power issues, again- Cell is the most powerful general purpose chip per watt by a considerable margin atm, and Intel's main limitation with Larrabee is going to be power.
Intel isn't being creative, forward thinking or anything remotely close to that with Larrabee. They are copying an idea Sony/IBM brought to the mass market years ago only Sony had enough sense to realize even before it hit it couldn't handle its' initial goals(which seems to be where Intel is having a bit of trouble). They need to up their projected computational power by more then an order of manitude to hope to keep up with a rasterized, today's rasterizers, and that is only if we ignore basic functionality like AA(raytraced AA increases computationaly demands perfectly linear with samples utilized, rasterizers are a very small fraction of that).
