Another Xbox Anatomy Lesson

Keith writes: "Icrontic.com has taken apart, examined, and modified an Xbox. In their latest article, they point out some debugging leads on the Xbox, and a possible USB hack. The Xbox is looking more and more like a PC." A lot of the investigation here is incomplete; watch this space, because it won't be long until Xbox surgery is commonplace.

Comments

Re:Slashdotted already

[aka-ed]

While it's true that MS is losing money on the hardware, any purchase of the hardware will help them achieve the exonomics of scale that will allow them to reach break-even (or even profitability) on Xbox. By the way, this is standard console practice; the Playstation 2 was also a loss leader at its intro:

Driving down production costs will be a determining factor in profitability over the next five years. According to most estimates, Sony's PlayStation 2 cost the company $450 per unit upon initial production in early 2000. The company had first sold the machine as a loss leader for $360 in Japan and for $300 in the United States and Europe. The strategy paid off with the first Play Station because Sony was able to reduce the product's cost from $480 in 1994 to about $80 now (it was initially priced at $299 and is sold at about $99 today). Meanwhile, the company sold about nine games for every console. That model allowed Sony to make billions of dollars over the life of the PlayStation, even if it lost money at first.

source: Red Herring

While estimates say MS will lose $2 billion on hardware before break-even, much of that could be recouped in games from Day One, and the hardware should itself become profitable relatively soon.

Re:UMA is a performance issue

[X]

Tradtionally, UMA is a huge performance issue because all the components are accessing memory over the same, narrow bus. However, Xbox uses AMD's HyperTransport bus, which effectively provides a dedicated channel for each device on the bus (in the Xbox's case I believe just the CPU and GPU are on the bus).