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Microsoft Moving Into Chip Design With Xbox Next
adamsmith_uk writes "According to ZDNet, Microsoft will more actively participate in chip design for the next version of its Xbox gaming console, tentatively called Xbox Next. By switching from using relatively standard parts to more customized silicon, the company can better optimize its game console, due in 2005. At the same time, the move potentially gives the company a toehold in a completely new market."
Well, as the article said, "They sure don't want to have a situation where an Xbox can be turned into a PC."
-h-
I doubt that they intend to do quite as much as some are claiming. I suspect that all they are going to do is to integrate standard cells for the processor and graphics processor onto the same chip. Probably losing the FPU in the process and some other stuff that is not much use on a dedicated graphics machine - or at least not enough use to want to spend silicon on it.
The PC has been dancing close to the line where a PC on a chip becomes possible for some time. This has happened before of course, Inmos did it in the 1980s, but then you got 4Kb or Ram per transputer. Today you can get a CPU, Graphics processor and 2Mb of cache onto a chip without too much pain.
The costs of going custom are not that great for the production runs involved. We are talking tens of millions of chips. So the cost of some custom masks is really not that big of a problem. Microsoft hae to pay for the processor IP whether they use it as a standard cell or buy it in as a commodity.
The support chips will probably still be commodity items - but remember that there are a lot of things you just do not need on a game box that are vital for a PC, things like protected memory, virtual memory etc. They take up a lot of real estate but you don't need them in a game box.
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Your points are all correct however you have to also remember that it costs alot (in time & money) to develop libraries and a developement platform. For Microsoft it made sense to use as much as they had over from the PC, they were banking on being #1. Porting and developing for a new processor/archicture would have probably meant they would delivery way too late.
I'm in a hurry, but I'll be back in a few hours if you want to debate this. But before I leave I must say:
This is not a problem for IBM, the reason being that there is no other manufacturing player in town.
Huh? NEC, LSI, Mitsubishi, Toshiba, . . . there are plenty of manufacturing players.
Once the process is decided that it it. You can't just switch to someone else.
Wrong. We port ASIC designs from competitor's processes all the time.
This means that for once in their life MS is at the mercy of someone else.
Not at all.
Screw IBM and you just free up resources for Nintendo and Sony (Assume you know that they have chosen IBM as well), and delay your own product by 1-2 years, meaning the project is pretty much dead.
Sony is making their own chips. Nintendo uses NEC.
IBM is the Ring that Rules them All.
I'm not really sure of what overall point you were shooting for, but every statement you made is false.
everything in moderation
Xbox 2 specs from another discussion thread - dated 5/18/03
Intel NetBurst micro-architecture (Pentium 4 or revised name) on 0.07-micron process
Clock Speed: 7 GHz to 8 GHz
SSE2 Floating-Point Performance: 28 to 32 GFLOPS (or 64 GFLOPS with architecture improvements)
External Bus Bandwidth: 5.33 GB/sec
System Memory: 1024MB (1GB)
System Memory Bandwidth: 32 GB/sec (or up to 64 GB/sec)
NVIDIA XGPU2
Clock Speed: 1 GHz
128 Gigatexels per Second
512 Billion Anti-Aliased Samples per Second
Full-Scene Anti-Aliasing (4x, 8x, 16x, 32x, 64x) 64-bit color (16-bit floating point value per channel, RGBA)
2D and 3D Texture Compression Z, Stencil, Shadow, and Multisampling buffers Vertex Compression
Triangle Tessellation (including NURBS support)
Programmable Pixel and Vertex Processors
Full Hidden Surface Removal (boosting effective fillrate 8x = 1 Teratexel per Second)
High-Speed Rendering Buffer (partial frame buffer): 4MB to 8MB
High-Speed Texture Cache: 8MB to 16MB
Textures and Full Frame Buffers are stored in System Memory (1024MB)
32 to 64 Hardware Light Sources
1.25 Billion Particles per Second
3 Billion Polygons per Second (peak)
1.25 Billion Polygons per Second (sustained)
800 Million Polygons per Second (with effects)
15 Trillion Operations per Second 1.14 TFLOPS (1140 GFLOPS)
Screen Resolutions: 640x480 (TV), 1280x720
(HDTV), 1920x1080 (HDTV), up to 2048x1536 (VGA)
NVIDIA MCPX2 800 MHz
1024 Total Voices (256 3D Voices)
3D Modeled Sound
Dolby Digital Encoder
Multiple DSP units
10/100/1000 Ethernet
USB 2.0, DVD, HDD Controller
40x DVD-ROM 160GB Hard Disk Drive or 30GB Solid State Drive
Begin the Drool Fest. PS3 has 1 advantage, it'll be out sooner.
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the GB line was successful because it was the only option. period. the game gear was way too expensive, heavy, and sucked batteries like a drunken prom date. GBC and GBA werent introduced until way after the demise of the GG, so it wasnt backwards compatability that sold all those GBAs and GBCs.
It was 12 year olds that wanted to play pokemon.
turn up the jukebox and tell me a lie
> Developers *hate* working with the X-Box team at M'soft, and if coding for the X-Box was as difficult as coding for the PS2 developers would choose 1 console and stick with it.
I actually heard quite the opposite. One of the developers of "Buffy The Vampire slayer" told me that working with MS was much better - better tools, better support, etc. compared to GameCube and PS2. He specifically said that Xbox developer support was so much better than Sony
Steve Ballmer and John Connors told you in their own sworn to be true report to their owners. Bill doesn't have to sign them since he is just the Chairman of the Board. They were checked by an audit firm as well. In this link the product segments are described (you might have to page down once to see the segment report it's in Item I), home and entertainment is the division they classify the XBox. It also has things like Encarta, those MS branded consumer device hardware, and the bit of game software they've done for some time like Flight Sim. This segment slightly more then doubled in revenues following the release of the XBox. On the second link (you will have to read down a little to get to the table) you can see the comapny's fiscal (year ends in June) 2002 and 2003 results, XBox was released in fiscal 2002. As you can see the segment recorded operating losses of $800 million and $900 million. Notice that the loss amount increased even though they would have sold a better mix of software in 2003. They used to lose about that much when the division included MSN and several of the other money losing businesses that are now separate, they just began reporting this many segments in 2003, sorry.
Also note that only Client (Windows and CALs), Information Worker (Office, Project, Etc) and Server and Tools (Exchange, SQL, Windows Server, and Visual Studio) are the only three groups that make money. This is an extremely successful one hit pony, they have never made money at anything else.
The only reason I can come up with for them to operate in the Video game business is that they want to make a future version of the XBox the platform that you will use to access nearly everything online. Its the same dream everyone has had (Ellison's NICs IBM's PC junior, there were lots of others in the bubble) get people to buy a cheap system that is slightly propretary and then charge for access and get a cut of the business transacted on them. Expect a future version of office to be delivered to an XBox system, in addition to being sold for PCs. To al users: Finsys could possibly be the most unreliable web server in existance, please go easy on it.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.