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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."
yes. but that plan had one small flaw -it was bollocks.
Sony used custom Si with the same die area as Itanium1, yet could afford to pull it off by selling in the millions.
MS thought that by reusing PC kit they could get in the business easily (true), and ride the continual fall in PC part cost. Unfortunately, PC parts had had their cost already sucked out of them, apart from the effective 5% a month cost reduction of the Si parts. HDD and the DVD dont have much cost reduction at all, so that HDD is $70 of rotating iron whose cost is fixed. The best bit: Sony also rode the fall in Si parts, didnt have an HDD to provide fixed cost and can cut the selling price of the PS/2 whenever their spreadsheet hints that MS may be about to break even on hardware.
I think the biggest mistake of MS was thinking they could sell the hardware at a loss and make money on the games. The trick is to sell the hardware at a profit and make even more money on the games. Sony do that. Adding the HDD was another error. All it does is replicate DLL hell and add the Bill Of Materials of the box.
And they are effectively removing the aspect of XBox that made it cost effective and appealing to developers: easy porting to the PC through common components and CPU architecture.
I very much doubt the ActiveX APIs on the next XBox will differ much from the ActiveX found on ordinary PC hardware. Most of the rest, the compiler takes care of. How difficult is it to port most apps from linux-ppc to linux-i386, or even from linux-ppc to freebsd-i386?
The XBox already runs on not-quite-standard hardware and not-quite-windows-2k/xp..
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
every cent you can shave of the production costs of a unit makes a big difference
Your reasoning is spot on for any console manufacturer, but it's especially important for Microsoft because of the dreadful arithmetic of long-duration per-box losses resulting from slow growth of Xbox against the PS2.
The problem there is that Microsoft doesn't write a whole lot of games itself, so they're at the mercy of the usual game dev companies' choice of platform and rate of production. That rate has been slow, and every month that the ramp-up drags on with the PS2 light-years ahead in terms of game numbers represents another chunk of losses stemming from the high cost of the console versus number of games sold.
Exactly why Xbox hasn't exploded onto the scene and become a head-for-head PS2 rival after all this time is a good question which I haven't seen explained anywhere. It's nice hardware from a dev perspective, so why so few games? (Even the Xbox mags are disappearing from shops. Looks bad.)
With the present sluggish rate of new releases and with way under 200 Xbox games in most of the "Coming Soon" lists despite Xmas approaching, I don't see any light at the end of the Xbox tunnel for a long time to come. Under these inauspicious circumstances, I'd have to guess (and we can only guess) that bringing down the pre-console loss must be extraordinarily important to MS.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I can just see the Intels, Siemens, TIs and NECs of the world lining up for patent suits on this one. If Microsoft plans to wade into this battle without any existing IP they are going to get smacked very hard with the infringement stick...