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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."
now we can build BSODs into hardware!
I wonder how much of this is to make it harder to pirate games or run linux on the XBox?
The IBM representative acknowledged that Microsoft is looking at the company's PowerPC technology, the underlying architecture behind the chips in Apple computers. PowerPC concepts will also be the basis of the Cell processor, which will contain multiple chip cores that handle a variety of tasks.
Microsoft absorbs good ideas from multiple places... Here they are considering powerpc concepts!
As I have said many time... Microsoft is very borg-like! I use and enjoy Microsoft everyday... but their ability to "borrow" technology and ideas is slightly disturbing.
Davak
So they'll hardwire port 139 open on the metal?
Best Mr. Burns voice: Excellent
So this is where the chess club wound up.
The original X-Box was a reworked PC. Maybe they want a closed system for their next box so Linux won't run on it.
Steve Jobs: "Get my lawyer on the line!"
"X"Box - OS X
"next" - NeXT
Those who previously doubted Bill Gates love obsession with Steve Jobs be damed...
By switching from using relatively standard parts to more customized silicon, the company can better optimize its game console
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.
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
1. Microsoft will find a partner willing to invest in designing a new generation of hardware.
2. The product will start to become a reality.
3. Microsoft will pull out of the deal, citing "differences" and go into the hardware business itself, suddenly having aquired lots of new technology and staff.
4. Lawyers everywhere will rejoice once again.
Ah, but the lure of big money will find a sucker every time. Microsoft is like a huge fat 419 scam artist. "Have $500bn sitting in games market, need someone to facilitate extraction, will give 10%".
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Wasn't the XBox supposed to crush Sony like a grape because it used commodity parts while silly Sony used specialized ones, therefore much more expensive?
By switching from using relatively standard parts to more customized silicon, the company can better optimize its game console, due in 2005.
Or cut back on piracy. Perhaps we will have to activate games online in the future!
adventure-today.com
But, the thing is, for the most part, only the extreme crowd is interested in doing that sort of thing. One drawback that Microsoft is going to have to work at, is that if they get too custom, they're going to make the big selling point (i.e. it's next to nothing to port a Windows game over to the X-Box...) and pretty much throw it out the window.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I just shelled out 200 for a playstation 2 late last year. I can't afford to go buying another game console every 2-3 years. I know technology is racing ahead so fast the a console is already obslete by the time it hits the market but would it really hurt if a company stuck to an obslete console for 5-7 years. I mean, whose going to remember a console in ten years if it was only out 3 years before ti was discontinued? Stick with one console, build up a decent library for it, and actually work on a few good games for that console rather than the eyecandy we get now. I can't keep buying consoles like this. I don't many can. And why shoudl I* buy the comapnies latest console, when if I just continue to save my money, I'll be able to afford the next model 3 years later.
Cost of console = n + $100 where n equals the prices of the console this one renders obselete.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
Didn't MS agree to stay the hell out of the chip making business in order to be lovey-dovey with Intel and their specs?
How's Intel taking the news?
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
I doubt Microsoft cares as much about Linux as the rampant piracy of the Xbox games
I knew this was coming.
Microsoft made some serious design mistakes with the first X-Box. One of the big ones was they assumed that if they used generic standard PC parts that would make it somehow cheaper. However, the economic logic of the PC industry doesn't necessarily apply to the gaming console industry, where you want to make tens of millions of consoles all exactly the same. When you are doing that, it actually is worth the effort making fairly customized hardware, because every cent you can shave of the production costs of a unit makes a big difference.
With a changein graphic processors, I wonder if Microsoft plans to not include backward-compatibility with the original (current) XBox.
One of PS2's main strengths was that consumers didn't have to throw away their PSOne game libraries or keep two consoles hooked up. Sega didn't do this with their hardware and suffered as a result. Nintendo did not do this with its consoles but _did_ with the GameBoy line, and look at which one is more successful.
If Microsoft wants to build a sustainable marketshare for XBox, it must keep consumer units "in the family" as Sony did with Playstation and Nintendo did with GameBoy.
NeXT-Box sounds better than "Xbox Next" anyway.
Although I am partial to "XX-Box", and eventually, "XXX-Box".
Is the XBox actually going anywhere? Here in Spain I must see ten PS2 advertisements on the TV for every one for the XBox. And in most stores the PS2 seems to have about three to five times more shelf space allocated to it than the XBox. Not only that, but with the GameCube priced at 99 Euros, the XBox has some serious competition this Christmas. Can the XBox ever become serious competition to the Playstation under those conditions?
What's it like in the rest of the world?
If they want to BE like Apple Computers, they should just throw caution to the wind and do it. I imagine this doesn't bode well for Intel or AMD...
To be honest, I'll bet they are really vying to make their own chips for home users and set top boxes and keep Intel and AMD on the backend.
Un-news
This really highlights the stupidity of MS's anti-hacking efforts. I don't ever remember a company spending so much effort and money on an attempt to remove functionality and desirability from their products.
-3Suns
~~~~
The Revolution will be Slashdotted
but the chip as well:6 5,00.ht ml?tw=wn_culthead_4
http://www.wired.com/news/games/0,2101,610
So, the new XBox will be called Next, and will be running a G5 chip.
Only thing left to happen now is for Apple to come out with a video game console running on an Intel P4 called "Apple ME", and we'll know for a fact that the whole world has gone to hell.
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.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Do you really need somebody to tell you how to think?
"Soon to come antivirus, mainframes, and chips."
So now I'm supposed to trust MS with anitvirus?
Where do they think they'll find chip-design engineers who will work on Windows? I wouldn't do that type of work on that platform, and all the others I know will only use a Unix based system for their engineering work. Does this mean that MS will be installing a new Linux network to develop their new ASICs?
I'm sure it's possible, but designing ICs requires some serious software and hardware tools, and an OS that won't get in the engineers way.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
Although Microsoft did not produce key components of the PC, yet it had a very active participation in designing the standards ruling the PC world. From 1184 paralell port to ISA Plug&Play, from ACPI to DirectX 9.0 it was Microsoft who decided how the hardware should interface to the OS and in cases like DirectX 9.0 it acutally dictated lots of the arcithecture of the hardware. So it's not a surprise that it get goes one step forward for a product that is going to carry it's own name on the box...
Microsoft involved in chip design? Um, so how do apply service packs to silicon?
Remain calm! All is well!
Their compiler and tools group is extremely strong. I'd be surprised if it was at all any more difficult to port to Xbox Next than Xbox.
I'm sure 95% of it will still be a solid C compiler and directx api.
hell, it'd probably have a setting for Endian notation in the dev env too.
the main loss is that with general components they can send devkits to developers early and when the ps3 specs get announced, MS could simply bump up the included cpu and gpu on the release units - guaranteeing that it'd keep ahead.
more likely though, it's just a matter of cost. It was too expensive to pay for a general purpose machine in each xbox - when it wasn't needed. they just better have backwards compatibility - which would be the one true victim of a powerpc switch.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
I thought they used up all the special silicone when they published Dead or Alive: Beach Volleyball...
it might not be so much to prevent pirating or Linux computing on the X-box as a way to get into chip design and knowledge for the hardware required to implement Palladium - if MS is solely dependent upon Intel or AMD for implementation of "trusted computing" it may not be as able to control the implementation effectively, while if they have an internal resource to design and fabricate chips, they can compete more effectively with competing standards from chip manufacturers. Since the evil that is trusted computing is a centerpiece for Microsoft's future, knowledge of the technologies required for it makes sense for MS. (this is assuming that Microsoft doesn't already have internal resources for DRM - even in that case, this may be another way to try DRM out in the field and to see how it works/doesn't work before they release it as part of Palladium).
Changing architectures will not change whether the new box can be hacked. And if it can be hacked to run code at all it can be hacked to run Linux. Or OpenBSD. Both, and many others, are very portable - and any obscurity about the system's setup will be penetrated. Heck - changing architectures will just make the hacking more interesting.
I'm not saying that "security" won't be a priority, just that it is not overwhelmingly affected by architecture - and certainly isn't affected enough to dictate a major change like the one they're doing.
This change was about performance, price, and possibly politics.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
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
Wasn't one of the "strengths" Microsoft was touting with the original Xbox was that because it uses standard PC parts it would be easier to develop and port games?
Now it looks as if the parts are going to be as "standard" as WMA.
So, what will be the advantage the Xbox has now? I doubt there will be that much of a technology gap between any of the next-gen systems. It puts it much closer to the other consoles, and among those, sheer numbers usually wins out - these days, namely, Sony. Only if the custom parts become much cheaper, and the Xbox stops creating losses for MS, would this be a good step for them.
If anything is going to tip the scales away from Sony in the console wars, I doubt it is going to happen this round.
Ugh! Mental image of Bill Gates putting his
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
Ask any developer in the country: working with Microsoft means jumping through a ridiculous number of hoops, and complying with really awful regulations (like all that X-Box Live crap).
Why do developers do this?
Because development for the X-Box is otherwise relatively easy. The X-Box being a modified PC, means that porting PC titles to the X-Box is cake.
The modified PC architecture also allows Microsoft to raid E3 for hot-titles, and buy out (or sign advance release deals) on hot titles. ("Halo" for example was originally supposed to be a PC release).
But what happens when Microsoft begins to move away from standard components?
The first and most obvious advantage to Microsoft is cost. Owning the chip manufacturing reduces the overall cost of production, not only by cutting out the 3rd party, but through efficiencies of custom architecture. This will translate into a more competitive console price. Most people don't know it, but Microsoft is in a state of panic right now over console prices. GameCube and PS2 can undercut X-Box comfortably in the late-stage console cycle (2 years after a console's release).
But (buyer beware) even though the X-Box NEXT will carry a nice price-tag, the number of titles will be SIGNIFICANTLY LOWER.
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.
This is almost guaranteed to happen with the release of X-NEXT. Watch as Sony announces a larger than ever release calendar and Microsoft is forced to go on an acquisition streak in order to bulk up on releases.
Also watch as GameCube surprises everyone with their next console which will demolish Sony and Microsoft's benchmarks...
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
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
The flip side to this is that it will throw their own developers off. They, bless their suffering hearts, must put up with all the ugliness on normal M$ work and then some. Time to buy another SDK, suckers! Considering the poor sales, I don't know where they will get then next batch. What M$ screw their develpers again? Say it ain't so.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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...
Back in the early days of RISC the same was being said of the idea of breaking down the CPU, eliminating complex instructions.
My point is that you have a very different set of tradeoffs going on to those in a general purpose PC. The main reason PCs have FPUs is to run benchmarks, if you look at the work most PCs do they don't really need them.
The real question is just how much stuff you can fit onto a single CPU chip. It is pretty certain that you want to integrate the GPU and the CPU. The on-chip/off-chip delay is going to be a major bottleneck. That does not leave a great deal to eliminate.
The way to settle the matter is not to flame on slashdot, take some actual games and compile the damn things for a range of simulated hardware options. That is actually what we used to do in the early days of RISC, the compilers were optimized to the code, (at first to the end user code, later on the benchmarks :-)
Sure you may think that floating point is essential for games, but it is a completely different question to ask whether the best way to spend your gates budget is on a slick full feature FPU.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
You're right, it would be interesting to run some benchmarks, but games nowadays *do* require a lot of calculations with non-integer numbers. In all but the simplest 2d games (i.e. puzzle games and the like), vast numbers of calculations are made. I'd be willing to bet that nothing out there makes as much use of the FPU as games software. Sure, some kind of fluid flow analysis software or rendering software like PRMan and Mental ray probably tax the FPU more, but in terms of the sheer number of FPU instructions that are excecuted everyday by PCs around the world, I'm sure games come out on top.
Please believe me when I say I'm not making this up - I have worked on real, published games for both the PC and console markets and we do use the FPU a great deal.
If you need further proof, just have a look at all the gaming hardware out there - the PS2 has two extra vector floating point units in its so-called 'Emotion Engine' CPU. Graphics cards (which are pretty much driven by games) are dedicated almost completely to floating-point operations nowadays - everything, from the vertex coordinates to the colours to the screen buffers are, or can be, floating point. This is the way that the gates are being put to better use - a lot of them are now dedicated to doing certain FP operations *very, very* quickly, on a scale unheard of on a conventional CPU. If the FPU is to be removed, it is likely to be replaced by additional specialised FP units, to do things like ray/sphere and ray/triangle intersections, physical simulation and the like. I don't think they'll entirely throw out the main FPU (although it could be scaled down a bit in that case - current CPUs generally have 4-part vector FP operations), simply because there'll always be a bit of calculation you need to do somewhere that doesn't fit into your specialised categories..
I suppose it is possible that the entire games industry has got it all wrong, and that this drive towards greater FP power is going in the wrong direction, but I doubt it.
P.S. Please don't feel I'm flaming - just explaining the way I see it.
Cheers,
Tim