Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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?
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".
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/
Microsoft involved in chip design? Um, so how do apply service packs to silicon?
Remain calm! All is well!
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
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
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...