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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."
I wonder how much of this is to make it harder to pirate games or run linux on the XBox?
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.
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.
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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Amusingly enough, the opposite proved true. (can't tell if you were being sarcastic)
Sony's specialized parts ensured that Sony owned all of the rights. Sony's intimate knowledge of the parts and the manufacturing has allowed them to combine silicon, cutting down on overall size and costs. Likewise, the only profittaking is from Sony, and with fewer hands in the pot the margins can be shrunk. Unfortunately for Microsoft, using off-the-shelf parts from different manufacturers ensured that they needed the cooperation (and credits) from different companies. Nvidia, for example, gets a cut on the sales of the hardware, not from the software like ATI gets from Nintendo. Microsoft similarly needs to use faster hardware in their machines as they aren't exactly console-optimized. The 'Cube, again, can get away with running on much slower (read, cheaper) hardware, because it would be a terrible webserver. Say what you will about the XBox OS, it's hardware and interfaces were not originally developed with gaming in mind.
On the other hand, the success of the PS2 can probably be traced to GT3, GTA, Square, Metal Gear Solid 2, Onimusha, and a host of must-have games that were released before the Xbox hit its stride. People buy games and hardware to play those games, not hardware and games to play on that hardware.
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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..
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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...