Xbox 360 Motherboard In-Depth

jshaped writes "As a follow-up to their previously popular article, Anandtech has posted an in-depth look at the Xbox 360 motherboard. The IBM cpu core looks massive, and check out the ATI gpu with 2 dice on the package." From the article: "The original Xbox featured a 4-layer Intel motherboard, but given the incredible power requirements of the CPU and GPU on the Xbox 360's motherboard we would be astonished if the same were true today. Luckily with any console, especially early on in their life, you are getting a true bargain when it comes to the cost of hardware - so the number of layers on this PCB doesn't matter much to the end user, as Microsoft will absorb all costs above and beyond the core system's $299 price tag."

Comments

Re:True costs?

[ivan256]

Microsoft has to be eating a ton of the cost for every console sold.

Doubtful.

Looking at the parts shown in this article, it doesn't seem that the price is far outisde the $350 range*. Really, the only super-expensive parts are the CPU and GPU, and recent articles have shown that custom high performance silicon in recent years costs considerably less to produce than analysts had been predicting. Plus they're using cost saving techniques like splitting components out onto multiple dies to improve yields. Add to that the the best economies of scale when manufacturing these things comes early due to the pre-release inventory build-up, and it seems to me that if they're not turning a profit on the average costs between the core and premium models, they will be soon.

(* $150 CPU (inc. heat sink, etc...), $50 memory (probably over estimating given how cheap GDDR3 is supposed to be and how cheap GDDR3 graphics cards are), $10 DVD-ROM, $100 GPU (again, maybe over-estimating), $40-80 packaging, glue logic, etc...)