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Microsoft Developing Console Chips
The Cheesecake writes "The New York Times is running an article that says that Microsoft is looking into designing and developing microchips. These will primarily be for the next generation of the Xbox. They also mention it could be used for things like voice recognition. They look to be doing this through a process designed by UC Berkley which makes it possible to reconfigure computer designs without the cost of making finished chips."
I can see it now:
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all!!
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
So now they shaft Intel and AMD.
First it's software, then it's computer chips, then it's robots, then it's...well we all saw Terminator...
In a world of acronyms, the words are the real victims.
far fetch from making software without actually finishing it. Will the chips be shipped and tested by xbox owners?
"No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes scripture." - Learned Hand
Gotta spend that 10-digit R&D budget on something. Anything.
Lots of R&D projects make MSFT look like a buy with growth potential. Competent maintenance of a core business (like Windows or Office) would make it look like Otis Elevator.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
If you've ever browsed through the old Windows C library header files, you notice some "Copyright Berkeley Systems Division" type stuff in there... no surprise that's where they turn!
stuff |
Will their chips turn blue when the console crashes?
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
Another amazing Microsoft Invention
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FPGA
Sun, SGI, DEC and IBM were disappointed in off-the-shelf CPU chips. Sun switched from Motorola to in-house SPARC. SGI bought MIPs to control CPU development. DEC had the most respected chip in the business. Apple used IBMs design. None of these enterprises were considered great commercial successes. Most of the survivors use Intel or AMD now. The big guys can come up with new versions each year or so and catch up to the "boutique" designs.
I wonder if Uncle Bill and Uncle Steve are looking to enforce DRM through hardware or remove (or severely restrict) the ability to mod-chip the next-gen Xbox.
... you will get a new chip delivered every first Tuesday in 'snail mail' with instructions for removing the old chip and soldering and what not on how to install the new chip update due to 'important "critical" security updates".
Oh Yea?
"First it's software, then it's computer chips, then it's robots, then it's...well we all saw Terminator..."
But for a while, we will have to put up with Microsoft Robot, whose face goes entirely blue for no reason at all, which crashes into the wall several times a day, which has trouble obeying you since it is constantly bombarded with commands from all over the world, and which considers the Asimov Laws of Robots as mere recommendations.
Where were you when the voynix came?
Wow, it just struck me that I haven't heard that term since about 1989!
NAI announces a new generation of security products, dubbed "McAfee Microchip Edition Software Suite (MESS) 1.0"
Here come the new hardware induced BSOD's...
Nuns. No sense of humor. -Kurgan
IBM are the odd one out there; Apple fizzled but IBM are still making their own chips; and have plenty of other buyers. And Freescale and AMCC make the same kind of chips. And Xilinx have synthesisable ones. There are lots of options. I don't see the POWER5 market fizzling soon for IBM's own-chip own-servers market, even though they do use Intel and AMD.
"They also mention it could be used for things like voice recognition."
Every time Microsoft introduces another new platform, whether OS, Office, HW, game console, or new executive, they promise voice recognition. Of course they never deliver.
Even the dedicated voice recognition researchers and developers don't have real voice recognition on any HW. MS doesn't do the kind of basic research necessary to move further down the road. And it doesn't even productize the R&D done by others - it copies or buys products from competitors. Or it keeps doing it wrong every time, until expectations are low enough that small improvements are declared victory.
The people who deliver useable voice recognition will work it out in the open telephony world, which has enough focus, money, constraints and momentum to actually get across the threshold to universal, untrained voice recognition that does something limited, but at least as perfectly as humans do.
Next we'll hear that these chips will be good for a "database filesystem"...
--
make install -not war
They will now be called Microhard.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
>>makes it possible to reconfigure computer designs without the cost of making finished chips
Dear Bill,
There are two other ways to "make it possible to reconfigure computer designs without the cost of making finished chips"
1) buy the finished chips from someone else
2) use FPGAs if the design must change on-the-fly or after delivery to customer.
On the other hand, that's what software is for.
You're welcome.
--
Jon
You really wonder? This is obviously the reason to do it. Noone besides NDA-bound game developers will even know how these chips work. This automatically shuts out home-brew developments, mod chips and all that.
What other reason do you think they have spending tons of cash on developing something when better chips already exist?
Until someone mods the Xbox 360, they've effectively removed that ability from it as well. The DVD firmware hack will only let it run copied games, not unsigned code.
None of these enterprises were considered great commercial successes.
.com boom. How many do they have to sell to be a 'great commercial success'?
If you don't call DEC's Alpha chip a 'great commercial success', than what is? Does it still have to be on the market? What chip from the Alpha era is still on the market? They've all been redesigned since.
The only reason the Alpha 'failed' is because DEC's support business was so much more profitable than it's CPU business.
The big guys can come up with new versions each year or so and catch up to the "boutique" designs.
Intel only managed to catch up with the Alpha for two reasons: They stopped coming out with new versions of the Alpha, and Intel implemented patented Alpha designs without a license. It's not really a fair argument to you though, since Alpha wasn't 'boutique', and DEC *was* one of the 'big guys'.
Similarly, SPARC was *the* CPU of the
All the magic is out of CPU design. Lots of people know how to do it, and do it well. The hard part these days is in the manufacturing process, and you can buy that. There is no good reason not to design your own CPU if you can reasonably expect to sell enough of them,
August 9, 2010: Microsoft announced today he first patch for their first microchip, the MSME VID2009 videogame engine core.
The VID2009 chip was recently taped out by the newly formed MS Micro-electronics division. It was widely acclaimed as a new era for MS, altohugh the two analysts still not paid by MS voiced concerns about how the usual Microsoft quality control would not fly with electronic microchips.
MS issued the patch in response to reports about VID2009-equipped videogame consoles spontaneously bursting into flames and cutting users' fingers by snapping the DVD reader door too quickly. The reports have been piling up since 2007. "Since MS bought every other game console maker, it's not like we consumers have a choice", says Gaban Tycho, a self-appointed gaming affair watchdog. "Face it, today's dedicated gamer has either burnt skin patches or missing fingers. Sometimes both. Hey, since you've got fingers, could you open that bottle of burn lotion for me?"
Today's patch is expected to solve these issues, although initial reports show it might introduce other problems: when the voice recognition headset is used and the user pronounces the word "Linux", the patched unit sends 110V AC through the headphones.
The patch is replacing 53 logic gates, changing two nano-instructions and rerouting 12 clock signals inside the VID2009 chip. A small issue might delay the application of the patch, though: It requires replacing the chip itself. An MS spokeperson said that the replacement was covered by the standard MS two-week warranty, but that older units would have to be discarded.
As usual, the MS Patch Police, a team of electronics expert affectionately known as the Blue Squad of Death, will patrol neighborhoods and listen to howls of pain to determine where faulty consoles might be located. Unpatchable units will be shredded at customers' premices. "I hate those guys", Tycho said. "Last time, I stepped on my cat's tail and here came the Blue Squad, ramming through the door. They couldn't find the console so they destroyed the toaster instead."
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Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
They are using a system that allows them to evaluate the performance of different potential designs without actually fabbing a prototype. The Berkeley system is basically a board with a handful of FPGAs (a cheap QuickTurn box).
It's nice to see Microsoft bringing quality to new markets ;). Seriously, Microsoft has to hedge it's bets - Windows and Office may not be cash cows forever. Twenty years from now Microsoft might be like IBM is today - important, influencial and profitable but not the young vigorous company it used to be. Microsoft should go for providing the best standards-based tools and environments it can. I believe that Microsoft place in the future is guaranteed and that at some point in the future they will be selling window managers for X alongside APIs that make everything easy to create and use (C#, XNA, Self configuring and healing networks, etc.). Microsoft's vast cash stores and pool of seventy odd thousand employees represents a major force in computing so don't be surprised when ten years from now you can download GPU updates if you were smart enough to buy a top-notch Microsoft console ;).
Shh.
The only voice recognition command I need is:
when I yell "DAMMIT!!!" at the top of my lungs, I want the OS to gracefully recover from a blue screen of death and automatically save the term paper I've spent ALL NIGHT writing.
(yeah, I know I'm supposed to save often, but you can't tell me it hasn't happened to you, too.)
This automatically shuts out home-brew developments, mod chips and all that.
Sounds good to me. No one needs all that crap. If they wanted it, they wouldn't be buying an Xbox from Microsoft.
You want to home-brew your own games, get a PC.
IBM's PowerPC design is in all the next-gen consoles, PPC was in Tivo too. IBM has a lot of PPC systems in the Top 500 supercomputer list. I wouldn't call PPC a commercial failure. A lot of embedded designs still use ARM variants (Intel's XScale was derived from DEC StrongARM), among others. I think MIPS is used in a lot of embedded systems, take a look at Linksys's WRT54G. When you get away from what you'd call a conventional computer, there are a lot of viable CPU architectures.
I get a good laugh out of all your MS jokes because while you make all those funny posts and bash Microsoft they SELL MORE WINDOWS LICENSES!!!!!
HA HA HA...
Hey, listen, when the water's cold, a certain amount of shrinkage is inevitable...
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
Sun put the dot in dot com.
The console market is (was) great for homebrew, because you could write software that was designed for very specific, well-documented (relatively inexpensive) hardware. Sure, a lot of the homebrew stuff for consoles isn't very good, but there are some real gems -- look at what people have done on the original XBox for examples.
No, YOU want to homebrew your own games, YOU get a PC.
The console market is (was) great for homebrew, because you could write software that was designed for very specific, well-documented (relatively inexpensive) hardware. Sure, a lot of the homebrew stuff for consoles isn't very good, but there are some real gems -- look at what people have done on the original XBox for examples.
That's fine, but they can only do that with the permission of, and at the pleasure of Microsoft. If Microsoft doesn't want them to do it, then they shouldn't be doing it. If they don't like it, then it looks like they shouldn't be buying an Xbox.
Why would you buy something from a company with the intention of modifying it, if the company that made it not only doesn't want you doing that, but has gone to great lengths to make it hard for you to do so? Why would you support someone like that? These restrictions don't exist on PCs.
You can't say all these restrictions are a big surprise. Instead of whining about them, why not stop patronizing a vendor who treats you like crap?
"If you don't call DEC's Alpha chip a 'great commercial success', than what is? Does it still have to be on the market? What chip from the Alpha era is still on the market? They've all been redesigned since."
I'm a huge Alpha proponent, so please understand that when I ask you what the hell you're smoking. Alpha was a monumental "commercial" failure. It was a huge "technological" success, but for many reasons it failed commercially. Heck, Apple sold more G4 Macs in a single quarter than DEC (and Samsung and Mitsubishi) sold Alphas during its entire product life.
Sheesh.
And this isn't to mention that microprocessors these days are so encumbered with patents that you'll need major cross-licensing with every other major manufacturer to avoid spending those next five years in court. What does MS have to offer in return for the licenses? It would take a lot of $$$ for any of them to want to make it easy for another competitor to enter their markets.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I have no problem with vendors trying to implement such things. I also don't buy hardware or software with these "features" added; at least not until someone's already found a solution to the "features".
It occurs to me that the DRM in the XBOX starts at the hardware level. So if MSFT wants to really lock down their systems making their own hardware would be a good place to start.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
The CELL processor. Just notice how successful the Cell already is.
To be honest, Microsoft wants to make a profit, the best way is to do everything in house, but seeing how low the quality of their systems are I don't know if we want them to work on processors? Imagine now you're phone stop working because the processor breaks? That's impossible you say? Well it was rare for a console to stop working before Sony and Microsoft got into the market, and at the same time Nintendo seems to have high quality assurance.
"If they don't like it, then it looks like they shouldn't be buying an Xbox." And if Microsoft don't like it, then it looks like they shouldn't be selling the Xbox to modders. Cos once you sell something,it's not yours anymore!
Sorry, that wasn't directed to you personally, just everyone here in general who thinks they might be getting screwed over by MS because of these new lockdowns.
I can understand wanting to hack devices you buy to add new features. But when the device maker goes this far in trying to prevent the community from doing so, and there's other perfectly viable alternatives out there, it seems like it's time to cut your losses and move on.
Besides, what's wrong with the PC? You mentioned low cost and known hardware, but is that really all that important if you're not developing some super-cutting-edge game that pushes hardware to its limits? You can buy whole PCs now for $400 or less with decent capabilities, and there's lots of other people in the open-source community who have successfully made their own games (3D ones too). If you want to write software, why waste time with a console that's hardwired to keep you out when PCs have no such restrictions?
Hi! I'm Microsoft! I know people are starting to go a little mad about the imminent arrival of the PS3 therefore the Marketing Dept. require you to know that we'll have some simply awesome hardware in the future! So don't be PS3! No! Wait for the Real Emotion Chip (TM)!
(This has been a public service broadcast.)
## NB: Comment here
Wont it be ironic if in 10 years Microsoft is doing what Apple is doing now (selling windows on their own hardware only) and vice versa?
I respect the hell out of the architecture, it's amazingly clean, beautiful. It's what MIPS was meant to be and what I wish PowerPC was a little more like. I think you're crazy if you think it was at all sucessful though. The biggest and best successes that they had was that they were pretty consistently building machines and compilers that could lead the SPEC benchmarks.
If you want to dive deeper in to it and look with a critical eye towards learning from the mistakes, DEC did one really smart thing, they OEMed fairly inexpensive boards (but not inexpensive enough) Try finding a good PowerPC ATX board at any reasonable cost. The 21064 starved, they couldn't feed it with data fast enough. The 21066 was kind of just a joke. The 21064a was one of the more exotic chips you'd ever find with all the cache they could cram in to the thing in any odd way because they learned that the 21064 was starving and clock rate was too high for the rest of the system. The 21264 was much more balanced but they were an also ran by then. The big lesson is you need to deliver the whole package. If you go and spin your own chip in the future, make sure you have all the support chips and you can actally run the thing. They built a raelly great motor but put the first 3 in really shitty cars and by the time they matched the car to the motor the world was in to a different kind of motor.
But Microsoft's chip is so fast, it will make Windows Vista run quickly. Oh wait, nothing is fast enough for that.
...and here I thought you were talking about a delicious new fried potato snack that has the Xbox360 logo on it. Then again, I thought for years that Apple Chips should have the old Macintosh happy computer/person face logo on them...
If all my base are belong to you and I attempt to retrieve my base, does that mean I'm freebasing?
If you don't call DEC's Alpha chip a 'great commercial success', than what is? Does it still have to be on the market? What chip from the Alpha era is still on the market? They've all been redesigned since.
;).
How about, MIPS, x86 or PPC? ARM should probably also qualify, perhaps even bump MIPS off the list
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
Oh shit! They're gonna start making politicians?!?
If this happens, the Republicans will run Clippy and the Democrats will run Bob. Yeah, yeah, you could vote for a human; but nobody will want to "throw their vote away" on a third party.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Microsoft has dabbled in chip manufacture before. After the last fiasco, you'd expect them to have learned their lesson, but noooo...
Back around the time of Direct3D's first release, some "bright" people in Redmond decided they knew the future of PC gaming hardware. Talisman was the code name of their project.
This project so fscked up DirectX that every developer I talked to lamented Microsoft's decision to get into hardware. The Talisman team required the DirectX team to tailor the API to their hardware, which was radically different than anything else on the market. It took multiple generations of DirectX to undo the poor assumptions and ridiculous design decisions made by the Talisman team. Microsoft even adopted OpenGL because of this Talisman-induced DirectX fiasco.
Microsoft should stay out of hardware. Refusal to plan ahead and not thinking a design all the way through can't be covered up in hardware.
and just name themselves HardSoft. Obviously the hardware devision will be called HardHard, the harddrive department will be changed to HardHardHard.
You can't handle the truth.
Once upon a time they did make some hardware ( anyone remember the z80 card? )
If they wanted too, they could make their own line of PC's, and of course vista would run better on them then on the competitors. Bundle them with enterprise agreements... eeek!
Be afraid of this movement, be very afraid.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
For the company that has the widest ranging, most popular OS, it only makes sense for them to make the chips that run them to optimize the process. And, for all those people who complain about Microsoft's products being so crappy... it's probably the same buggers who make the viruses that bring those systems down all the time. A hardware solution is mostly invulnerable to those software threats that have ruined Microsoft's reliability and reputation. If Microsoft didn't have to worry about programming ubersecurity into it's products, it could probably spend more time building a better product. Keep that in mind before you poopoo all of Microsoft's products.
The console market is homebrew-unfriendly all around, but is Microsoft really any worse than anyone else in this regard? Heck, their plans for XNA GSE seem to be downright homebrew friendly, compared to the norm in the console market.
The Sony PSP uses MIPS (and the Nintendo DS ARM, incidentally), so they're still on the market in high-profile products.
An unbelievably strong point, after all ARM is the #1 architecture for general purpose processors - not IA32. As long as your willing to consider all devices and not just desktop/laptop computers. Cell phones world wide use ARM more than any other architecture. PDAs use ARM more than any other architecture, and if your not willing to call these devices computers, then I'm sure you'll agree computers only came into existence in the latter half of the 90s.
When all else fails, try.
Yeah, because when MS is really serious about making something that Just Works, especially a security product, they turn to their industry-leading in-house talent.
My bullshit detector is going wild here. The magic is not all out of cpu designs. If you believe that, well you can go the way of the alpha.
The magic is not out of it. Most of the basics have been covered, that is true, and manufacturing process matters a lot; also true. But the manufacturing process is also not just a matter of "throwing a lot of money at it". However as I'm not as familiar with the manufacturing side of things, I'll stick to the areas I know, like processor design.
If the magic were gone in CPU design, and it was all about manufacturing, why do both ATI and Nvidia compete so heavily, and why can one produce chips faster than the others (although it switches too often for me to care). Sure they may not be general purpose processors, but they're highly important, and they are processors. Additionally while the changes in intels designs may be more on the level of incremental improvements (doubling cores etc) it doesn't mean there's not a lot of research going into it.
Now if you take the narrow mind that the magic in single core superscalare processor architecture is gone, sure. I'll agree with you there. That's a well studied problem. The research community moved on years ago. Simplescalar results no longer mean anything. However their is a large amount of research and development being done in the system design (the system level being restricted to a single chip). Cache-processor(s) interaction, efforts to improve programmability of chips etc etc.
Designing your own chip is a very very risky endeavor, even if you have multiple billions of dollars in the bank like microsoft does. If they manage to pull this off; more power to them. It's a very challenging process, and will not be done by grunts (i.e. it will require roomfuls of PhDs working on various parts of the project. Your comment about being reasonable to design your own... well I tend to disagree. Building the chip used in the xbox360 from scratch would have cost far more money than leveraging the design and knowledge expertise that IBM already had. Plus the chips needed for consoles have nowhere near the volume required to build their own fab. So in that case, that means they would contract out the fab work, and so the whole point is in their design. Sure looks like design is dead to me.
Phil
But does it run Linux? Seriously...come on....
To a noob, root is like a gay bar...and he's wearing assless chaps
remove (or severely restrict) the ability to mod-chip the next-gen Xbox.
This has basically already been done. Everything coming out of the chip is encrypted, with IBM enterprise technology. If they did it themselves, they'd have to come up with their own way. Not saying they can't, but IBM has already proven theirs.
Fortunately, nobody knows how to pronounce "Linux".
Well, Linus does...
But yeah, I guess the VID2009 won't kill you when it hears Lie-noox.
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Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
[adult swim] rocks Lord Adamus ka-kien.
In case anyone is wondering... yes... Microsoft is looking to expand its dominion down into the hardware. As if they didn't already effectively control it through their deals with Intel and the BIOS companies, they actually want to own it.
The coming era of Trusted Computer has lots of tech companies both spooked and slavering with anticipation. They all want Trusted Computing and the control over the customer that it braing, but they all realise that the bottom of the heap (hardware, BIOS, OS) will be able to operate completely in secret and control the whole stack above it. They may control their customers with TC, but they are in turn controlled by those further down the boot process.
Do you ever want to have privacy or control over your own PC again... you need to be a hardware maker, who can also make your own software (see IBM and its major push for Linux).
Watch Microsoft race into the hardware world over the next couple of years.
I work in FPGA. It is now possible to use FPGA for rapid prototyping of your IC, making design changes quite easily. When the design is finalised it is quite easy to get these converted to a structured ASIC. See Altera Corporations Hardcopy. Though I don't agree with the Microsoft invents FPGA sentiment it could be where the parent is coming from.
Absolutely. The ARM processor family has 75% of the market for embedded 32-bit processors.
Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think. --Niels Bohr
Can it be ? NVIDIA being bought by Microsoft ?
What, me? A dirty joke? Never!
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
WGA Processor.
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