The Truth About Last Year's Xbox 360 Recall

chrplace forwards an article in which Gartner's Brian Lewis offers his perspective on what led to last year's Xbox 360 recall. Lewis says it happened because Microsoft wanted to avoid an ASIC vendor. "Microsoft designed the graphic chip on its own, cut a traditional ASIC vendor out of the process, and went straight to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd., he explained. But in the end, by going cheap — hoping to save tens of millions of dollars in ASIC design costs, Microsoft ended up paying more than $1 billion for its Xbox 360 recall. To fix the problem, Microsoft went back to an unnamed ASIC vendor based in the United States and redesigned the chip, Lewis added. (Based on a previous report, the ASIC vendor is most likely the former ATI Technologies, now part of AMD.)"

Comments

Ridiculous

[smackenzie]

ATI and Microsoft developed this chip together over a period of two years. The XBOX 360 GPU has been known since conception as an ATI GPU.

Furthermore, the recall was for overheating in general which -- though unquestionably affected by the GPU -- is a more comprehensive system design failure, not just a single component. (Look at the stability success they have had simply by reducing the size of the CPU.)

I'm looking forward to "Jasper", the code name for the next XBOX 360 mother board that will include a 65 nanometer graphics chip, smaller memory chips and HOPEFULLY a price reduction.

What's going on.....

[ryszards]

Microsoft didn't design the GPU, ATI did, and everyone knows ATI have always been fabless. TSMC are the manufacturer of the larger of the two dice that make up the Xenos/C1 design, and while that die has been revised since for a process node change, it doesn't even appear if that new revision has been used yet (despite it being finished by ATI a long time ago).

Lewis seems to be just plain wrong, which is kind of upsetting for "chief researcher" at a firm like Gartner, especially when the correct information is freely available.

While the cooling solution for the GPU is the likely cause of most of the failures, that's not necessarily the GPU's fault, or ATI's, especially for a fault so widespread.

Re:What's going on.....

[afidel]

Now scaler chip makes a LOT more sense to me than the GPU. Everyone knows ATI was the partner for the GPU and there would be few people in the industry that would call a GPU an ASIC. A scaler chip is very much an ASIC and I can see where MS might decide to do their own scaler chip, but they had no chance of doing their own modern GPU without a partner.

Re:Another Talisman CF

[Anonymous Coward]

What makes you think that it was designed by only software engineers exactly?

I can tell you first hand that a lot of the people on the Xbox hardware team a extremely talented HARDWARE specialists. The way you talk you would think MS locked a bunch of IE developers in a room and didnt let them out until they had designed the chip.

And as for the argument of 'well if they are so talented, why is the chip such a POS?', it is not only software engineers that design shitty hardware. Look at AMD, with the TLB defect in the Phenom chips, is that the fault of the software engineers?

This response may be overkill, but somehow you were modded +5 interesting, but you completely miss the point.

Re:Vote parent up

[i.of.the.storm]

Seriously, I thought it was common knowledge that the GPU was ATI. Don't know how this article even got here.

Re:Vote parent up

[Pete Brubaker]

Both of you are completely right. The alpha dev-stations were Mac G5s with a special ATI reference board in them. Basically a PS_3_0 chip with more registers and instructions. Plus there wasn't even a recall. They only replaced/repaired units that had problems.

Re:yes, go cheap, that's the way

[Hal_Porter]

I don't think you're getting it. Cutting costs is one thing. Cutting corners is another. Cutting costs is fine, but cutting corners implies the product is worse off because of it. Few engineers would say "It'd be cheaper to roll our own graphics chip," because they realize the immense technical challenges involved. They didn't "roll their own graphics chip" from what I can tell. They licensed the IP (the VHDL code or a synthesized core) from someone else. The plan from the start with the XBox360 was that they would do this and try to integrate it all eventually onto one chip. That's the reason they moved from x86 to PPC, because neither Intel or AMD would license their IP and let Microsoft make their own chips. Actually this is the difference between Risc and x86 these days - x86 vendors don't license their IP but Risc vendors do. Since consoles are sold at a loss initially and subsidized by games it's really important to reduce the build costs by doing this. Back in the XBox days most people thought that Microsoft lost out because they couldn't integrate the design into once chip in the way that Sony did with their console. And that was because they didn't own the IP for the processor.

The mistake seemed to be to let Microsoft's in house group do this rather than outsourcing.

But you've got to remember this is an article in EEtimes from an analyst with an agenda
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=51TYZYXYRWUZUQSNDLSCKHA?articleID=208403010
"System OEMs have no business designing ASICs any longer," said Lewis. The reality is that system companies are finding it hard to do enough ASIC designs to keep in-house design teams employed.

Basically he's trying to create business for ASIC design houses by telling people that putting a bunch of licensed IP onto a chip is rocket science and they shouldn't try to do it in house.

Is it really? I honestly don't know. I suspect it depends a lot on the quality of the in house people and the quality of the ASIC design house.

And it depends on what you're trying to do. In the embedded area lots of companies much smaller than Microsoft put an processor and a bunch of their own peripherals onto a chip and it works. I guess that console or PC graphics cores use a lot more power than that. But I don't know if "an ASIC design house" would have done a better job than Microsoft's ASIC group.

Or more to the point, maybe a $1B recall is the price you pay for learning about this stuff. Microsoft can afford it obviously and it will influence how the successor to the XBox360 is done. Whether they hire more engineers and do it in house or outsource it is a business decision it seems. I guess the in house people and the design house will both try to argue for the best option from their point of view and some manager will decide.

But if you're a cash rich company then the bias will be to try to do as much as possible in house, because that gives you more freedom to value engineer later.