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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.)"
it seems that every time some company tries to cut corners, it only ends up biting them in the a. my company does the same thing, and the kludgy results are nothing short of spectacular.
I know /. does like to stick the boot into MSFT whenever possible, but in the last 2 hours there has been 3 front page stories, real stories, about the nasty behaviour of MSFT coming back to bite them in their fugly corporate ass.
Or is it all just a hoax?
Hope not.
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
I had the miss-pleasure of working on a graphics ASIC with MicroSquish back around the late 90's on a project called Talisman.
Never, and I say NEVER let a bunch of software engineers try to design a hardware chip. This was the biggest CF I'd seen in all my years (30+) as a chip designer. That they did it again, and with such stupidity again is no friggin surprise.
It is not that software engineers should not be involved, of course they should but when they drive the architecture in complete void of any practical chip design constraints..... and continually refuse to listen to any reason from the hardware designers..... well as they say, garbage in, garbage out.
"TV, a medium as it is neither rare nor well done." Ernie Kovacs
A variety of problems will contribute to a 3 red ring failure. In my case it appears to have been failure of the video scalar chip. What's odd about it is the magic smoke didn't just escape and fail. No it would occasionally work fine, work broken, and not work. Suggesting a problem from the lead free solder being incorrectly applied. Ultimately leading to failure from thermal fatigue.
Given the lead free solder doesn't have a forgiving (nearly idiot proof) eutectic, and the companies producing the 360 were unfamiliar with lead free solder, it's easy to see how massive defects like this might happen. In retrospect I wonder how the enviromental impact from the increased entropy caused by the design choice of lead free solder would have stacked up against just using solder with lead and avoiding all the mess.
Look at Bunnie Huang's analysis.
The problem wasn't any chip at all. It wasn't even heat. The problem was the chips were not soldered to the board.
http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=223
Doesn't matter who designed or made the chips. If they aren't soldered down, they won't work. And that's what the problem was. That's why X-clamps (mostly) work.
Heat is semi-tangential. If the chip is soldered down, heat won't pop it off and if it isn't soldered, any kind of movement will break it loose, even when cold. This is how MS could ship you replacement units that were RRoD out of the box. They were fine before they were shipped and were broken loose during shipping.
Most of the problem appears to be solderability problems, not a problem with chip design or manufacturing.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
That's because Microsoft forgot a crucial step in designing the chip. They forgot to steal the design. Had they just used their standard operating procedure of innovation, they'd have monopolized the console system by now.
Dunno why Lewis being wrong is upsetting.
Everything I've ever heard as a "Gartner opinion" got one of two reactions from me:
1. Well duh.
2. No, that's obviously wrong.
Looks like this is #2.
The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
Anyone else think it funny that the guy that played Ballmer in that Pirates of Silicone Valley movie is the guy that does the voice for Bender?
The reason GTA4 runs at a lower resolution on the PS3 is because they can do all kinds of nifty effects with the card that aren't all geometry, textures, and shading. They can do a slight motion blur, for example, and have almost everything 100% bump-mapped. In reality, you don't notice that the resolution is slightly lower.
The PS3 COULD run it in 360-resolution, but it might have to sacrifice some of those filters and special effects. I'd rather have a special effect laden game run at slightly lower resolution myself, as long as its hard to notice.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
The reason GTA4 runs at a lower resolution on the PS3 is because they can do all kinds of nifty effects with the card that aren't all geometry, textures, and shading. They can do a slight motion blur, for example, and have almost everything 100% bump-mapped. In reality, you don't notice that the resolution is slightly lower.
:)
Um, this is what PS3 owners like to tell themselves before they start crying at bed time maybe...
However, the PS3 is using a virtually off the shelf core Geforce 7800 GPU. The XBox 360 is using a variant of an off the shelf ATI 2600 (prior to the 2600 GPU ever existing.)
The XBox 360 GPU is a unified GPU and handles all DX10 features and effects, the 7800 GPU DOES NOT. (See DX10 and the specifications for Vista came from the XBox 360 team, this is why Vista can kick some serious FrameRates for games and still be a general consumer OS.)
Sure the PS3 could run in the XBox 360 resolution. However, it would lose FPS, and also increase load times.
Don't forget your precious blu-ray that is so freaking slow the game has to be copied to the PS3 Hard Drive to keep up with the XBox 360 DVD player. (Mircrosoft even kindly gave Sony a heads up the slow nature of both HD-DV and Blu-Ray would be a serious issue for fast playing games that load large worlds virtually. (Most games have 'load screens' which are just hell longer on PS3, GTAIV doesn't have that luxury)
The 'blur' effect you are referring to is what they used on the PS3 title to help 'reduce' how noticeable it was there was no anti-aliasing. (See the XBox 360 is not only doing HD resolutions, but anti-aliasing the scene as well.)
The same 'blur' effect has been used in many other games for a long time when Video cards couldn't handle anti-aliasing, especially PC games. Take City of Heroes even on the PC, nice game, has two direct blur settings for distant objects, as they artifact REALLY BAD when there is no anti-aliasing. So if your card can't do it the right way, you flip on the distance blur and the non-aliased distance artifacts are smudged on the screen. Almost anti-aliased quality, but only works well on distant scenes or where detail can be smudged away.
Now if you really want to try to argue the 'blur' effects are something the XBox 360 can't do, I suggest you go grab a whitepaper on the GPU differences between the 360 and the PS3, and even pick up the whitepapers on the consumer counterparts, the NVidia 7800 and ATI 2600 - trust me when I say there are more than a 'few' features the XBox 360 GPU will do that the older NVidia chip just can't handle.
PS I'm a fan of NVidia, run them in every laptop and most desktops I own, even my old beat around traveling laptop is from 2005 simple early dual-core P4 w/HT and has a 7950GTX mobile GPU... Oh, the funny thing is, that 2005 laptop can run games at a higher FPS than the PS3, and even do it at full 1920x1200. Since even though it is a Mobile GPU, the 7950GTX w/512mb is FASTER THAN THE GPU in the PS3. Hope this makes you sleep better at night...