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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.)"
"HOPEFULLY a price reduction" - your hope is in vain.
Considering Microsoft is a software company and hardly a hardware company (most of their keyboards/mice the only non-gaming hardware sold under their name are produced by other people) so seeing their GPU fail is nothing spectacular...
I'm such an idiot that I didn't even take a moment to realise what GP was getting too...
Give him his troll rating. There are some hardware engineers at microsoft. We all make mistakes. Cut 'em some slack. I didn't think MS had any hardware engineers working on it, or at least not forming the bulk... But then I remembered the cash and how stupid I can be.