Software Development
The EE Times provides some interesting details about a problem that, I think, doomed the Xbox 360: When Microsoft Corp. announced a mammoth global recall of its Xbox 360 a year ago, the software giant never disclosed the exact source of the game console's heat problem that led to the fiasco. The Xbox 360 recall a year ago happened because "Microsoft wanted to avoid an ASIC vendor," says Bryan Lewis, research vice president and chief analyst at Gartner. 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. Asked the moral of the story, Lewis said: "Had Microsoft left the graphics processor design to an ASIC vendor in the first place, would they have been able to avoid this problem? "Probably. The ASIC vendor could have been able to design a graphics processor that dissipates much less power." That's not the moral of this story. The moral of this story is, "eventually, hubris always gets you in the end." I recall meeting with the Xbox 360 guys for the first time in May 2005. The person I spent the most time with, Jeff Henshaw, was fantastic, and our meeting resulted in a two-part article, Inside Xbox 360, which may be worth revisiting today. Henshaw aside, I saw some troubling things. First, the Xbox guys were operating like a separate company, which I'm sure seemed like a great idea at the time, located miles away from the main Microsoft campus at a place called Millennium Campus. It's on the edge of the earth if you're familiar with the Redmond area. More important, I recall that my biggest "gotcha" moment that day was when I saw the Xb