IGN gamescom award show
After a great deal of pressure, Microsoft tacitly recognized the RRoD epidemic, and announced extended warranty support that would cost the company more than one-billion dollars. Microsoft refused, however, to discuss exactly what had caused so many consoles to fail, noting only that the problem stemmed from a "design issue."
The gaming public, however, was well aware of the truth of the situation after a number of peeps in the modding community opened their broken consoles and found the 360's GPU had run too hot, resulting in warped motherboards, unseated chips, and disconnected heat-sinks. Such evidence was only given greater credential when redesigned Falcon Xbox 360s arrived with a newly beefed up heatsink on the GPU.
Though RRoD failures are now generally a thing of the past after several chipset redesigns on Microsoft's part, the question has long remained as to how Microsoft allowed critically flawed Xbox 360 consoles to reach production, much less become a billion-dollar epidemic. Today, light seems to have finally been shed on the issue, as eetimes.com reports from the Design Automation Conference.
Speaking at the show, Bryan Lewis, research vice president and chief analyst at Gartner, revealed that Microsoft, bucking industry norms in what was hoped to be a cost-saving decision, chose not to seek the input of a traditional ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) vendor in designing the architecture of the 360's GPU. Relying purely upon in-house processor-architecture design expertise (or lack thereof), Microsoft went directly to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co to put the Xbox 360's GPU chips into production.
The result was the mass production of ungainly processors that ran quite inefficiently, generating far more waste heat than expected. According to Lewis, had Microsoft brought an ASIC vendor into the design process, a far more elegant chip architecture would likely have been developed, leading to much cooler-running GPUs for the Xbox 360. Bryan Lewis noted that Microsoft has since developed a new version of the Xbox 360 GPU with the support of an established ASIC vendor, widely thought to be ATI / AMD.
