Recent content by bkilian

Just the test portion of the team. I don't know if the rest of the team was impacted.

I figured it wasn't intentional. Different companies do testing differently, at Microsoft, until very recently, most testers were just engineers who wrote code that tested product code. In some teams we also contributed code to the product itself, and in other teams, like HD DVD, the test team...

Heh, don't let a Test or QA person hear you insinuate that they don't "take part in the actual development" :) I was a developer in test on the audio team. Very little (but not none) of the code I wrote runs on the actual shipping product, but I helped define and debug the APIs and was one of...

Speech team is separate. We were the same team during Kinect launch, but we got split up right after that. I don't know if the speech team got hit by the layoffs. Part of it is MS is changing their process around testing. Now tests will be written by the developers, who will be expected to test...

Welp... the entire Xbox core audio test team was let go during the MS layoffs last week :(. I'm glad I left when I did, or I would also be looking for a new job now. I don't know what this means for audio support and new uses. I believe the dev team is now expected to test their stuff themselves...

There was no 2 SKU system in the PS3. The PS3 launched with a single hardware SKU (ignoring hard drive size), and then later _removed_ functionality from a new SKU. Removing functionality, especially BC functionality is significantly cheaper to do than adding functionality. They stopped...

Aah, you appear to be under the impression that the console manufacturer has infinite resources and can just easily absorb all the design, manufacturing and test cost for adding a new sku with what would have to be significant hardware differences and huge software differences. I too would like...

I suspect cheap came up in most of the decisions. RAM prices stay relatively the same or drop slowly, process reduction can cause much larger decrease in cost per chip. So maybe they went with eSRAM because it will share in the process cost reduction. I don't know the reasons. I do know eSRAM...

Voice commands don't use the 10% reserve. Some of that reserve is, however, used by snapped apps. I imagine it's a pretty small portion though. 10% reserve is about half a 360's worth of graphics.

Um, if you get to pick and choose, you can make anything a pattern. Pyramid of Khufu, Aztec Pyramid, Luxor Hotel. I think I see a pattern here. Triangle, square, pentagon. I think I see a pattern here. 3DO, Pippin, Laser Active. I think I see a pattern here.

They are general purpose DSPs with some custom instructions.

There are a couple of gotchas to the Jaguar SIMD/FP pipeline. It doesn't have a FMADD, which can increase the instruction count for some loads, and while they have more than double the number of units, they have half the clock speed. The theoretical top FP performance of an 8 core Jaguar is...

Haha! I have no idea. 58 was STE, so testers who can't code. QA-types. When I started at MS, levels started at 9 or 10, and that was entry level coder. Then in 2000 or so it got changed to the current numbers, with each of the previous levels being divided in two, and entry level coder being...

No idea, I wasn't part of the decision making. I know our audio guy fought for a dedicated DSP to do reverb and FFT, but the speech team jealously guarded their two cores.

He is a director level employee. That's somewhere around level 68. Entry level programmers are level 59. Senior level are 63. Principal is 65. Above that lies dragons and ridiculous stock awards.