BW: Inside IBM's Xbox Chip

pipo

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Big Blue offers a sneak peak at the powerful chip at the heart of Microsoft's next-generation gaming console...

...To prove its chipmaking mettle, IBM is showing what its new Xbox chip is made of -- literally -- on Oct. 25. the outfit will make the disclosure at the Fall Processor Forum, an annual gathering of chip engineers taking place Oct. 25-26 in San Jose, Calif...

...Microsoft, in a bid to get its next-generation gaming console on the market before Sony's PlayStation 3, held suppliers to tight deadlines. IBM's Comfort said the company sped up its development cycle to meet Microsoft's demanding timetable. IBM's Engineering Technology Services unit kicked development into high gear, cutting a process that would have normally taken 30 to 36 months down to 24 months. That meant making sure there were no mistakes made along the way. "We paid extremely close attention to detail in our design practices," Comfort says...

Etc. etc: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/oct2005/tc20051025_898864.htm
 
So IBM's Fishkill and Chartered in Singapore are both fabbing the CPU's as of right now. Microsoft shouldn't have problems with having enough CPU's. The amount GPU's TSMC can churn out is what will limit the amount of consoles produced. How difficult of a process it is in combining the NEC eDRAM part and the TSMC fabbed Xenos together is an intresting question.

For obvious geographic reasons I'm sure Microsoft would rather the bulk of the CPU's to come from Chartered. Kind of funny making a CPU at Fishkill to just end up shipping it to the other side of the world, which will just be shipped all the way back.
 
Brimstone said:
How difficult of a process it is in combining the NEC eDRAM part and the TSMC fabbed Xenos together is an intresting question.
I've no idea what the failure rate is of attaching flipchips to OLGA substrates, but since this tech is the better part of a decade old it isn't going to be a BIG problem that's for sure.

For obvious geographic reasons I'm sure Microsoft would rather the bulk of the CPU's to come from Chartered. Kind of funny making a CPU at Fishkill to just end up shipping it to the other side of the world, which will just be shipped all the way back.
AMD manufactures their CPUs in Germany, then have them assembled/packaged in Singapore, or some other far-eastern place...
 
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051025/ap_on_hi_te/xbox_processor

The IBM-built chip features three customized PowerPC computing engines that can each handle two simultaneous tasks at clock speeds greater than 3 gigahertz. It was customized for Microsoft in less than 24 months from the original contract.

But the Cell processor, which is expected to be deployed in devices beyond the PlayStation, is fundamentally different from the Xbox chip, said Ilan Spillinger, director of the IBM Design Center for Xbox 360.

"We took a general purpose core ... and we implemented a few more instructions that were key for them to accomplish the performance (Microsoft) was looking for," he said.

IBM also incorporated high-speed connection between the microprocessor and the Xbox's graphics processor developed by ATI Technologies Inc. The graphics hardware can read directly from what's stored on the primary processor's onboard memory.
IBM will discuss the new custom chip Tuesday at the Fall Processor Forum, which is being held this week in San Jose.
 
In all truth they're probably having chips fabbed at Fishkill (and Chartered, an IBM partner fab) because IBM had significant leverage in the initial contract in determining where Microsoft would fab the 360 chip. IBM indeed does not have the best reputation as a fab, and I can only imagine their prices are higher than a job at one of the Taiwanese fabs would have been, but IBM surely wanted more out of this deal than just a chip design contract.

Anyway I'm looking forward to the presentation - hopefully we get some full reporting/coverage today.
 
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