A year ago I posted about what I went thru when my Xbox 360 got the Red Ring of Death. At the time Microsoft would not say what the problem was other then saying it was a design issue. If you read my post about the RRoD you will see alot of comments with people having the same problem. Now it turns out that we may have the answer to what the hell is going on.
At EETimes.com they have a story about Bryan Lewis, research vice president and chief analyst at Gartner, and what he found out. It seems that the problem is the graphic chip that Microsoft designed on its own. Now why would a software company design there own graphic chip? To save millions. Of course in the end it cost them a lot more then they were tring to save but what the hell, good try.
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.)
The best quote from Bryan Lewis is this.
When it was pointed out that Microsoft still has its own semiconductor technology group that is still designing various chips, Lewis responded, “How many ASICs per year does Microsoft design? Not many” compared to experienced ASIC/ASSIP vendors.
I still have not read about millions of PS3’s crashing.
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And there is what some alternative? ;)
And who pays for them trying to save money. Us!!!
From what I understand they knew about a lot of the problems beforehand but just decided to release it anyway. I do feel for the people that that have bought there’s and it’s gone faulty