I thought the design flaws of the Xbox 360 cooling system had more to do with Microsoft than any inherent design flaw by IBM. I assumed that switching to x86 processors let Microsoft leverage their native developer tools from Windows which helped developers.
"Microsoft did not reveal the cause of the issues publicly until 2021, when a 6-part documentary on the history of Xbox was released. The Red Ring issue was caused by the cracking of solder joints inside the GPU flip chip package, connecting the GPU to the substrate interposer, as a result of thermal stress from heating up and cooling back down when the system is power cycled."
I don't have any solid numbers on me, but I believe early 360s failing wasn't just widespread; it was straight up most of them dying within the first couple years. It's honestly insane they more or less got away with that. And I guess also speaks to how much Microsoft was killing it in that era that people were willing to go through multiple console RMAs (which I heard was a terrible, slow, and unreliable process) to play 360 games. How far they've fallen.
> It is interesting that IBM dominated this generation of consoles, and was vanquished in the next.
IBM's Power was the only logical option at the time.
These consoles were being designed around 2000. Intel and AMD weren't partnering on bespoke CPUs at that time. I don't even think AMD would have been considered a viable partner. Neither had viable 64 bit options and part of console marketing at the time was the ever increasing bit depths.
Prior console generations had use MIPS which wasn't keeping up with ever increasing performance expectations and players like Toshiba and Sony were looking for a higher performance CPU architecture. IBM's Power architecture was really the only option. Sony, Toshiba, and IBM partnered to develop their a new 64 bit microarchitecture called Cell.
Microsoft's first console was basically a PC and that's how everyone saw it. The 360 was an opportunity for Microsoft to show that it could compete with the big boys. It was also an opportunity to keep a toe dipped in RISC, because it had dropped support for RISC CPUs with Windows 2000.
Yeah that part didn't make sense, not to mention that neither the PS3 nor the 360 were running 64-bit software. They didn't have enough memory for it to be worth it.
you don't need memory to make 64 bit software worth it. Just 64 bit mathematics requirements. Which basically no video game console uses as from what I understand 32-bit floating point continue to be state of the art in video game simulations
Fundamentally it's still a memory limitation, just in terms of memory latency/cache misses instead of capacity. If you double the size of your numbers you're doubling the space it takes up and all the problems that come with it.
Voltage glitching. An outside attacker who has direct, extremely fine-grained control over the power supply to the chip can cause it to brown out for one instruction cycle, preventing a result of an instruction from being written.
With enough sophistication, physical access is more powerful than root access, no exceptions.
The high failure rates of the Xbox 360 did not help.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_technical_problems
"Microsoft did not reveal the cause of the issues publicly until 2021, when a 6-part documentary on the history of Xbox was released. The Red Ring issue was caused by the cracking of solder joints inside the GPU flip chip package, connecting the GPU to the substrate interposer, as a result of thermal stress from heating up and cooling back down when the system is power cycled."
It seems like there was a period in time when solder just wasn’t done well, it seems like.
I've heard that flash memory can also be revived with heat, either long duration or high intensity.
https://www.extremetech.com/science/142096-self-healing-self...
IBM's Power was the only logical option at the time.
These consoles were being designed around 2000. Intel and AMD weren't partnering on bespoke CPUs at that time. I don't even think AMD would have been considered a viable partner. Neither had viable 64 bit options and part of console marketing at the time was the ever increasing bit depths.
Prior console generations had use MIPS which wasn't keeping up with ever increasing performance expectations and players like Toshiba and Sony were looking for a higher performance CPU architecture. IBM's Power architecture was really the only option. Sony, Toshiba, and IBM partnered to develop their a new 64 bit microarchitecture called Cell.
Microsoft's first console was basically a PC and that's how everyone saw it. The 360 was an opportunity for Microsoft to show that it could compete with the big boys. It was also an opportunity to keep a toe dipped in RISC, because it had dropped support for RISC CPUs with Windows 2000.
What wasn't viable?
That allowed both a CPU and an advanced GPU to be on the same die.
They also wisely sold Global Foundries, and were able to scale with TSMC.
Previously:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16094925
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27480448
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTFn4UZsA5U
With enough sophistication, physical access is more powerful than root access, no exceptions.