Comment by chasil
8 hours ago
It is interesting that IBM dominated this generation of consoles, and was vanquished in the next.
The high failure rates of the Xbox 360 did not help.
8 hours ago
It is interesting that IBM dominated this generation of consoles, and was vanquished in the next.
The high failure rates of the Xbox 360 did not help.
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.
The main issue was revealed to be solder.
"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."
And there was the same problem with early PS3s, on Nvidia's GPU package...it was a fairly widespread problem at the time.
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Sounds like the 2012(?) Macbook Pro after the switch to leadless solder (?). I had to cook my motherboard 3 times in the oven to revive it.
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When did the industry transition to different/lead free solders? Wonder if that was part of the issue?
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Sony stuck with Cell even longer and it locked them into a decade of weird ports and missed optimization tricks, so "vanquished" cuts both ways.
It did not help that the performance of the Xbox 360 CPU (and Cell) was terrible. In-order execution without the crazy-high frequencies the CPU was designed for was a failure.
> 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.
By the way, the AMD athlon 64-bit launched 2003. The PS3 launched in 2006. I had an AMD64 bit process in my laptop in 2005.
What wasn't viable?
They would have started designing the systems in 2003, and one of the first choices is CPU partner.
Do you trust the new line of CPUs that just launched that year?
Because consoles don't use off-the-shelf CPUs for many reasons. Neither Intel nor AMD of that time would even consider making a bespoke CPU for Sony or MS.
Even they could use off-the-shelf SKU it wouldn't be viable - neither one had one that fits in power envelope (not that it helped xbox...)
I have some confidence that AMD's acquisition of ATI had a huge impact.
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.
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.
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You have to remember that the AMD and Intel of today are very different companies than they were 20-25 years ago. AMD split off it's fab capabilities, acquired ATI, adopted TSMC as a fab, and developed a custom silicon business.
At that time AMD wasn't in the custom CPU business, AMD64 was a new unproven ISA, and x86 based CPUs of that time were notoriously hot for a console. These were also some of the reasons why Microsoft moved away from the Pentium III it had used in the original Xbox.
The PS3 was launched in 2006 but the hardware design was decided years earlier to provide a reference platform for the software.