360 Red Ring of Death explained.....

Wheezer

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Nov 2, 1999
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The mystery behind the Xbox 360's infamous 'Red Ring of Death' problem, which has been bricking consoles left, right and center since it launched in 2005, has finally been unraveled.

Speaking at the Design Automation Conference in California, Bryan Lewis, research VP and chief analyst at Gartner, said that the reason Microsoft was forced to admit 360's hardware fault and conduct a $1 billion recall was because it wanted to manufacture the 360's graphic chip itself, rather than paying a third party.

"Microsoft wanted to avoid an ASIC vendor," said Lewis. Microsoft designed the GPU itself, cut a traditional ASIC vendor out of the process and went straight to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, he explained.

But in the end, by going cheap MS ended up paying more than $1 billion in its 360 recall.

To try and fix the problem, said Lewis, the platform holder went back to an unnamed ASIC vendor and redesigned the chip. According to him, it was probably ATI.

"Had Microsoft left the graphics processor design to an ASIC vendor in the first place, would they have been able to avoid this problem? Probably. The ASIC vendor could have been able to design a graphics processor that dissipates much less power."

We're sure it won't make the same mistake twice...
.

 

StevenYoo

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Jul 4, 2001
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so does this mean that newer 360 consoles will have this newly designed GPU and will therefore RRoD less often?
 

HannibalX

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May 12, 2000
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I don't see how trying to complete a project in house and pay your own employees to do the job is somehow worse than outsourcing the job to some other company.

Their design had a problem that had to be corrected. They aren't the first company to "not get it right on the first try".

Console wars are stupid. The "fans" fighting them are even worse.
 

aphex

Moderator<br>All Things Apple
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Originally posted by: Pale Rider
I don't see how trying to complete a project in house and pay your own employees to do the job is somehow worse than outsourcing the job to some other company.

Their design had a problem that had to be corrected. They aren't the first company to "not get it right on the first try".

Yea, but it seems they were trying to do something in-house that had been semi-perfected by third party companies, specifically how to design around the massive heat produced by the chips. Sure they didn't get it right on the first try, but thats the benefit going with someone who's done it before, they already went through all the problem phases themselves.
 

bobsmith1492

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Feb 21, 2004
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That doesn't make sense... if the graphics ASIC was flaky, wouldn't it just tend to lock up until it was restarted? ASICs are pure ROM, right, so the internal code would be the same no matter what happened while it was running.

I suppose they could be poorly enough designed to be damaged physically while running via overheating or something.

Still, like Pale Rider says, designing a chip on your own instead of having someone else do it is not cutting corners. It's simply using the resources you have more efficiently unless they actually cut corners on the chip design itself.
 

HannibalX

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May 12, 2000
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Originally posted by: aphex
Originally posted by: Pale Rider
I don't see how trying to complete a project in house and pay your own employees to do the job is somehow worse than outsourcing the job to some other company.

Their design had a problem that had to be corrected. They aren't the first company to "not get it right on the first try".

Yea, but it seems they were trying to do something in-house that had been semi-perfected by third party companies, specifically how to design around the massive heat produced by the chips. Sure they didn't get it right on the first try, but thats the benefit going with someone who's done it before, they already went through all the problem phases themselves.

I suppose nVidia should just buy their chips from ATi then since ATi has been in business longer.
 

aphex

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Jul 19, 2001
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Originally posted by: Pale Rider
Originally posted by: aphex
Originally posted by: Pale Rider
I don't see how trying to complete a project in house and pay your own employees to do the job is somehow worse than outsourcing the job to some other company.

Their design had a problem that had to be corrected. They aren't the first company to "not get it right on the first try".

Yea, but it seems they were trying to do something in-house that had been semi-perfected by third party companies, specifically how to design around the massive heat produced by the chips. Sure they didn't get it right on the first try, but thats the benefit going with someone who's done it before, they already went through all the problem phases themselves.

I suppose nVidia should just buy their chips from ATi then since ATi has been in business longer.

Thats far from what I was trying to say. Did Microsoft built the chips for the original xbox in house? (serious question, I don't know)

EDIT: Looks like nVidia made the original xbox GPU - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox
 

HannibalX

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May 12, 2000
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Originally posted by: aphex
Originally posted by: Pale Rider
Originally posted by: aphex
Originally posted by: Pale Rider
I don't see how trying to complete a project in house and pay your own employees to do the job is somehow worse than outsourcing the job to some other company.

Their design had a problem that had to be corrected. They aren't the first company to "not get it right on the first try".

Yea, but it seems they were trying to do something in-house that had been semi-perfected by third party companies, specifically how to design around the massive heat produced by the chips. Sure they didn't get it right on the first try, but thats the benefit going with someone who's done it before, they already went through all the problem phases themselves.

I suppose nVidia should just buy their chips from ATi then since ATi has been in business longer.

Thats far from what I was trying to say. Did Microsoft built the chips for the original xbox in house? (serious question, I don't know)

EDIT: Looks like nVidia made the original xbox GPU - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox

Maybe you weren't saying that but your line of thinking points in that direction.

Microsoft wanted to complete the project in house. They thought they could do the best job. Simple.

Did it turn out how they wanted, no, but sometimes you have to try anyway.
 

frostedflakes

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Mar 1, 2005
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Sounds like cutting corners to me, but at least they admitted their mistake and have corrected the problem. They probably could have played dumb, but I think with a 40% or whatever it was failure rate, most people were suspecting this was a design flaw of some sort.
 

aphex

Moderator<br>All Things Apple
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Jul 19, 2001
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Originally posted by: Pale Rider
Originally posted by: aphex
Originally posted by: Pale Rider
Originally posted by: aphex
Originally posted by: Pale Rider
I don't see how trying to complete a project in house and pay your own employees to do the job is somehow worse than outsourcing the job to some other company.

Their design had a problem that had to be corrected. They aren't the first company to "not get it right on the first try".

Yea, but it seems they were trying to do something in-house that had been semi-perfected by third party companies, specifically how to design around the massive heat produced by the chips. Sure they didn't get it right on the first try, but thats the benefit going with someone who's done it before, they already went through all the problem phases themselves.

I suppose nVidia should just buy their chips from ATi then since ATi has been in business longer.

Thats far from what I was trying to say. Did Microsoft built the chips for the original xbox in house? (serious question, I don't know)

EDIT: Looks like nVidia made the original xbox GPU - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox

Maybe you weren't saying that but your line of thinking points in that direction.

Microsoft wanted to complete the project in house. They thought they could do the best job. Simple.

Did it turn out how they wanted, no, but sometimes you have to try anyway.

Well thats taking it to a bit of an extreme. When both ATI and nVidia started making chips, heat was never as big of an issue as it is today. I had early video cards from both and they had small passive heatsinks, don't even think they had a fan. Point being, things have changed quite a bit since that time.
 

randomlinh

Lifer
Oct 9, 1999
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Originally posted by: Pale Rider
Console wars are stupid. The "fans" fighting them are even worse.
What does this have anything to do w/ why we see the RRoD?

Anyway, it's not exactly cutting corners... just trying to save a buck or two thinking "no problem, we can do this." This is almost how every DIY project I start goes =P

I view cutting corners would be more along the lines of using questionable capacitors, or having an iffy company manufacture the chips. But that's all semantics.

Hopefully this gets fixed asap (wasn't it suppose to be by now....).


 

Parasitic

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Aug 17, 2002
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How is this cutting corners? Cutting corners would be things like using a lower grade silicon, cheaper plastics, crappy manufacturers, etc.
Maybe MSFT wanted to handle the graphics chip design themselves so maybe the whole R&D process will be more streamlined? And maybe if MSFT also wanted to diverge its footings to other home electronics market like maybe TV or even PC hardware and thought that this could somewhat motivate the startup of that new department?
 

Acanthus

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Aug 28, 2001
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They got taken to the cleaners on die shrinks by Nvidia for the Xbox, hence their hesitance to do it again with the 360.

I couldve sworn the RRoD was already explained by Microsoft as the motherboard warping due to excess heat generated by an insufficient cooling design.

If im remembering right, the new consoles would be defect free as they have recently gone with 65nm CPUs and GPUs, reducing the heat output of the console dramatically.

This article is strange because it says they may have outsourced to ATI to fix the defect... ATI doesnt have an in house fab, their GPUs are manufactured by TSMC... the same company that makes the Xbox 360 chip. It is also well known that ATI was contracted to design the original Xbox 360 chip, and that microsoft was manufacturing it through TSMC.

So i think the article is fundamentally wrong.
 

wwswimming

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Jan 21, 2006
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it wanted to manufacture the 360's graphic chip itself, rather than paying a third party.

probably all MS had to do was listen to the engineers.

on that entire development team, there was probably one or
more who said, "hey, we have to heatsink this thing more
aggressively".

if they hired a design firm to do the case, there were
probably some engineers there who did the same thing,
but may have been ham-strung by "marketing considerations" -
the customer (MS) wanted it a certain way.
 

imported_Baloo

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Feb 2, 2006
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Originally posted by: Pale Rider
I don't see how trying to complete a project in house and pay your own employees to do the job is somehow worse than outsourcing the job to some other company.

Their design had a problem that had to be corrected. They aren't the first company to "not get it right on the first try"."

Des not seem too dificult to fathom for me. Microsoft is a software company. Designing GPU's is not one of their specialties, it's not even anything they've done before. The ASIC vendors have much more and better resources for designing such things. I would think it would be a no brainer to see that ASIC companies know more about designing and manufacturing such chips than a software company. Oh, as was pointed out in the OP's post, It cost Microsoft a lot of money dealing with their flawed design, and they still ended up paying a third party to fix the design. So it cost them much more than it would have had they done that in the first place. Are you still having trouble seeing "how trying to complete a project in house and pay your own employees to do the job is somehow worse than outsourcing the job to some other company"?
 

ElFenix

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Mar 20, 2000
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Originally posted by: Pale Rider
I don't see how trying to complete a project in house and pay your own employees to do the job is somehow worse than outsourcing the job to some other company.

Their design had a problem that had to be corrected. They aren't the first company to "not get it right on the first try".

it's something MS has little, if any, experience with. certainly not with a processor that large and power hungry. sometimes you have to walk before you design A380s.