Inside IBM's Xbox Chip -- Posted by XanTium on October 25 00:27
From businessweek.com:
IBM is keen to improve its reputation for manufacturing semiconductors after Apple earlier this year said it would begin using chips from Intel starting in 2006.
To prove its chipmaking mettle, IBM is showing what its new Xbox chip is made of -- literally -- on Oct. 25. (tomorrow) 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.
The [Xbox] chip was developed specifically for Microsoft, and as such IBM won't sell it to any other customers. That's in contrast to the arrangement for IBM's Cell Processor, which is going into Sony's PlayStation 3 console but is also being used in other specialty computer systems.
Analyst Kevin Krewell of Instat/MDR, which is hosting the Fall Processor Forum, says the new IBM chip shares much of its lineage with the Cell Processor and other chips in the PowerPC family that have come before. "The basic core at the heart of this chip is very similar to that in the Cell Processor," Krewell says. "There's definitely some design re-use going on here."
Microsoft loses money on every first-generation Xbox it sells. New versions of the product will be managed with a much closer attention to cost. "IBM was given a size and a cost to shoot for, and IBM put as many cores in and as much performance as it could in within those boundaries," says Krewell.
IBM's Vice-President James 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.
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