Report: The Truth About Last Year's Xbox 360 Recall

EETimes has the scoop on a comment made by an analyst at the Design Automation Conference, where it was claimed that the reason for the three flashing red lights technical problem that affected the Xbox 360 was the consequence of using a GPU designed by Microsoft without using a company that specializes in ASIC design.

EETimes quotes Bryan Lewis, research vice president and chief analyst at Gartner:

The Xbox 360 recall a year ago happened because "Microsoft wanted to avoid an ASIC vendor," said Lewis. Microsoft designed the graphic chip on its own, cut a traditional ASIC vendor out of the process and went straight to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd., he explained.

An ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) vendor is a company that designs integrated circuits created solely for a particular use. In the case of the Xbox 360 GPU, it is not a standard part that other companies use, but instead is it a chip designed solely for the Xbox 360 system.
Lewis explained that this attempt to save money turned out to be a huge mistake for Microsoft and if the company would have used an ASIC vendor from the beginning, it could have avoided the "Red Ring of Death" ("RROD")

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.)

Asked the moral of the story, Lewis said: "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."

Unfortunately, Microsoft has never provided details on the causes of the "Red Ring of Death" ("RROD"), so there’s no way to check the veracity of these claims.

Report: The Truth About Last Year's Xbox 360 Recall - Xbox