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.
Would need "(2018)" in the title.
unrelated, but recently XBox One was hacked for the first time
How does XBox get hacked when it uses Secure Boot?
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.
Sobre calentamiento
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.
I seem to recall baking PC nvidia GPU boards in your oven was a reasonably common out-of-warranty fix around that era.
I had to do this with my MacBook Pro models early 2015 and late 2017.
It seems like there was a period in time when solder just wasn’t done well, it seems like.
Simple answer: Halo 3.
Family got first gen 360. Still works to this day. We hit the jackpot with that console. It out lasted 2 wiis and a ps2
Whenever we lost a 360 we got a pre owned 360 from gamestop. I think they went for like $70 for one without any hdd.
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.
Some macbook hacks involved disabling sleepmode, running a benchmark and putting it in a pile of blankets for a few hours
When did the industry transition to different/lead free solders? Wonder if that was part of the issue?
Yeah, it was the transition to RoHS.
> 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?
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.
Parts of the 360 did. The hypervisor ran in 64bit mode, and use multiple simultaneous mirrors of physical address space with different security properties as part of its security model.
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.
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.
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.