ATI's progress on the 360 chip
A few months ago I discovered that a customer at my store works at ATI. Needless to say over the last few months I've asked him how things were going on the Xbox 360 front. He wasn't able to say much in terms of specifics prior to the official unvieling of the system but since then he's been able to give me some interesting tidbits. Today's was very intriguing...
Today when he came in I asked him if they were still busy on the 360 chip or whether they were basically done, having handed off the final design. He said they are still working very hard and in fact there were still some final specification decisions being made.
How so, I ask? Now I am not hugely knowledgable about chip design and manufacturing so forgive my layman's translation of what he told me. Apparently the yield on chip production is much higher than they had expected, and consequently they have the option to make a decision about the spec to shoot for.
Now I was under the impression that when they manufature the big "wafer" (I hope that's the right term) of chips that basically some percentage worked properly and some percentage did not and was thus junk. But he explained that in fact that it's more the case that a certain percentage of chips will work at the intended clock speed but that some of the others will work, but at a lower clock speed. These "slower" chips can still be used. They can be sold as slower, less expensive graphics card. Of course in the case of a console only those chips that meet the minimum specification can be used and the rest are useless for the consoles.
But apparently the yield is so much higher than they expected they basically can shoot for a higher clock speed and still achieve the yield they planned for. So instead of 500 Mhz (forgive me if I've gotten the units wrong...I am a layman here) they can possibly aim for 600 Mhz and still get the same yield they were shooting for originally. Alternatively, they could stick at the originally planned clock speed and simply have a higher percentage of useful chips and thus lower the cost per unit.
Clearly, either result is beneficial to Microsoft. The question is: which will MS choose? Faster chips or lower cost pre chip?
Anyway, just thought I'd pass that on. It would appear that things are going well on the ATI front.
