...the PoR was December 2012 for production wafers...The chip, which is still referred to as ‘Oban’, is being run through multiple fabs in very high quantities, too high by more than an order of magnitude to simply be for dev kits. Yields on the chip are said to be something between painfully low...and worse than that. Given the sheer number of wafers Microsoft contracted for, this seems to be both an anticipated problem, and one they have plans to work through. That said, SemiAccurate’s sources are still reporting that there is much work to be done, yields are not even up to “horrid” yet.
One of the things Microsoft seems to be trying is dual or triple sourcing the parts, hoping the elves at one foundry will fix things ahead of the rest. Even if none do, three chances of a breakthrough are better than one. While there is still time to get things right, it takes about 8 weeks to run a hot lot through a fab and analyze the results. If production wafers are really going in this year, the last time a foundry can run a test wafer is about November 1. Anything after that day will not come out of the fab in time for the results to be fed back in to the production chips. That is the technical term for “The XBox Next is going to be delayed”.
Sources on the supply chain side of the console world tell SemiAccurate that there is some slack in the production schedule, six to eight weeks of delay would be possible before the launch would have to be pushed back. That meshes well with what SemiAccurate knows about silicon production times and ODM capabilities. Microsoft insiders tell us that the planned launch date is September 2013, and that is not changing without heads rolling internally.
