August 24, 2007 for those who don't have kids to advise them of the latest technology news: Microsoft has been experiencing problems with their new Xbox 360 my understanding is that the Microsoft strategy is to practically give away the Xbox hardware at cost seeking to make a fortune selling game software for it (Microsoft is a software company) Xbox 360 hardware problems have been causing financial losses Xbox 360 hardware originally was sold with the standard 90 warranty; however because of hardware malfunction problems they extended the warranty to one year in 2006, and has now again announced another extension to 2 years; with writedowns of over one billion dollars to cover repair costs repaired units have had epoxy underfill added to the Central Proccessing Unit (CPU) and Graphics Processing Unit(GPU), as well as a new GPU heatsink, which might indicate overheating and thermal cycling problems. Xbox 360 photo there also exists speculation of difficulty in trying to comply with the new lead-free solder joint requirements lead is a rather soft metal, without lead the solder joints would be more brittle; and broken solder joints would be a significant electrical problem the concept of "relativity" pertains to the stock market same as it does to the entire universe though, one should view Microsoft's one billion dollar warrantee writedown in a context of such huge costs being relative to their earnings stream; Microsoft reported earnings of more the 50 billion dollars last year, and has a stack of corporate cash of more then 20 billion dollars. they will suvive the Xbox 360 hardware problems, and remember, Microsoft is a software company, if they are able to fix the hardware problems, and if they have software game titles ready, well, year end holiday season could be a profitable time for such products competitor video game hardware platforms are: the Nintendo Wii (in the United States demand still outpaced supply as of June 2007) and Sony Playstation3 (PS3) which features Blu-ray Disc the size of video games keeps increasing, they will no longer fit on a CD, and eventually the larger capacity DVDs will run into capacity limits; Blu-ray Discs offer higher storage capacity then DVD try buying a Blue-ray disc player for your television and you will realize the bargain price of the Playstation 3 as of November 2006: it costs Sony $805.85 to build a 20GB PS3 system ($840.35 for the 60 GB version) which amounts to a loss of $250 for each unit sold Sony Losing Almost $250 per Console it reportedly costs Microsoft $323.30 to manufacture Xbox 360 which sells for $400 (not inclunding warrantee repair costs) anyone who has kids interested in PC video gaming realizes that it requires a high performance PC computer to be able to run the latest popular computer games; its rather mind boggling the quantity of mathematics involved in computer generation of 3D Graphics the Sony PlayStation 3 CPU is based upon a seven core version of the IBM designed Cell microprocessor with graphics processing performed by by NVIDIA RSX the IBM Cell microprocessor is a story in itself most computers now have multiple processing units, and some technologically savvy persons see computer architecture such as the IBM Cell as being the future direction of computers the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is exploring the possibilities of connecting together large quantities of such high performance (and low cost) computer game hardware to create supercomputer clusters

this webpage was last updated on: August 24, 2007