Home Gaming The Origin of the Three Red Lights Revealed

The Origin of the Three Red Lights Revealed

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redringOrigin.jpg

Now I know that many of you believe that when an Xbox 360 experiences “the red ring of death”, the source of the problem is Satan himself. Some large brained folks from the land of the free and the home of the Big Mac are saying that they have found the actual source of the issue.

EETIMES.com reports that “in an unlikely venue at Design Automation Conference here, Bryan Lewis, research vice president and chief analyst at Gartner, disclosed that the problem started in a graphic chip. Lewis offered this offhand revelation while discussing the changing ASIC and ASSP landscape for his DAC audience.

You can read the article yourself if you like, but it there is a lot of industry jargon that most people aren’t interested in. So I am going to explain it in simpler terms.

In an attempt to save bajillions of dollars, the graphics chips in the 360 were designed without going through what is called an ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) vendor. ASIC’s are created when something is being made for a specific use and not for general purpose. A good example is the chipsets used in cell phones.

It seems that it is due to this major short-cut that was taken the chips weren’t designed properly, which led to Microsoft losing $1 billion dollars.

Shame on Microsoft (and possibly ATI), I am glad that they suffered huge losses because of this. If they weren’t trying to save some bucks on the side they would have been better off and all of their customers wouldn’t have been messed around so badly.

It really is discomforting to know that huge companies with so much money still go out of their way to cut corners so that they can increase profits, leaving their customers with problems that never should have happened. This has been a big blow to Microsoft and it seems that they have no one to blame but themselves.

source: EE times

Last Updated: June 11, 2008

5 Comments

  1. The core mantra of any profit-maximizing organisation (regardless of size) is: ‘keep expenses low and profits high (and not at a cost to the customer’. Microsoft were fully justified in taking the actions they did, but blew it by compromising the product in the process.

    Reply

  2. koldFU5iON

    June 11, 2008 at 11:35

    see cheaters never prosper… but I still love my xbox 🙂

    Reply

  3. Gougedeye

    June 11, 2008 at 12:12

    They didn’t lose $1 billion dollars. They lost much, much more. I honestly think if it wasn’t for the MASSIVE RROD negative publicity, the 360 would have had the PS3 for breakfast in this generation.

    Reply

  4. SlippyMadFrog

    June 11, 2008 at 12:38

    I wish we could see some actual figures of the RROD and not estimates. At the moment it’s only guess how much 360s get the RROD.

    Reply

  5. Gazza ZA

    June 11, 2008 at 13:01

    Well atleast thanks to that headstart mircosoft for the first time can actually say overall (by that i mean hardware, games downloads and subs) that they are actually making money of xbox 360.

    Gazza ZA’s last blog post..The Last Remnant ‘Ruler’ trailer HD Video

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