Xbox 360 Song

Any Donkey, Jr., has sent his Xbox 360 back for repairs twice . . .

Game console failure rates

SquareTrade reports that Microsoft's Xbox 360 has experienced a failure rate of 16.4% and Sony's PlayStation 3 fails about 3% of the time.

That has to hurt.

Donkey Note:
Microsoft has replaced its gear twice for Any Donkey, Jr., both following the appearance of three red lights flashing on the power display. On both occasions, the arrival of a shipping box was within two business days and then a turnaround of about two weeks.

The News

DigiTimes Bits+Chips:

With Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3 (PS3) new-generation game consoles priced below their component costs, the game console vendors are aggressively preparing to migrate chief components to 65nm production in order to help shrink the gap between retail prices and costs.

DigiTimes Bits + Chips:

Hynix Semiconductor pulled off a double upset in the DRAM market with a remarkable increase in shipments causing it to rise to the second rank for both the fourth quarter and for all of 2006, up from third previously, according to iSuppli.

EETimesUK Online:

Chip market growth in 2007 will be 7 percent according to Bruce Diesen, an analyst with Terra Securities ASA, who made his prediction after seeing relatively weak numbers for December from the Semiconductor Industry Association. There is a general consensus among analysts that the first half 0f 2007 will be weaker than normal seasonality would suggest and that growth is set to occur predominantly the second half. The timing of the turnaround from a mild dose of inventory burn-off is likely to have major effect on the growth numbers for 2007.

Ars Technica:

Sony's games division may have taken its hard knocks lately in the press and in sales figures, but the company is determined to turn things around. To that end, the company is planning a two-pronged attack: price cuts on the Playstation 3 console and a marketing surge promoting the Playstation Portable's Internet features.

HT Pinehurst Joe

IBM to cash in on its chips

While Intel and AMD focused on a perceived need for speed, IBM followed an path of multi-core design and partnerships. IBM chips are in Wii, Xbox 360 and Sony Playstation 3 and it hopes to parley its recent success into billions of dollars over the next decade. Part of IBM's hope hinges on the Cell processor.

"From a technological perspective, we still have a tremendous amount of upside," said Bernie Meyerson, chief technologist for IBM's systems group. "We've only gone down this road one turn."

IBM is working with other companies, such as Mercury Computing Systems Inc., to adapt Cell and other chips for their own new devices. Cell powers a line of IBM servers and is being used in a supercomputer for the Los Alamos nuclear lab. Toshiba plans to use the chip in TVs.

However, even with Cell's performance boosts, it could have limited paths into other systems unless IBM can encourage many software developers to create applications that take advantage of Cell's unusual architecture.

Read an interesting article about IBM linked here at the Baltimore Sun.