Microsoft Developing Console Chips 129
The Cheesecake writes "The New York Times is running an article that says that Microsoft is looking into designing and developing microchips. These will primarily be for the next generation of the Xbox. They also mention it could be used for things like voice recognition. They look to be doing this through a process designed by UC Berkley which makes it possible to reconfigure computer designs without the cost of making finished chips."
Voice recognition? (Score:5, Funny)
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all!!
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
http://youtube.com/watch?v=kJ861ehHwWQ [youtube.com]
Re: (Score:1)
Same old same old (Score:1, Interesting)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Insightful?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
the start of the end (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:the start of the end (Score:5, Funny)
Oh shit! They're gonna start making politicians?!?
Re:the start of the end (Score:5, Funny)
A problem has been detected and Bush has been shut down to prevent damage to your politician.
WAR_COUNT_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL
Tough Choice (Score:2)
Oh shit! They're gonna start making politicians?!?
If this happens, the Republicans will run Clippy and the Democrats will run Bob. Yeah, yeah, you could vote for a human; but nobody will want to "throw their vote away" on a third party.
Microsoft Robot (Score:5, Funny)
But for a while, we will have to put up with Microsoft Robot, whose face goes entirely blue for no reason at all, which crashes into the wall several times a day, which has trouble obeying you since it is constantly bombarded with commands from all over the world, and which considers the Asimov Laws of Robots as mere recommendations.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:1)
I thought I was the only one who watched FLCL (Score:1, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
An excellent summary of anime overall, dear AC.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Well don't worry, like the article said;
There's no need to worry. This thing, like their other products, will never be finished. I think we're safe, no need to get that bunker just yet.
Not such a ... (Score:1, Flamebait)
Gotta spend! (Score:5, Insightful)
Gotta spend that 10-digit R&D budget on something. Anything.
Lots of R&D projects make MSFT look like a buy with growth potential. Competent maintenance of a core business (like Windows or Office) would make it look like Otis Elevator.
Re:Gotta spend! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Personally, I think they've just got a case of Apple envy.
Re: (Score:1)
Apple is chic, executing perfectly and has great products, but software is oh so much more profitable than shiny happy hardware.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
M$ has low customer apeal, as a brand label it sucks and beyond it's monopoly position on the os and office suite, which is currently being eroded, it has no customer loyalty. Take for example their new music player, how well will it sell, it depends upon how many of their potential customers they managed t
Re:Gotta spend! (Score:4, Insightful)
In the world of publicly-traded companies, a stable company that makes a great product and loyal customers but doesn't continue to grow is a very bad thing.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
But then came the
Re: (Score:2)
I hope you're right. Otherwise we're all in trouble.
Re: (Score:1)
Let's not forget the tax difference! In Canada stock apreciation is a capital gain so only 50% of it is taxable, but you pay full tax on dividends. If your marginal tax rate is 40% (middle class) then you take home 20% less with dividends than with capital growth.... of course no one wants to see a lot of
Berkeley, what a surprise... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
Blue chip of death? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Blue chip of death? (Score:5, Funny)
When the chips are down, MicroSoft will be there.
Re: (Score:1)
It just occurred to me... Microsoft itself is a Blue Chip [wikipedia.org] of Death!
Re: (Score:1)
Microsoft Invents FPGA (Score:1, Troll)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FPGA [wikipedia.org]
Re:Microsoft Invents FPGA (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
when Sun, SGI, DEC, and IBM built their own chips (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:when Sun, SGI, DEC, and IBM built their own chi (Score:2)
Re:when Sun, SGI, DEC, and IBM built their own chi (Score:5, Interesting)
If you don't call DEC's Alpha chip a 'great commercial success', than what is? Does it still have to be on the market? What chip from the Alpha era is still on the market? They've all been redesigned since.
The only reason the Alpha 'failed' is because DEC's support business was so much more profitable than it's CPU business.
The big guys can come up with new versions each year or so and catch up to the "boutique" designs.
Intel only managed to catch up with the Alpha for two reasons: They stopped coming out with new versions of the Alpha, and Intel implemented patented Alpha designs without a license. It's not really a fair argument to you though, since Alpha wasn't 'boutique', and DEC *was* one of the 'big guys'.
Similarly, SPARC was *the* CPU of the
All the magic is out of CPU design. Lots of people know how to do it, and do it well. The hard part these days is in the manufacturing process, and you can buy that. There is no good reason not to design your own CPU if you can reasonably expect to sell enough of them,
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm a huge Alpha proponent, so please understand that when I ask you what the hell you're smoking. Alpha was a monumental "commercial" failure. It was a huge "technological" success, but for many reasons it failed commercially. Heck, Apple sold more G4 Macs in a single quarter than DEC (and Samsung a
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It occurs to me that the DRM in the XBOX starts at the hardware level. So if MSFT wants to really lock down their systems making their own hardware would be a good place to start.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
How about, MIPS, x86 or PPC? ARM should probably also qualify, perhaps even bump MIPS off the list
Re:when Sun, SGI, DEC, and IBM built their own chi (Score:5, Interesting)
My bullshit detector is going wild here. The magic is not all out of cpu designs. If you believe that, well you can go the way of the alpha.
The magic is not out of it. Most of the basics have been covered, that is true, and manufacturing process matters a lot; also true. But the manufacturing process is also not just a matter of "throwing a lot of money at it". However as I'm not as familiar with the manufacturing side of things, I'll stick to the areas I know, like processor design.
If the magic were gone in CPU design, and it was all about manufacturing, why do both ATI and Nvidia compete so heavily, and why can one produce chips faster than the others (although it switches too often for me to care). Sure they may not be general purpose processors, but they're highly important, and they are processors. Additionally while the changes in intels designs may be more on the level of incremental improvements (doubling cores etc) it doesn't mean there's not a lot of research going into it.
Now if you take the narrow mind that the magic in single core superscalare processor architecture is gone, sure. I'll agree with you there. That's a well studied problem. The research community moved on years ago. Simplescalar results no longer mean anything. However their is a large amount of research and development being done in the system design (the system level being restricted to a single chip). Cache-processor(s) interaction, efforts to improve programmability of chips etc etc.
Designing your own chip is a very very risky endeavor, even if you have multiple billions of dollars in the bank like microsoft does. If they manage to pull this off; more power to them. It's a very challenging process, and will not be done by grunts (i.e. it will require roomfuls of PhDs working on various parts of the project. Your comment about being reasonable to design your own... well I tend to disagree. Building the chip used in the xbox360 from scratch would have cost far more money than leveraging the design and knowledge expertise that IBM already had. Plus the chips needed for consoles have nowhere near the volume required to build their own fab. So in that case, that means they would contract out the fab work, and so the whole point is in their design. Sure looks like design is dead to me.
Phil
Re:when Sun, SGI, DEC, and IBM built their own chi (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Absolutely. The ARM processor family has 75% of the market for embedded 32-bit processors.
But Microsoft's chip is fast enough for Vista (Score:1)
DRM Enforcement and/or Removing Mod Capabilities (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:DRM Enforcement and/or Removing Mod Capabilitie (Score:1)
This has basically already been done. Everything coming out of the chip is encrypted, with IBM enterprise technology. If they did it themselves, they'd have to come up with their own way. Not saying they can't, but IBM has already proven theirs.
Re: (Score:1, Troll)
Sounds good to me. No one needs all that crap. If they wanted it, they wouldn't be buying an Xbox from Microsoft.
You want to home-brew your own games, get a PC.
Re: (Score:2)
No, YOU want to homebrew your own games, YOU get a PC.
The console market is (was) great for homebrew, because you could write software that was designed for very specific, well-documented (relatively inexpensive) hardware. Sure, a lot of the homebrew stuff for consol
Re: (Score:2)
The console market is (was) great for homebrew, because you could write software that was designed for very specific, well-documented (relatively inexpensive) hardware. Sure, a lot of the homebrew stuff for consoles isn't very good, but there are some real gems -- look at what people have done on the original XBox for examples.
That's fine, but they can only do that with the permission of, and at the pleasure of Microsoft. If Microsoft doesn't want them
Re: (Score:2)
I have no problem with vendors trying to implement such things. I also don't buy hardware or software with these "features" added; at least not until someone's already found a solution to the "features".
Re: (Score:2)
I can understand wanting to hack devices you buy to add new features. But when the device maker goes this far in trying to prevent the community from doing so, and there's other perfectly viable alternatives out there, it seems like it's time to cut your losses and move on.
Besides, what's wrong with the PC? You mentioned low cost and known hardware
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
The console market is homebrew-unfriendly all around, but is Microsoft really any worse than anyone else in this regard? Heck, their plans for XNA GSE seem to be downright homebrew friendly, compared to the norm in the console market.
I suppose then... (Score:5, Funny)
Oh Yea?
Microchips? (Score:1)
In other news... (Score:2, Funny)
Fatal Error (Score:1, Interesting)
Press 1 If You Just Cried "Wolf" (Score:5, Interesting)
Every time Microsoft introduces another new platform, whether OS, Office, HW, game console, or new executive, they promise voice recognition. Of course they never deliver.
Even the dedicated voice recognition researchers and developers don't have real voice recognition on any HW. MS doesn't do the kind of basic research necessary to move further down the road. And it doesn't even productize the R&D done by others - it copies or buys products from competitors. Or it keeps doing it wrong every time, until expectations are low enough that small improvements are declared victory.
The people who deliver useable voice recognition will work it out in the open telephony world, which has enough focus, money, constraints and momentum to actually get across the threshold to universal, untrained voice recognition that does something limited, but at least as perfectly as humans do.
Next we'll hear that these chips will be good for a "database filesystem"...
Voice recognition for the rest of us (Score:3, Funny)
when I yell "DAMMIT!!!" at the top of my lungs, I want the OS to gracefully recover from a blue screen of death and automatically save the term paper I've spent ALL NIGHT writing.
(yeah, I know I'm supposed to save often, but you can't tell me it hasn't happened to you, too.)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
An example of the final one is to save with a new name like mydoco.20061021-2110.doc
Why? because if the word processor crashes during saving, you won't destroy the only version of your file... and if it does get corrupted, you can revert back to older versions. Sometimes you realise that during copy/paste/edit you accidentally DIDN
Re:Press 1 If You Just Cried "Wolf" (Score:4, Insightful)
Voice recognition is the sort of thing that stupid people love to hear about. The trouble is that we've got voice recognition already, and it just bites. It's a lousy way to control a computer. Computers cannot respond to unstructured input, and very few users, even those who are normally considered technically adept, are capable of speaking in a well-structured manner. The limitations of the mouse-and-keyboard interface are also their strength - by constraining the user to a limited set of actions, they greatly increase the stupid user's ability to figure out what to do. If you let somebody sit there and say anything, they'll sit there all day without saying anything that the computer can understand. Prompting them doesn't work because most of these people never read anything that is displayed on the screen.
Or, more briefly:
Most computer users can grasp the concept of pointing and clicking with a mouse. Very few computer users can grasp the concept of speaking with correct grammar. While we are doing reasonably well at parsing and interpreting more-or-less correct english (as is reasonably common in written form), there is presently no ability to write software that can comprehend the gibberish that most people speak. You probably need human-level intelligence to manage it.
Voice control is a white elephant.
Re: (Score:2)
I think the main barrier to voice recognition success is that people are unforgiving of less than perfect machine response. We're much more forgiving of humans - our standard of recognition is unrealistically high, but we let it slide, try again, ju
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
They need to change their name (Score:5, Funny)
microhard (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
at this point they should drop the 'Micro' part (Score:2)
Other ways to avoid cost of making finished chips (Score:3, Insightful)
Dear Bill,
There are two other ways to "make it possible to reconfigure computer designs without the cost of making finished chips"
1) buy the finished chips from someone else
2) use FPGAs if the design must change on-the-fly or after delivery to customer.
On the other hand, that's what software is for.
You're welcome.
--
Jon
Re:Other ways to avoid cost of making finished chi (Score:2, Informative)
In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
August 9, 2010: Microsoft announced today he first patch for their first microchip, the MSME VID2009 videogame engine core.
The VID2009 chip was recently taped out by the newly formed MS Micro-electronics division. It was widely acclaimed as a new era for MS, altohugh the two analysts still not paid by MS voiced concerns about how the usual Microsoft quality control would not fly with electronic microchips.
MS issued the patch in response to reports about VID2009-equipped videogame consoles spontaneously bursting into flames and cutting users' fingers by snapping the DVD reader door too quickly. The reports have been piling up since 2007. "Since MS bought every other game console maker, it's not like we consumers have a choice", says Gaban Tycho, a self-appointed gaming affair watchdog. "Face it, today's dedicated gamer has either burnt skin patches or missing fingers. Sometimes both. Hey, since you've got fingers, could you open that bottle of burn lotion for me?"
Today's patch is expected to solve these issues, although initial reports show it might introduce other problems: when the voice recognition headset is used and the user pronounces the word "Linux", the patched unit sends 110V AC through the headphones.
The patch is replacing 53 logic gates, changing two nano-instructions and rerouting 12 clock signals inside the VID2009 chip. A small issue might delay the application of the patch, though: It requires replacing the chip itself. An MS spokeperson said that the replacement was covered by the standard MS two-week warranty, but that older units would have to be discarded.
As usual, the MS Patch Police, a team of electronics expert affectionately known as the Blue Squad of Death, will patrol neighborhoods and listen to howls of pain to determine where faulty consoles might be located. Unpatchable units will be shredded at customers' premices. "I hate those guys", Tycho said. "Last time, I stepped on my cat's tail and here came the Blue Squad, ramming through the door. They couldn't find the console so they destroyed the toaster instead."
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Fortunately, nobody knows how to pronounce "Linux".
Linux pronounciation (Score:2)
Fortunately, nobody knows how to pronounce "Linux".
Well, Linus does... [sladen.org]
But yeah, I guess the VID2009 won't kill you when it hears Lie-noox.
Branching out. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Are they serious? (Score:2)
And this isn't to mention that microprocessors these days are so encumbered with patents that you'll need major cross-licensing with every other major manufactu
These are called. (Score:2)
To be honest, Microsoft wants to make a profit, the best way is to do everything in house, but seeing how low the quality of their systems are I don't know if we want them to work on processors? Imagine now you're phone stop working because the processor breaks? That's impossible you say? Well it was rare for a console to stop working before Sony and Microsoft got into the market, and at the same time Nintendo seems to have high quality
PS3 Coincidence lol (Score:1)
(This has been a public service broadcast.)
Hmm (Score:1)
A return to hardware? (Score:2)
If they wanted too, they could make their own line of PC's, and of course vista would run better on them then on the competitors. Bundle them with enterprise agreements... eeek!
Be afraid of this movement, be very afraid.
Best Move Ever (Score:1)
I can't believe this hasn't been mentioned (Score:1)
Newest Chip Design (Score:2)
WGA Processor.