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XBox (Games) AMD Intel

20 Years Later, Xbox Creator Apologizes To AMD CEO For Last-Minute Switch To Intel (gamespot.com) 50

Posted by BeauHD from the pure-politics dept.
The original Xbox was released 20 years ago next month, and to mark the upcoming anniversary, the console's designer has apologized to AMD's engineers and its CEO for Microsoft's last-minute decision to drop AMD for rival Intel. GameSpot reports: Seamus Blackley apologized on Twitter to the AMD engineers who worked with Microsoft to create the prototype Xbox consoles that the company used in the lead-up to the OG Xbox's release in November 2001. To AMD CEO Lisa Su, Blackley said, "I beg mercy." "I was standing there on the stage for the announcement, with [Bill Gates], and there they were right there, front row, looking so sad," he said of AMD engineers in the room. "I'll never forget it. They had helped so much with the prototypes. Prototypes that were literally running the launch announcement demos ON AMD HARDWARE." "I felt like such an ass," Blackley said. Microsoft dropped AMD in favor of Intel due to "pure politics," Blackley said in another tweet.
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20 Years Later, Xbox Creator Apologizes To AMD CEO For Last-Minute Switch To Intel More

20 Years Later, Xbox Creator Apologizes To AMD CEO For Last-Minute Switch To Intel

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  • Nice, can we assume... (Score:5, Funny)

    by brunoblack ( 7829338 ) on Wednesday October 13, 2021 @06:37PM (#61889753)

    Nice, can we then assume that in 20 years, they are going to apologize for making Windows 11 slow on AMD CPUs? /s
    reference:
    https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]

    • I wonder how much Intel pay them...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        I wonder how much Intel pay them...

        Yeah, me too. Intel has a history of criminal business practices.

    • Nice, can we then assume that in 20 years, they are going to apologize for making Windows 11 slow on AMD CPUs? /s

      Or back in reality the problems will likely be fixed in a patch Tuesday release before Windows 11 is out of Beta. Make no mistake it is still in Beta. MS hasn't even rolled out the update to all their own devices yet and that should tell you everything you need to know.

      But don't let that get in the way of a conspiracy.

  • 20 years ago the Internet was still good. But do you hear anyone complaining about that here?

  • Chipsets (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Insanity Defense ( 1232008 ) on Wednesday October 13, 2021 @06:47PM (#61889777)

    It wasn't a total loss as chipset development for the XBox spurred on some very good Athlon chipsets that might never have been developed otherwise or at least not in time to help AMD.

    • No apology to SEGA either I see. What we know today as the XBox started out as the 2nd Dreamcast. MS took all the development efforts of that system, then at the last minute screwed SEGA over. I'm sort of surprised AMD didn't see the writing on the wall.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by kriston ( 7886 )

        What we know today as the XBox started out as the 2nd Dreamcast.

        I have serious doubts about this speculation. Dreamcast and the earlier Saturn and 32X were all about multiprocessing. The XBox was a paltry single-processor CeLeron without a hint of multiprocessing aside from the nVidia graphics.

        Sorry, I don't buy the theory that the so-called "Dreamcast 2" project became the XBox. The only thing that supports this theory is the use of Windows CE in some Dreamcast games, even though Windows CE wasn't used in the XBox at all.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          It was. Of the Gamecube, Playstation 2 and Dreamcast the xbox is most similar with the Dreamcast because the xbox was out to compete with the dreamcast. That is what makes the xbox the dreamcast 2. Just look at the xbox controller, the 4 controller ports and the built in ethernet. Its there to grab the dreamcasts playerbase. The controller feels the same held in the hand, the button layout of very similar and many dreamcast 'sequels' are on xbox only.

          microsoft needed to enter the console industry because th

        • SEGA multiprocessor (Score:5, Interesting)

          by DrYak ( 748999 ) on Thursday October 14, 2021 @01:40AM (#61890461) Homepage

          true for the Saturn, but starting from the dreamcast: not anymore.

          part of the reason the saturn wasn't that successful in the west was that it was an extremely complex beast with multiple different chips, each requiring carefully hand tuned assembly. getting the most out of the system required dark-magic levels of hardware mastery.
          (well that, and the fact that Sega was on a spree release confusingly many different platforms in a short period of time, pissing several developer houses in the process)

          contrast with the Sony PlayStation 1 which was much friendly to the type of development done in the west: just compile your high-level C/C++ code against some library and run it on a straight-forward architecture, e.g., making ports of PC games much easier.
          (funny how it will be Sony's turn to dial the complexity up later, specially with PS3).

          Sega took notes, and designed the DreamCast much more straightforward PC-like structure : a single SH4, a 3D graphics card (at some point even 3dfx was considered), an optical drive sitting on an ATA interface, and a modem or 100mbit network card plugged on the side. The controller with pluggable mini-screen/micro-handheld was the only fancy thing out of the ordinary.

          They even collaborated with Microsoft to license and adapt WinCE and offer that as an alternative OS, next to the native Katana (and to other sega's experiments with BSD) in order to further ease development of ports (a few game discs boot into WinCE and rely on Direct X).

          once you pay attention to how the architectures are organized, it becomes very obvious that for Microsoft, their work on with Sega was a precursor to their XBox line: simpler PC-like organized hardware that is programmed with familar tools and APIs.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      20 years ago Intel was in fact working hard to develop a superior product. It was at the time, after years of laziness depending on the WinTel monopoly, as well as the foolish RISC/CISC wars, regaining a foothold. This was seen with the switch to Intel products by Apple. The top dog fluctuates wildly in the chip industry.

  • Microsoft does evil! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Film at 11:00.

  • I wonder (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Wednesday October 13, 2021 @07:37PM (#61889843)

    Just how much did Intel pay Microsoft for that?

    • Re:I wonder (Score:5, Funny)

      by Dutch Gun ( 899105 ) on Wednesday October 13, 2021 @08:12PM (#61889917)

      Didn't you hear? It wa$ only an i$$ue of politic$. $erou$ly, ju$t politic$.

      • Precisely, politics. Like you know, "campaign contributions".

      • I know you joke, but sometimes people overestimate how rational the world is. At the end of the day, there really is no such thing as 'Microsoft' that strictly operates on it's own financial interest. There are only the people who work at Microsoft. People are complicated with a million different interests.

        It could be 'bribery'
        It could also be a business decision where Microsoft has a long term relationship with Intel that they consider better served than one with AMD. Microsoft is a lot more than the XBOX

        • [quote]It could be a personal relationship where someone's long term friend works at Intel and it would help them out.[/quote]

          You're not wrong, but if someone in my company did that, they'd be gone gone gone in a heartbeat if someone put it together. We literally have "ethics" training that has that exact scenario in it, lol.

          But yeah politics is probably the right answer. I've had people look me straight in the face and say they believe they should be our first choice as a supplier because of all the p

        • I know you joke, but sometimes people overestimate how rational the world is. At the end of the day, there really is no such thing as 'Microsoft' that strictly operates on it's own financial interest. There are only the people who work at Microsoft. People are complicated with a million different interests.

          This, a million times this.

          I so often see comments on the Internet supposing that corp X has some detailed, long-term and devious plan for how they're going to generate revenue from decision Y. Having worked for multiple big corporations, and sometimes been involved in decisions that are being publicly discussed and second-guessed (with guesses that are borderline conspiracy theories), I can tell you that is basically never the case. Decisions are often made on far less rational bases, like internal polit

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by kriston ( 7886 )

      Just how much did Intel pay Microsoft for that?

      We were all thinking this back then.

      Also, we were thinking why not use 128 MB or even 256 MB instead of 64 MB of RAM? It could have been so much better, even without AMD.

      MSFT's decisions are and will always remain bizarre mysteries.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kremmy ( 793693 )
        It did spawn a beautiful aftermarket with people using the traces on the board to install upgrades for the RAM, larger hard drives, all kinds of wild case mods, etc. It was pretty impressive for a console.

      • "Also, we were thinking why not use 128 MB or even 256 MB instead of 64 MB of RAM? It could have been so much better, even without AMD."

        Were we?

        The Xbox 1 came out in the PS2 and Gamecube era and was by far the most powerful console, the PS2 had only 32MB of memory and releasing a console superior to others, often just means that your games are 'gimped' as they support the lowest common denominator.

        The Xbox 1 was still a wonderful machine, especially once it had XBMP (XBMC / Kodi) on it and played, some gam

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Kremmy ( 793693 )
          The problem was that it was PC-based and you couldn't even install Windows in 64MB and expect to have a good time by that point. XP was dropping and 512MB was about to become necessary just to run the OS for the PC guys. The PC ports of Playstation 1 games weren't running on PCs with the footprint of the Playstation 1 versions, there was no running Tomb Raider in 4MB of RAM. There was no way you were getting 3D games on PC hardware in 64MB without serious sacrifices. They were lucky to be in control of thei

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Bert64 ( 520050 )

            Extra RAM is needed to run a general purpose OS with its various abstraction layers required to support wildly differing hardware and varying use cases.
            When you have a fixed hardware configuration designed solely to run games, you can do away with a lot of this bloat and make do with a lot less resources. The windows version of halo would run like crap on a celeron with 64mb ram, the xbox version ran just fine and the same is true for most games that existed on both xbox and windows at the same time.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by diems ( 6396892 )

        The main reason would have been cost. the xbox console lost billions during its whole market life and putting in more ram would have made microsoft lose even more money.

        The other thing I think is most console games during that time were arcade-like games which didnt need much memory. They werent too ai heavy nor had lots of numbers to keep track of like in wrpg games. Probably a good sign of this is how Bethesda had to delay the xbox port of morrowind multiple times long after the pc release to get it worki

  • I Suppose In The End (Score:4, Interesting)

    by aerogems ( 339274 ) on Wednesday October 13, 2021 @08:17PM (#61889923)

    AMD got the last laugh since their chips have been used in both Sony and Microsoft consoles for the current and previous generation.

    • Actually AMD got a much needed kick in the nads to step up their game. I worry what would have become of them if they had a cash cow on which to further rest on their laurels. This was around the time when Intel was eating AMD's lunch and after the Xbox launch was around about when AMD made the push towards 64bit and gave the industry a reminder that they still exist.

      • Re:I Suppose In The End (Score:4, Informative)

        by Penguinoflight ( 517245 ) on Thursday October 14, 2021 @08:58AM (#61891251) Journal

        Around the time that the Xbox was released AMD's Athlon XP was comparing very well vs Intel's p4, especially with price considered.

        Of course, this was also around the peak of intel's shenanigans in benchmark applications so many reviews showed intel "eating AMD's lunch", while real world performance like linux compliation had the 1600+ shaming intel's most expensive p4/2000. http://www.thg.ru/cpu/20011031... [www.thg.ru]

        It's hard to say how the constrained power/cost target would have played out between AMD vs Intel. As it stood, the late P3's did very well for their TDP, and once intel figured out how to release one with (less) L2 cache, even the celeron variant would do well too.

        The biggest problem AMD had for the whole Athlon series was unquestionably their reliance on VIA or others for their chipsets, but they didn't even fix that for the early athlon64, where nVidia had to bail them out.

  • That AMD was a dirty and evil corporation like Intel, Oracle and the worse one, Nvidia?

    Because MS has shafted AMD way more than once (remember XP 64?) because AMD revenge would had being as crazy as apple against nvidia.

    But I guess that karma does exist.

  • When I was in my late 20s I wrote multimedia software that used MIDI timecodes to stay in sync per video frame and also trigger events. Multifli was the first software code I sold that was used to create and release multimedia presentations using Autodesk Animator's FLI format. It was quickly followed by another multimedia tool I wrote for GRASP. A language training company called Hyperglot Software found one of my customer's animations on a BBS forum (before the days of the internet in every home) and asked me if I was interested writing a sound driver to add Covox Speech Thing support to their application. I accepted the challenge, wrote the code, delivered.. and began earning royalty cut per Hyperglot package sold. The software was actually authored with GRASP and my Driver was written in C. Six months passed and I was asked again to write a new driver for Hyperglot, this time for their Windows 3.0 with Multimedia Extensions 1.0 package. I took on the task and quickly noticed that the multimedia extensions had serious latency issues. I wrote my own driver and when Microsoft learned about it they approached me via Microsoft Online and asked how I addressed the latency issue. I was an enterprising young man with a wife and a newborn son, I figured this is my chance to earn a 40% down payment on our house. I requested and NDA and a 1.5% royalty deal based on each copy of Windows sold. Within a week (I live on the east coast too) I received the NDA and royalty contract. Well it's 2021 now and I still have not received a check. I might have a copy of the contract in an old filing cabinet in the basement. I'm not sure if I kept it.. I think I have my copy somewhere. I figured if this is how Microsoft does business then I don't want to do business with them or support their product. At that time the alternative was IBM OS/2 Warp. I wrote a multimedia generation and playback tool that supported the AutoDesk FLI and FLC formats. There were no takers, LOL. In 1992 I installed my first official distro of Linux called Yggdrasil and have not looked back since. I am employed as a Sr. Systems Engineer supporting Linux servers and clusters, and as a side hustle I promote Open Source solutions for small businesses. One of my projects that I have been working on in my own time is a Kubernetes Cluster for small business, all ARM based. Local Storage, each Cube runs BGP. The OS is hardened, Only documents and actual work data is in persistent storage. Microsoft can stay the F*&~K away. I'm not surprised that Microsoft screwed AMD. At least Karma caught up with INTEL. Their hardware is plagued with security issues.

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