Microsoft's $1 Billion Xbox 360 Recall Problems Caused By Chip
Cheapness  Microsoft's red ring Xbox 360 problems have cost the
company about a billion dollars in warranty repairs, but the
research vice president and chief analyst at Gartner said that
the hardware problems were caused because Microsoft wanted to be
cheap. Instead of using an application-specific integrated
circuit (ASIC) vender to make a graphics chip for the 360,
Microsoft decided to design it themselves and have Taiwan
Semiconductor Manufacturing create it. This saved "tens of
millions of dollars" in design costs. Yes, only tens of
millions.  The good news is that when Microsoft said that their
red ring problems are fixed on newer units, they were probably
right. They went to "an unnamed ASIC vendor based in the United
States and redesigned the chip." Probably ATI, is what EETimes
thinks. Moral of the story is to not skimp on chip design so you
can save tens of millions, because that may come back and bite
you in the ass down the road. [EETi