Exclusive: The Xbox 360 Uncloaked - Page 5
- May 05, 2006 16:36 PM PST
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After Mike Abrash left, the silicon team needed new direction. As the WebTV/3DO folks were working away at the chip architecture in Mountain View, Holmdahl assigned Greg Gibson to be the chief on the overall design of the Xenon hardware system in Redmond. He was going to be the customer of whatever the Mountain View team designed.
Gibson, then 31, grew up in Salem, Ore., and earned an electrical engineering degree from the University of Washington. Like a number of other Microsoft hardware engineers, he had worked at Fluke Corp. designing handheld test equipment for six years. He joined Microsoft in 1997 to work for the hardware group designing mice and keyboards. When the time came to put together the original Xbox, Gibson was one of the first that Holmdahl assigned to work on the engineering design. In September, 1999, he became a technical program manager in charge of working with Intel and Nvidia on the Xbox chips. Since the Xbox had been mostly outsourced, Gibson's role was to supervise and communicate with the teams at Intel and Nvidia that were doing all the work. Intel had agreed to provide the microprocessor and create the system board for the Xbox, while Nvidia had agreed to create a custom graphics chip and a communications chip. Gibson had to shepherd those projects through to completion, pulling out a few hairs as he was doing so. Holmdahl regarded Gibson as an essential contributor.
At the time of the Xbox launch in November, 2001, Gibson was running all the electrical-mechanical hardware development on the Xbox. While Nvidia and Intel had designed most of the innards of the original Xbox, Gibson's team was taking over those tasks on Xenon. Now it was overseeing the redesign of the motherboard, mechanical design, and software. The last thing that Microsoft had not yet taken over was silicon integration. That meant that Microsoft wanted to determine the schedule for redesigning chips, debugging the designs, and sending them to the factory. That was why the chip engineers in Mountain View were so important.
When he moved over to run hardware development for Xenon, he gave up command of 200 engineers and went to a team with just a few. In the spring of 2002, Gibson made the shift from Xbox to doing mostly Xenon. He had clear marching orders. Whatever happened, this time Microsoft couldn't be late.
Microsoft needed to know the competition's intentions. Baker hired Jon Peddie Research, a technology consulting company in Tiburon, California. Peddie had been around the graphics industry for decades and had a wide array of market intelligence at his disposal. Sony was applying for patents on the Cell microprocessor, so Baker, Peddie's staff and the rest of the crew analyzed them. Microsoft's people thought that Sony was making a mistake with the way it was designing the system. It would be too complicated and too costly to make games for. At one point, the team actually thought that Sony would put three Cells on one chip, for a total of 27 processors. The patents just didn't spell out Sony's intentions. But one part of Sony's strategy, which had the imprints of Ken Kutaragi, a semiconductor expert, was absolutely clear.
"It was a huge upfront capital investment and I didn't think that they would get their money back later when they were making masses of cheap chips," said Jon Thomason, head of software for the Xbox team. "We clearly didn't think that the capital investment was going to be necessary. So we looked for other strategies."
