The
Mercury News' Dean Takahashi reports (thanks
DailyTech) that the
first Xbox 360 CPUs manufactured on the 65nm process are now on ships in the
Pacific bound for North America. Should the consoles, which are made in China,
arrive soon, then they could be on retail shelves sometime this fall. Last
month, Takahashi reported that the 65nm Xbox 360 chips would come in a revised
hardware version that Microsoft has coded “Falcon.” The new chips are not only
smaller and roughly 50 percent cheaper to produce than their 90nm counterpart,
but they are also cooler - and presumably less prone to the Red Ring of Death
defect. Those expecting the 65nm die shrink to affect the two main chips inside
the Xbox 360 will be disappointed to learn that only the console's main
processor will be the manufactured on the new process.
Oddly enough, it appears as though the main culprit behind the Xbox 360
reliability woes may be linked to the ATI GPU rather than the IBM CPU. As part
of a recent fix to all 90nm-based consoles, Microsoft has been adding additional
cooling measures into the Xbox 360. Found first in a repaired European Xbox 360
was a new heatsink with a heatpipe that leads to a secondary 'daughter' heatsink
helps to further cool the GPU. The latest Xbox 360 Premium consoles with the
HDMI-enabled 'Zephyr' motherboard also features the extra heatsinks, providing
further evidence that an overheating GPU is the main cause behind the Red Ring
of Death.
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