Microsoft to design its own CPUs - Next Xbox In Development

Because Mac OS has moved to Intel chips.

MS is positioning themselves to be both the supplier of the CPU and
the OS.

Motorola died because there weren't enough MAC customers buying 68k
CPU's.

This is a warning shot across Intel's head by MS.

It could also be because of the retirement rate of Intel P3 and P4
CPU's.  The stability of supply maybe is less than what MS wants for
the X-box.

In article < XXXX@XXXXX.COM >,  XXXX@XXXXX.COM  says...



Who cares about Mac?


Don't believe it.  Ther is no room/money left in CPUs.


No, Motorola "died" because of bad management.


Perhaps, but it's an idle threat.


Huh? WTF does the P3 or P4 have to do with X-box?

-- 
  Keith 

??  And that affects the X-Box how exactly?  Honestly Macs and OS-X
are barely even a blip on Microsoft's radar for desktop computers
(Apple is still languishing at around 2-3% of worldwide sales), hardly
something for MS to get worried about.


Macs made up a *VERY* small proportion of the processors that Motorola
sold.  Besides, they didn't die at all, just split the chip business
off so that it could be more focused (ie the exact opposite of what is
being proposed here).  And Freescale (the spin-off semiconductor
company) is doing fairly well for themselves, $250M profit on $1.6B
revenue for the third quarter of this year.  I don't think that
they're missing Mac sales too much.


MS doesn't buy chips off the spot market for the XBox, they have a
guaranteed supply as per their contract!  Intel will provide the
original XBox chips for as long as the MS contract requires them too.
Same goes for IBM providing the XBox360 chips and the next generation
chips beyond that.

I'm in full agreement with the others, absolutely no point at all in
MS getting involved in the processor market, there are more than
enough competent suppliers out there who have already coughed up the
several billion dollars required for fabs and the R&D teams.  MS will
probably get involved more closely on the specs and architecture of
the chips for their next-gen console (sorta like Sony's involvement
with the Cell chip for the PS3), but the actually processor design and
production will be handled by someone with expertise in that field.
----------------------------
Tony Hill
hilla <underscore> 20 <at> yahoo <dot> ca