MS opens in-house chip lab for Xbox 720

by Ken Weeks { Oct 21st 2006 at 1:30PM }

The NY Times reports that Microsoft is ending its partnership with IBM to found it's own chip design lab to work on chips for a planned third generation Xbox:

The design effort will initially be split between research labs at the company's headquarters in Redmond, Wash., and its Silicon Valley campus here. Tentatively named the Computer Architecture Group, the project underscores sweeping changes in the industry.

One reason for the effort is that Microsoft needs to begin thinking about the next-generation design of its Xbox game console, said Charles P. Thacker, a veteran engineer and Microsoft engineer who will head the Silicon Valley group. Voice recognition may also be an area where the research could play a significant role.

Thacker is famous in certain circles for his work at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. The division will be called the "Comupter Architecture Group" which isn't the snazziest name ever, but then, neither was IBM.

Tags: chips, design, lab, next-gen, third-gen, xbox 720, Xbox720

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

J.Goodwin @ Oct 21st 2006 4:43PM

Microsoft already had their own chip design group for Xbox360. They farmed out a lot of the heavy lifting on the GPU and main processor to ATI and IBM, but pretty much everything else on that board, along with the initial design concepts, came from the group of guys that Microsoft aquired for Ultimate/Web TV. Many of these exact same people were working on the follow up to the 3DO before it died a nasty death.

They do good work, and if the basic design is what I expect it to be, they won't be starting from the ground up this time, and they already own complete licenses to the IP that they will be needing.