Microsoft & Nvidia fighting over XBOX (1 Viewer)

[Chris]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/3/25076.html
NVidia makes it official in their
SEC Filing where they tell us they and Microsoft are battling in arbitration regarding what MS wants in regards to the chip, and that MS feels as though Nvidia is short changing them..
Could be interesting.

 

[Gary King]

The Register, in typical Register fashion, has the facts (mostly) right but the spin is out of control. The article is just standard Register sensationalist crap.

 

[John Kilroy]

Spin notwithstanding, this is interesting. I had heard from multiple sources that MS will not be using the Nvidia chipset in their version of the Xbox, and I'm sure this is part of the reason. Of course, MS could just be "firing for effect" as a message to Nvidia, whose shareholders were very pleased with the additional revenue.

 

[Jeff Kleist]

What are you talking about? There is only 1 version of the XBox, and that's made by Microsoft. They CAN'T change their spec now, they have millions of decks out there, and that spec includes NVidia chips. It's going to affect their backwards compatibility if X-Box 2 doesn't have an NVidia chip in it

 

[Derrik Draven]

What do you expect from a website that calls Microsoft, "The Beast"; inferring some biblical/satanic meaning. :rolleyes

 

[MikeAlletto]

Or the beast could mean just a large company. I've called pieces of hardware beasts because they are big and heavy, but I am not giving it a negative meaning. IBM is a beast because they make loads of money and are very large.

 

[Gary King]

No... If you were familiar with any of The Register's other "articles," you'd know that when they say The Beast, they aren't being nice.

As for the additional revenue -- any disputed charges have been earmarked as deferred revenue. Microsoft has given NVIDIA the money; however, NVIDIA hasn't recognized it as actual revenue until the dispute is resolved, so there isn't any additional revenue for shareholders to be pleased with.

 

[Dave F]

Jeff- I think John meant to say the next Xbox.

-Dave

 

[Chris]

Right. Microsoft has made known that they have SGI patents and could build their own graphic chips and have also solicited bids from Intel and Via for them to design a graphic chip for XBox2.

 

[Andrew Grall]

Of course Microsoft is going to "audition" different options for the graphics chipset in X-Box 2. By the time X-Box 2 actually becomes a reality, back-compatibility shouldn't be much of a problem because the new graphics sets will be much more powerful than what is currently in the X-Box.

I'm sure they will weight the cost/benefit options of the various chipsets they look at. A big name like nvidia never hurts either...

 

[John Kilroy]

Gary,

Just to clarify, shareholders were most certainly pleased and sent a message when Nvidia announced the $200m payment from Microsoft in 2000. And they would definetely send a different message if Microsoft used another chip set for the next Xbox. My point is, Microsoft knows this and may be "firing for effect" to get a better position. Perhaps they did the same thing when they were "seriously considering" AMD for the Xbox CPU before Intel caught wind and came back with a sweet deal.

That's all I'm trying to say.

And of course, as Dave pointed out, I was talking about the next Xbox.

 

[Gary King]

Microsoft isn't soliciting bids for future Xbox graphics chipsets yet. They may be posturing to try to get a better deal on the current Xbox graphics chipsets, but they'd be silly to start working on a chipset that's 4 years away at this point. 4 years ago, the Riva TNT was the best graphics chip available, and NV10 (GeForce) was just over a year away.

Any chip that's planned now will undoubtedly be horribly out of date (or awkward for developers) by the time the console is ready for release. That's what happened with the GS in the Playstation 2 -- I'm sure Microsoft doesn't want to make that mistake.

Microsoft has made known that they have SGI patents and could build their own graphic chips

Just having patents doesn't mean you can build a chip. I'm sure Microsoft could hire hardware engineers if they wanted; however, they certainly do not have the staff to build a 250+M transistor graphics chip from the ground-up now. And SGI's patents won't really help them with most of the things that they'd want, anyway.