| News | Jaspers Hit The Streets – 3 Years Too Late |
For those of you who still don’t have a Xbox 360, though I may be the last one, your time, patience and your willingness to mooch off of others has finally been rewarded. You might have heard the words “Xenon”, “Zephyr”, “Falcon” and “Jasper” floating around the interwebs. They are the codenames for the pair of chipsets (CPU and GPU) within the 360. Starting from the “Falcon” they’ve shrunk the CPU feature size from 90 nanometers to 65 nm and added extra heatsinks.
Now with the Jasper, not only is the CPU 65nm, the GPU (graphics processing unit) is also 65nm. What does that mean? Well the CPU is smaller and also creates less heat. The GPU will also create noticeable less heat as a smaller feature size on the chip makes it run faster, so the clock speed can be reduced and less heat generated. Combined with the added heatsinks and it should mean that the machine can run cooler and quieter, hopefully reducing your risk of the dreaded RRoD.
But why didn’t they do this sooner? Microsoft knew about the RRoD from the start, so why didn’t they take precautionary measures before hand? I mean, the 360 has been out for 3 years! And they are just now fixing the RRoD problem?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy with this news of the Jaspers finally out on the street (been waiting almost half a year), but if they knew about the flaws and faults from the very beginning, Microsoft should not have shipped the machines out. The article previously linked (and linked here for you lazy people) said that the reasons for shipping early were “fear of failure, ambition to beat Sony, and the arrogance that they could figure anything out.”
Great job letting pride get in the way of a good job and giving 30% of Xbox players that hassle of having to send in their Xbox whenever they saw that Red Ring.
EDIT 12/24: AnandTech has a wonderful article about the 360 and about the history of the chipsets and more on the Jasper.
Remember when you didn’t have to cross your finger when turning a new machine on.
I miss those days.
Well back then when it didn’t work you’d just have to blow into it. :)
Crap, my Xbox 360 broke! *Blows in the cd tray* Why isn’t it WORKING?!
“Clover”, everything you say should be taken with a dumptruck load of salt because you obviously don’t know what you’re talking about. This one statement proves it, “The GPU will also create noticeable less heat as a smaller feature size on the chip makes it run faster, so the clock speed can be reduced and less heat generated.” The GPU produces less heat because of the lower voltage and smaller feature sizes (the two are interdependent). The clock speed is unchanged.
@G8tor: My bad, I actually added that part, but may have over simplified.
Taking the basic power dissipation in a SoC equation (P=1/2*C*f*Vdd*a) it does cause the frequency to be independent of the energy per operation. However, the frequency does still affect the total power used.
The smaller the chip is, the faster it can switch its gates. So relatively, if you kept a chip at say 90% maximum speed, shrinking the feature size does cause the clock speed (in Hz) to increase. This is one of the driving forces behind Moore’s Law. When I added the bit about the clock speed being slowed, this is what I was referencing. That proportionately to the gate speed, the clock is slower, which in turn causes the lower power output (The frequency in Hz stays the same, but relative to the chip, it’s slowed).
Hope that clears things up.
Also, disregarding somebody’s entire article, because of a small technical misinterpretation seems like a bit of an overreaction.
Nice article, don’t think i’ve ever heard this level of detail about the subject of RRoD before now. Without trying to in any moral sense justify what microsoft did, it’s obviously proved beneficial in the long-term with their domination of particularly the american market for traditional games. Still sad that i have to keep a little desk fan next to my 360 to stop it going fucking nuclear.
I am so sick of hearing people whine about this issue.
Mine broke 3 times and frankly it was not much of an inconvenience. Why, because unlike when my 2 PS2s broke, I didn’t have to pay to get it fixed!!!
Now let it go already, we got it, you hate Microsoft, everybody does whoopdi doo, it doesn’t make you cool anymore.
Those arent the only reasons Microsoft released the console early. Now I agree that it was a very stupid thing to do on their part with such a high failure rate. They established a contra account to revenue for the allowance of failed consoles, underestimating the failure rate of their hardware, this is true. However Microsoft wanting to release their console ahead of Sony wasnt the only reason that they released it early. NVIDIA ceased production of the Xbox’s GPU in August 2005 before the 360 was released. Microsoft in an effort to have a product on the market instead of losing millions of dollars, they rushed the 360 to production and hoped for the best. Dont get me wrong here, I think Microsoft could have done better, but it just pisses me off when people post things on the internet without actually looking up the facts first.
I have two 360’s, one’s an original model. Still no problems. It’s loud, it’s kinda off white now, but it still works the way it did when I first bought it.
I rarely use my new one (hehe, saving in case I need it ;);)
Anyway, my two cents on the issue. It does seem a little weird to have someone bitch about a console being improved, and I agree with the comment about the ps2. I had one of those die on me, Sony did nothing to back me up on that.
-Caid.
I am one of the consumers who hasn’t picked up a 360 yet due to the RRoD and hope the Jasper Chipset will fix the problem. I am going to wait a bit longer so that all the non-Jasper 360’s can be bought up by others before I purchase mine. Also since I got a PS3 before a 360 most of my library is on the PS3 so the 360 will be a back-up system to me.
I find it funny how the high 360 failure rate is propagating the PS3 failure rate to something higher than it was. Every 360 fan who is trying to justify having to have gone through 4-5 360s by now pretend line they had multiple broken PS2s. I still have my launch PS2 running just fine, and I use the thing as a DVD player so it has been working double time.
Let’s also not forget that the PS2 has sold upwards of 120 Million systems. The 360 has sold upwards of 17 million, when counting the RROD replacement units they are still just at about 23 million, and those figures are shipped units to boot.
Correction, I meant “PS2 failure rate”, since the PS3 failure rate is near non-existent.
I just got a X360, was waiting for the jasper mobo, but my friend were having way to much fun playing COD4, so i got the revision 60GB unit.
Striferific is right about trying to compare PS2 failure rates to X360 is way off base. All hardware have failures, but the X360 was way above industry averages.
MS released this product way to early in a temp to up one Sony. They were both over price(Sony still is), but Sony’s hardware was always solid and that goes a long way in marketing.
I enjoy my X360 and plan on buying a PS3 this Xmas, at the end of it all, it will always come down to the best GAMES.
i won’t count on it…..i got a xenon for 8 months….then got a falcon for 4 months and now THIS??? NO WAY!!! i ain’t buying that shit again!!!!
I’ve only had one RRoD so I guess I’ve been lucky. At least the next Xbox console will be super reliable since I doubt MS want another $1 billion repair bill on their hands.
I also disagree about Sony hardware being solid. I’ve had four PS2s and my original PSX only reads discs when it’s turned upside down.
Спасибо, интересно было прочитать.