Squilliam on 10 January 2009
| kn said: Squil, When was the rumored valhalla MB supposed to be coming online? As I recall, Valhalla was supposed to bring a unified 65nm CPU/GPU chip which would reduce mother board size, cut the cooling system to one heatsink instead of two, reduce heat and hence cooling fan size/speed/noise, and reduce power consumption thereby further reducing size and cost of the power adapter. There would be additional cost savings from a reduction in assembly costs due to less complexity as well... I don't know the potential cost savings of said valhalla, but I suspect it would be rather strong. This would more than offset the increased cost of including wireless as well as a larger hard drive. A "slimmer" redesign with a slot load, built-in wifi, larger hard drive, and perhaps multiple colored boxes would be, in my opinion, the smartest move MS could make. That would carry them into the next gen with not much else to cost reduce except for die size on the cpu/gpu. |
The console is simply too hot to shrink to a slim SKU on the 65nm node. If they wanted to do it, they might be able to do it on the 55nm node for both CPU and GPU which is an optical shrink from the current 65nm. Depending on the power usage, most likely they need to reach the 40nm node so I would pick 2010 as the year for the slim personally as the net gain from each shrink diminishes with every shrink.
Tease.
