| Ryuu96 said: I don't believe Microsoft is holding back stock for the regulators either. False forecasts would be illegal, I'm also fairly sure that I've read before that console ordering takes months-a year from ordering to delivery as well. Microsoft can't just say tomorrow to the manufacturer that they want millions of Series X by June, Lol. Whatever Microsoft has planned for Holiday season as an example was likely ordered months in advance, maybe even a year. They also wouldn't intentionally kneecap their business for an acquisition, in an acquisition you have to continue business as normal, they especially wouldn't do it when they thought the acquisition would sail through, despite things maybe working out in the end, this has not gone to plan for Microsoft, they aimed for a closure in January, the extensions are delays to the aimed for closure date. And orders that Microsoft has for Holiday will be known by the CMA as well. Microsoft doesn't need to kneecap themselves on console hardware, with more stock they would sell better but Sony would still dominate them, Lol. Microsoft won't be able to hide any secret plots to hurt themselves either, the regulatory bodies will find out, they can force Microsoft to tell them their future plans. Something is up with Xbox Series X manufacturing, none of us know for sure what it is but it's not Microsoft intentionally self sabotaging, Imo. |
Some design features of the series X that a presume are making it harder to manufacture, in no particular order:
1. The chip itself is one of the largest ever put in a game console
2. It is cooled by a gigantic copper vapor chamber. The plus side of this is thermal efficiency that far outstrips the PS5, and it operates silently under all conditions. The downside of this is that it’s extremely expensive by console standards
3. 320 bit memory bus as opposed to 256
4. SSD is a laptop form factor removable NVME drive instead of being a soldered solution. This is good for repairability but represents a cost increase
5. this last one is speculation, but I believe the fan has noise dampening or perhaps uses higher quality bearings.
All of this except for number 5 can be traced back to the Series X being a hybrid design: it is a server as much as it is a console product. The large chip ran at low clocks allows it to have high performance in a space and thermally constrained environment (IE, a server rack), the wide memory bus and large number of compute units allow it to run multiple instances at a time (for server usage), the copper vapor chamber allows it to stay cool in a small space (again, server rack) the laptop NVme is to help ease maintenance (for data center crews)
