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>> Robert Hess: You're deep in the heat of battling some devil spawned
creature in the bowels of a long-abandoned research center on some distant
planet with only 60% charge left in your plasma rifle and you just used your last
health pack.
At times like this, you probably aren't thinking about the hardware architecture of
the XBox 360, the years spent designing it, the painful trade-offs and the
decisions along the road or ongoing challenges of trying to decrease the
manufacturing process.
You might not, but Nick Baker does. Hello. I'm Robert Hess, and I'll be your host
today as we talk with Nick Baker, General Manager for XBox Architecture
Design. I hope you enjoy this chance to look at the technology and the person
behind the code.
After graduating from Imperial College London in 1990 he found his way to Apple
and worked on the team that tried to create a specialized video card. He then
went to 3DO where he worked on their high-end gaming system which,
unfortunately, failed in the market.
In 1997, he joined Microsoft to work on their Web TV team on their next
generation set-top box known as Ultimate TV.
It was during this time that Microsoft XBox was entering its initial design phase.
Because Nick and his team had already done some research adding game play
capabilities to Ultimate TV, they provided some useful guidance on the first XBox
hardware design.
Nick's assistants with the initial XBox design was seen as pivotal enough that in
2002 he was asked to head up the team that would design the next generation
hardware, which would eventually become known as XBox 360.
It is there that Nick Baker finds himself to this day working hard at fine tuning the
design of the system, its costs and its performance.
Join me now as I welcome today's guest, Nick Baker.
Greetings, Nick.
>> Nick Baker: Good morning.
>> Robert Hess: Glad to have you here.
>> Nick Baker: Thanks for having me.
>> Robert Hess: Now I suppose to begin with we need to discuss the fact that
probably we need to change the name of this show from Behind the Code to
Behind the Soldering Iron or something.
>> Nick Baker: Behind the Hardware.
>> Robert Hess: You really don't do that much coding yourself, do you?
>> Nick Baker: No, not anymore.
>> Robert Hess: But now it's more of a hardware architectural model?
>> Nick Baker: Yeah. A lot of it is managing our partners to deliver the newer
designs. We do a lot of research. But in terms of research into the architecture,
but in terms of actual coding, unfortunately I gave that up about 10 years ago.
>> Robert Hess: That's a shame. I feel sorry for you.
How did you actually get started down this path for technology?
>> Nick Baker: So ever since probably about the age of ten I got interested in
electronics and kind of locked in that that's what I wanted to do. I didn't know
which avenue that would specifically take.
At some point I wanted to just, interested in doing computer architecture. Ended
up being more interested in graphics and the visual side of things, which
probably led me to where I am today. Because otherwise I probably wouldn't
have gone to 3DO and so on and led into the game industry.
>> Robert Hess: Do you remember what your first computer was, then?
>> Nick Baker: It was a Sinclair Z81 as we call them in England. Z81 here.
>> Robert Hess: These days a lot of things on the blog sites when some new
computer hardware device comes out they have a gutting of the system, ripping it
apart, stuff like that. Did you take your Sinclair apart?
>> Nick Baker: No. Back then I was too -- you paid a lot of money for it. And I
used to pull stuff apart, but it was like old TVs and things like that.
>> Robert Hess: Were you trying to fix them or just trying to rip them apart?
>> Nick Baker: Just trying to rip them apart to see what was inside them. I see
my son doing exactly the same thing with the old XBox 1 controllers the other
day as well. So looks like he's heading down the same path right now.
>> Robert Hess: That would be good. And your schooling and stuff like that, you
were at Imperial College. That's where you graduated from. Prior to that were
you also doing some hardware stuff there?
>> Nick Baker: I tinkered a little bit. My father started buying me electronics
magazines, tried building a few like simple circuits, traffic light controllers and
stuff like that.
When I went into high school, they had a little bit of rudimentary electronics, but
most of the stuff I had done up until I got to college was just from building circuits
and stuff like that from magazines.
>> Robert Hess: Then in Imperial College, what specifically did you study there?
>> Nick Baker: Electrical engineering. It was a four-year master's degree. It
was -- I targeted more towards software and microelectronics design. The
course had a lot of larger electrical engineering, motors and stuff like that. That
didn't interest me too much. I was from the day one pretty set on doing
microelectronics and computer architecture.
>> Robert Hess: So then from college you went to Apple directly?
>> Nick Baker: I did, yes.
>> Robert Hess: What was that like going from college to a company like Apple?
>> Nick Baker: I worked -- I had interned during the summers at [indiscernible] in
England. So I was already kind of familiar with the corporate environment
already. So from that standpoint it wasn't too much of a shock.
But I remember getting off the plane and driving down Highway 101 from the San
Francisco Airport and seeing the whole foreign environment, thinking, wow, what
have I done? [laughter].
>> Robert Hess: How old were you then?
>> Nick Baker: I was 25, 26. This was in 1990.
>> Robert Hess: 1990. And your role there at Apple to begin with was
specifically for their video card that they were working on?
>> Nick Baker: It was the video products group. This was as Quick Time was
being developed. And we were working on some video acceleration cards,
simple compression schemes, put in hardware to help with the capturing.
>> Robert Hess: And you were just a member on the team?
>> Nick Baker: Yeah. I was a member. We had, on the particular card that I
was working on, I was a silicon lead and there were two engineers. It was back
in the days when you could do a chip with just three people.
And then there was a guy doing the board as well. So it was relatively small. A
software team as well.
>> Robert Hess: Just focusing on just the hardware itself and then that lasted for
a couple of years then?
>> Nick Baker: Yeah, we -- probably even less than that. Probably nine months
into the project, they -- Apple did a pretty major reshuffle, were going to drop a lot
of the add-in cards business and our project was put on the shelf.
>> Robert Hess: At that point is that when you left Apple, or did you stay for a
while?
>> Nick Baker: The Video Products Group got split up. It was more a Video
Architecture Group. I can't remember exactly what we called ourselves. But we
were looking at more focused on pulling in video onto the motherboard. So as
you -- as Apple computers came out, they had video capability being built into the
motherboard. We were speccing those chips. We weren't necessarily doing the
designs ourselves anymore. It was working with Phillips and others to do the
silicon.
>> Robert Hess: Now, the challenge there, I would expect, is back in those days
they could see that the video was progressing at a fairly steady pace. And if you
start sticking video on the board, suddenly that now creates a board that's stuck
in time to a certain extent. Where if you add a card, you can modify things
moving forward. The PC back in those days was having mostly plug-in cards
and the map was mostly the board. I'm sure there were a lot of decisions and
political conversations going on understanding the right way to go.
>> Nick Baker: For base band video back then it was NTSC Pal. HD was still far
off. From that standpoint it was at least supporting uncompressed video. It was
as good as probably you needed for a while. We put in architectures to have a
parallel pixel bus so the role band would suddenly need to go through main
memory, for example.
And then probably the idea was to have a slot that you could add in a
compression card, for example, that somebody else could do. But if you looked
back at the last 10 years, then it's been quite an explosive raise of growth there
in the capabilities.
>> Robert Hess: From Apple you went from there to 3DO.
>> Nick Baker: That's correct. I was three years at Apple. We had a fair number
of people leave, particularly from -- some of my friends that worked at Apple, they
went over to 3DO. And from getting into the graphic side of things, getting back
to what I was, what I wanted to do back at college, while I was at Apple I had
actually taken a 3-D graphics class at Stanford. And so the opportunity of going
and working at 3DO, that was taking me more towards what I wanted to do there.
I started working on video. Of course, at 3DO that's what I've been doing at
Apple, doing a little video NTSC pal encoder design.
And then after that, we shipped successfully in the cost reduction. Went and
started working on the next rendering engine.
>> Robert Hess: So here you're talking about focusing on 3-D architecture. I'm
assuming that's got to be different from the hardware architecture standpoint that
I think about from a software architecture standpoint. I think about designing the
pixels and designing the objects that I'm going to programmatically take and
move around where you're actually thinking about how does the card understand
and assist in this process because you're no longer just simply being I'm going to
turn these pixels to allow the programmer to address these things. We need to
be a part of it.
>> Nick Baker: You've got to define the API, the level between the hand-off
between the software and the hardware. And once you have that, at least back
then there were fixed functions that you wanted to do in hardware. You wanted
to set up. You want to do shading. You want to do texturing. And a lot of those
algorithms are pretty well defined and developed, even when I started. So the
trick was to really do it as cheaply as possible in the hardware, because back
then doing rendering still was relatively taxing from a hardware perspective.
First design I started off was probably one of the first PC kind of adding card,
complexity chips that had a hardware setup engine, for example. So that was -you started with just rendering pixels and then texturing and then moving higher
up the pipeline doing setup.
So a lot of it was trying to figure out how to do the cheapest thing in hardware,
where you can cheat with the algorithms and you can't necessarily detect that
there's anything different, how much precision to use at different stages of the
pipeline to get an acceptable result. Big challenge is pipelining, probably didn't
think too much about it at the software level. You want to do loop rolling and
optimizations and stuff like that. But if you want to meet, say, a through-put of a
particular rate, you actually have to design your whole pipeline to be able to
handle that. And if you have any memory accesses, you need to figure out how
to absorb that memory latency.
So there's a lot of the design choices there.
>> Robert Hess: Because the hardware -- programmers quite often think it's just
the video card, I'm just going to throw some pixels at it. But there's actually a lot
more work that goes on from that standpoint to be considered.
>> Nick Baker: Yep.
>> Robert Hess: What were some of the challenges that you had at 3DO, then?
>> Nick Baker: Probably because we hadn't done -- it was the first setup engine,
so we had to work on that. Texturing back then was still quite a bit of a -- the
bandwidth required was challenging from meeting that on the architecture.
So we tried to tackle it from a different way, like using an SRAM cache, for
example, rather than going to main memory and flooding their memory. So that
was probably the most interesting part of that, floating point, setup engine and
getting the texturing right.
>> Robert Hess: What are some of the other gaming systems back in those
days so we remember what the landscape was like?
>> Nick Baker: So back then we were -- I remember that. 3DO we were trying to
go after the first Sony PlayStation. So the 3DO system launched in '96 or '97. I
can't remember anymore. Certainly we're working on the next gen design. One
of the people you were talking to was Simon.
And this was when a lot of those systems were ->> Robert Hess: We're basically talking about first generation of all the machines
out there today.
>> Nick Baker: It's obviously Feiger and Atari and then for us.
>> Robert Hess: Games back in those days are nowhere as sophisticated as
they are today, but it doesn't mean the problems aren't that much harder to face.
>> Nick Baker: The next generation 3DO was, it would have been in the first
3-D, true 3-D renderer. Everything else until then had been sprites including the
first 3DO system.
>> Robert Hess: Of course, like today, business back then was kind of cutthroat
business. And everyone's battling for position. And 3DO did make it quite
across the bar.
>> Nick Baker: There were several reasons. Probably one of them was the -- it
was a little bit defocused in terms of what the product was trying to be, trying to
sell it as multi-player, what exactly does that mean? And the business model
that was set up so that the price of the hardware was quite expensive when it
came out on to the market. So it didn't get a very strong launch from that
perspective. I think we saw 700,000 or something like that at the end.
And then while we've been working on the next generation, we tried to find an
avenue for that architecture out into the market. It was actually sold to
Panasonic. We licensed it to Panasonic, and they put it in pachinkos machine,
but never shipped a product based on it.
>> Robert Hess: After 3DO you went to Microsoft then, right?
>> Nick Baker: After 3DO, there was a brief period of time after 3DO decided
they were going to get out of the hardware business continue to a software entity.
They spun off the hardware group. That was a little company called Cagent
Technologies. Lasted about nine months. They were trying to do design,
licensing, tried to license Nintendo, some of the derivative architecture from the
360. I'm sorry -- from 3DO next generation.
>> Robert Hess: Basically trying to take some of your IP and getting something
out of that?
>> Nick Baker: Yes. So that was the original 3DO. But then the next
generation was M2. And that was the one that was sold to Panasonic. We
started working on the project that we called MX which we basically had the
design up and running for that and we were showing that to Nintendo at the time.
So that company lasted about nine months. We were run by Samsung when the
Asian crisis hit back at the end of the '90s, Samsung wanted to remove some or
get out some vents and Web TV picked us up just after they were approached by
Microsoft.
>> Robert Hess: Now, Web TV which isn't around anymore. Can you remind us
what that was exactly.
>> Nick Baker: Continues as MSN TV. It's a Web browser for your TV. So it
was designed around having a browser experience that worked in the living
room. So the 10-foot browser experience, and also having everything be
controlled by a simple remote control. That was a keyboard that you could
browse using remote control and sit back and the Web pages will be formatted to
fit on your TV.
Had a modem connection, this is before broad band and ethernet. So it was
optimized for low bandwidth browsing.
>> Robert Hess: It's like a plug and play situation where you basically plug
things in and you were on the Internet.
>> Nick Baker: Yes.
>> Robert Hess: And then after working on that for a while and the Web TV
project, you were working on Ultimate TV?
>> Nick Baker: So Web TV was already done when we came. And even the first
version of the Ultimate TV, were well under development. We were working on
the high definition version of Ultimate TV, which we got to the point of having the
demo systems available, so we actually taped out a chip. We got it back.
Showed high definition, DOD code running. It was actually designed for Jewels
Stream high def, D code. So you could do picture in picture. We had that
running at the end of '99, it would be '99, I can't remember exactly when. So we
came in started working on that design. Around about that time the -- Ultimate
TV decided that the high end set-top boxes were beginning to hard to monetize.
So we never shipped the high definition version.
>> Robert Hess: Because they would have been an expensive purchase people
would have had for their system, provide set top box capabilities?
>> Nick Baker: Yeah. Those days, there was a lot of convergence or seen -- a
need for convergence. Set top boxes. We looked at putting in gaming and other
stuff into the system.
>> Robert Hess: It was at this time also that the original XBox design started
picking up, and they were interfacing with your team in some fashion?
>> Nick Baker: Yeah, it was the tail end of the next-generation Ultimate TV.
Coincided with the first brainstorming sessions we had on the XBox 1. So that
would have been around the end of 1999.
>> Robert Hess: And so you assisted them in some of the game stuff you were
doing on the Ultimate TV and the Web TV and helping them see how some of the
stuff you work on already could be applicable to them?
>> Nick Baker: To be more accurate, it was more in terms of the business
model. Because we had been doing custom silicon to really get the cheapest
possible system, you want to get something that only has the stuff you need in it.
And you want to be able to take it through to manufacturing yourselves, and you
cut out as much margin as possible from everything in between.
So we were bringing to the table here's the consumer electronics method of
doing a game system. And so not so much that we had obviously an interesting
technology, but it was targeted as a set top box kind of performance. It was
integrated with a whole bunch of other stuff. Satellite tuners and everything else.
So the amount of dedicated -- if you want to build a dedicated game console, you
wouldn't have all of that. And you would have refactored your system slightly
differently to have higher graphics capability.
So we didn't really have anything that was just off-the-shelf ready to go and put it
in the game console.
>> Robert Hess: But you did have the thought process you went through and
saw where Ultimate TV was actually having trouble in realizing, hey, if we had to
go back from scratch and do this again, maybe we would have taken a different
approach?
>> Nick Baker: Yeah, I think more from the silicon business side of things. So
we knew how to do consumer electronics and the pitch was here's a way of doing
the 360 and replicate that model. I'm sorry, XBox 1.
>> Robert Hess: And so then the original XBox comes out. You were basically
just kind of an assistant in from a consulting standpoint, that sort of stuff.
>> Nick Baker: It was a little bit more involved than that. I mean, we had in
some of the early strategy, brainstorming sessions, you had several opposing
opinions as to what the box should be.
>> Robert Hess: More than a several ->> Nick Baker: Computer electronics. We tried to emulate the PC industry and
game console space. So we participated in that. And we also worked, actually
did start design on the potential architecture for the XBox 1.
We had partnered with a couple of companies and gotten into actually doing
some design with them. We had paid some money. And so we were actually on
the, marching along designing the XBox 1, so we thought.
But that got cancelled in favor of doing what eventually shipped, which is an
internal Nvidia architecture.
>> Robert Hess: How soon after the XBox 1 shipped did the design process
start for the next generation XBox?
>> Nick Baker: We started -- we got the go-ahead to start looking at the 360
architecture in the middle of 2002.
>> Robert Hess: And the original XBox shipped when? I can't remember exactly
what the deal was for that.
>> Nick Baker: It was 2001.
>> Robert Hess: So essentially within a year or less the XBox 360 project got its
kick-off. Is that when they approached you directly to lead up that team?
>> Nick Baker: Well, we needed -- because we had been involved with the XBox
1, we were already known to the team, and the silicon group from Ultimate TV
was looking for a home. And the whole group, actually, got transferred over to
XBox at the time. So it wasn't just one or two people.
We did help the rest of the team was helping with cost reductions on the XBox 1.
So we had the Tuscany cost reduction came out in like 2003, I believe, for that.
There were a couple of chips that were designed by Microsoft. We had taken
some of the smaller components on the motherboard. It was going to be
challenging to touch the CPU and the GPU. But like the video encoders and
flash and the little SMC, micro controller that runs the system monitoring and
opens the DBD tray and stuff like that.
So we swept all those into a couple of chips. So part of the team was doing that.
But myself and a few others were basically given the direction to start looking at
what the next generation to could look like.
>> Robert Hess: What were some of the key things you were trying to focus on
for the next generation XBox, the marching orders, things you wanted to make
sure you improved or did differently for it.
>> Nick Baker: It would be number one.
>> Robert Hess: Good plan to work for.
>> Nick Baker: So back then we believed that was performance. So we tried to
be as smart as possible about getting a high performing box, really pushed the
envelope on what you could do with graphics, with the visuals.
>> Robert Hess: Now, you essentially -- you were designing a PC but a very
special feature PC that only had a few special features it was doing.
>> Nick Baker: We made a lot of trade-offs with that as well. So anything that
wasn't really central to the gaming application, we pulled out. So we were only
really getting the stuff that we thought we needed.
>> Robert Hess: Now, at the heart of any PC is the computer chip. And I know
from some of the internal discussions I was seeing at the time there was a big
hoopla raised about the fact of switching from an Intel chip to a POWER PC chip.
From your standpoint what was going on in those days to going to a POWER PC
rather than an Intel chip?
>> Nick Baker: It was really just a matter of the right technology, the right price
at the right time. We had spoken -- you have to understand back then people
were predicting still, if I look at some of the slides that I had, you know, you're
looking at 6-gigahertz, 7-gigahertz, even 10-gigahertz CPUs.
And unfortunately once we hit 90 nanometer technology it became really evident
that the power consumption for really pushing that frequency was getting out of
hand. And actually the one -- one of the companies that was trying to sell us
really high-end call, they actually ended up canceling that project.
>> Robert Hess: Because they couldn't meet their goals, they thought?
>> Nick Baker: It was too far along that line of pushing the frequency. So we
wanted to tackle it differently. The multi-processing kind of -- it wasn't very well
predicted back then. So we were probably ground breaking, sort of seeing that
was the future. So we tried to go out and find smaller, cheaper cores and put
down several of them.
We had spoken to game developers that believed the code was parallelizable to
some extent. I mean, clearly we couldn't throw eight cores at them. But if three
or four, they said, yeah, we can see how that partitions up.
And so from fairly early on that was the architecture we wanted to go ahead and
try and build. It was just a matter of finding the companies that had the cores
that met our needs.
And we weren't necessarily religious about whether it was POWER PC. IBM just
happened to have the right cores. We looked at similar cores in the x86 camp,
and they weren't quite as far along.
>> Robert Hess: So you were essentially designing a multi-core architecture
before it really existed?
>> Nick Baker: Yeah, before the rest of the industry really went there, we were
already working down that path.
>> Robert Hess: So it must make you feel good that you realize today all of a
sudden all of our laptops are multi-core architecture. That's kind of the new
buzzword going through and parallelized computing.
>> Nick Baker: Yes, either we had very good insight or we got lucky, not sure
which.
>> Robert Hess: Do you think you actually kind of helped move the technology
in that direction?
>> Nick Baker: No, when we spoke to -- maybe a little bit. But when we spoke
to the companies they were already working on these and beginning to talk as
multi-core being sort of the way out from the power consumption and putting
more parallel, more mobile processing units on the dye.
So I wouldn't say we were out there showing the way to the industry. I mean, but
clearly we could have taken a bet a different way and done something else.
>> Robert Hess: By introducing multi-core architecture and introducing the
notion of parallel computing into the game designers, did that change their
approach much at all? Do they have to rethink the way they design these things;
it's no longer just simply a port from Nintendo, to Sony, to XBox, you now have to
think when I'm going to XBox, if I want to take advantage, I need to think about
how I go to a parallelized architecture design?
>> Nick Baker: Yes, that's the conversation we had with them early on. We
knew that was going to be an issue for them. The feedback we got was if you do
it, don't go too wild. If you look at the PlayStation 2 architecture, they probably
weren't too far down that path.
They have nine different cores to program and they're not all the same ISO or
architecture either. So based on our feedback from developers, it was let's keep
it as few as possible.
>> Robert Hess: At the same time also there was a notion of some level of
compatibility with the previous model of XBox as well. How did that factor in
some of your design decisions?
>> Nick Baker: That's an interesting conversation in itself. We wanted to not pay
anything for back -- we wanted it to be absolutely free in the hardware, maybe
pay 25 cents for it or something like that. But that was really the marching
orders. And so it was really what can be done in software emulation.
And to do that you need a fair amount of raw processing. So we knew we
needed to clearly be more powerful than the XBox 1 by a certain percentage to
make software emulation possible.
>> Robert Hess: So essentially taking the original XBox, turning its hardware
architecture into a software architecture, and running it on the XBox 360?
>> Nick Baker: Taking the binary from the disk and it's being the x86 code is
being emulated, using POWER PC.
>> Robert Hess: It's a different hardware architecture from that standpoint.
>> Nick Baker: Yes.
>> Robert Hess: I've got a bunch of old ->> Nick Baker: And [indiscernible], power PCs.
>> Robert Hess: Switch that around, because I've got a bunch of old original
XBox games I can play perfectly fine on my XBox 360 and they work quite well.
>> Nick Baker: Yeah.
>> Robert Hess: So as you're actually designing the XBox 360, aside from
things like the power PC and getting the chip architecture down to a price
standpoint, what are some of the big challenges you think you were facing at
those days, in the very early days of design?
>> Nick Baker: Very early 360. So memory bandwidth has always been -- and
continues to be a challenge. If you look at the processing capabilities on the
chip, what you can actually do in silicon, once you have everything on chip, you
know that is just going up at a much faster rate than the speed at which you can
get data in and out of the chip itself.
Certainly you can pay a lot of money and have a lot of IOs and pay for the
bandwidth and have exotic memory technologies and really push the envelope
there.
But to architect the thing so it could be cost reduced over time, that was the,
solving the memory bandwidth issue was probably the top of the list.
And what we realized is that we couldn't -- if we were to put down the 256 bit bus,
512 bit bus, you're looking at forever constraining the size of the chip based on
that interface.
And you're also not able to take advantage of higher density memories we
launched 512 megabit we're now shipping with one gigabit memory density.
So we wanted to not go that way. But we do need a lot of bandwidth. So the
option that we picked was to use embedded DRAM. Weren't necessarily the first
game architecture to do that either. But it was sort of the natural choice for
setting up the business the right way to have long-term cost reduction.
>> Robert Hess: Now, when you mention long-term cost reduction, you're
getting to the standpoint when the XBox 360 came out, Microsoft was basically
losing money on the hardware. We were selling the hardware for less than it
cost us to make. And making ->> Nick Baker: Subsidized.
>> Robert Hess: Subsidized hardware and using the licensing fees coming in
from the games to take and help make the business profitable. Clearly you need
to take and identify how moving forward the exact same machine could be made
cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, and you were actually designing that in from
the beginning.
>> Nick Baker: Yeah. So a lot of the design trade-offs and choices we made
were particularly with that in mind. Another key factor not just from the design
itself is getting control over the design. So if we're going to be shipping
something for five, six, eight, 10 years, you know if you look at the design team
that was there when you launched, you look at the company that was there when
you launched and the products that they're working on, you quickly start
diverging.
So, yeah, maybe you can have a discussion that says we're going to work on the
next version of the chip that's cheaper a year from now, two years from now, but
go back to the same company six years from now, eight years, and you quickly
see the interests diverge pretty quickly.
So you want to set the business up to be able to cost reduce as well as the
technology itself. So we structured the engagements with our partners so that no
matter how long we wanted to ship this thing we could still keep on cost
reductions, get the design. And so we did a lot of work inside in terms of
simulation, pulling the design in, making sure that if at the end of the day IBM or
ATI, which is now AMD, case in point, wasn't way, we'd have the design, know
what to do with it and we could continue doing the cost reductions.
>> Robert Hess: You don't want to be stuck out on a limb you want to control ->> Nick Baker: We want to control our destiny.
>> Robert Hess: We're moving forward making sure the XBox 360 is cheaper for
us to manufacture than the original XBox 360. Besides simply just making the
hardware cheaper, what else are we doing? Are we improving the box at all?
Making modifications to it?
>> Nick Baker: It's hard to improve the box from a ->> Robert Hess: Because it was so good already, right?
>> Nick Baker: Yeah. Obviously. But from a feature perspective, I mean it's
hard to come out with new features on a game console, because the whole
model, the ecosystem relies on having a fixed platform and having it there. And
you're pretty much guaranteeing that the last game that you ever ship will run on
the first console ever produced, vice versa. So the first game will run on the last
console, and as the time gets further, it could get more challenging unless you
guarantee that you have binary compatibility all the way along. And if you come
out with a new widget or something like that in the box, then the launch games
won't know about that.
And so certain ways you can look at history here in the game industry and
custom add-ons late in the generation don't necessarily make much sense.
>> Robert Hess: So where do you make changes? Is it just simply in identifying
how to make the parts cheaper?
>> Nick Baker: Yeah, I mean, everything cost reduces. Silicon probably cost
reduces more than anything else. And I have a couple of examples here to show
you exactly why that's the case.
So this is a wafer. This is of the launch 360, the GPU. So on the actual GPU
dye, the package, there are two dye. This is what we call the parent dye which
has all the shaders and texturing and stuff like that.
>> Robert Hess: I didn't realize the chip inside the XBox was that big.
>> Nick Baker: Yeah, we cram it down really well. So this actually has, when we
launched, so this is a 1900 nanometer wafer. It has about 326 chips on here.
>> Robert Hess: So for each square here is an individual chip to be cut out and
placed on silicon and stuck in the machine.
>> Nick Baker: Right. You would cut this up and package it and then actually on
the 360, you would end up -- this is this chip right here. This is the GPU right
there. This is the ED RAM chip. This is the CPU down here.
So you cut this up and you package it and you put it in the system. So then how
this gets cheaper is then you know side by side here now we have -- this is a 65
nanometer silicon parent dye, the same one that we're now we're just shipping in
360s today. If you go buy one.
So the benefit -- obviously you can see the wafer more or less costs the same.
This one's got about 550 odd dye on the wafer. So you're able to, for the same
amount of money, for the wafer, you're able to produce more 360s.
The other benefit is, of course, the power consumption decreases and so over
time you're able to make the box consume less power, which is obviously
eco-friendly.
>> Robert Hess: Cost reduction, size reduction, energy reduction throughout the
entire process, makes the box that much better of a box to work with.
>> Nick Baker: Yes.
>> Robert Hess: Now, we talked about the original box. The XBox 360. There
was a short period of time after the original XBox shipped that the Xbox 360
worked on. We shipped Xbox 360, how long ago was that?
>> Nick Baker: That was in November of 2005.
>> Robert Hess: So here we are 2009. Would the assumption be that there's
already work underway for the next XBox?
>> Nick Baker: We're always working on research projects.
>> Robert Hess: And it's through those research projects we're actually
differentiating our line from the other lines, because there is a competition going
on out there.
>> Nick Baker: Yeah. We're constantly working on stuff. I think if you look at
our next big bet is project Netal [phonetic], clearly.
>> Robert Hess: How do you see that changing things?
>> Nick Baker: Really, it's a new way of interacting with the console and
potentially with technology, consumer electronics itself.
>> Robert Hess: I mean, and we've got to realize that some of that concept was
kind of introduced by the Wii when it came out, before XBox and Sony and Wii
was in design phases, we'd see the news, it seemed like the PlayStation and the
XBox were pounding their chests saying how great they are and look at the Wii,
it's a cheaper machine, worst graphics, don't pay attention to it.
>> Nick Baker: I guess we wanted to win on performance, we won on
performance.
>> Robert Hess: Then the Wii showed us there's other things to pay attention to
too. That's how you interact with how the game, the device participates in your
world which I think does change the way we think about games in the future.
>> Nick Baker: Yeah, and if you look at the games that we at least I play at
home with the kids, I mean it's Rock Band. So it's certainly from the graphical
fidelity, it's not -- we don't need it certainly for that.
>> Robert Hess: Right it's the interaction, the participation, it's no longer just
playing around with a game pad.
>> Nick Baker: Going back and try to learn drumming on the next level
[laughter].
>> Robert Hess: With the other platforms out there, how much of a competitive
architecture are we taking and planning on and looking at what the other
companies are doing and understanding how they take and advance the whole
market forward, on hardware design and stuff like that, because you've obviously
got to be thinking about what's coming next, how do I prepare for that? Without
actually giving away anything, how are you preparing yourself for it?
>> Nick Baker: So we continually keep in contact with the hardware community,
understanding their capabilities. We're continually talking to developers,
understanding where they're going. We're continually talking to internal teams at
Microsoft, Microsoft Research, understanding where they're going and
formulating what can be done in the future and some of the things we say, hey,
we've got something, let's go and do this.
And obviously we have several of those going on at once. But that's kind of the
process. Continually seeing what's out there, starting up incubations, looking at
what interesting products could be.
>> Robert Hess: With Xbox 360, one of the features it contained was being a
media center extender. So if you've got a media center PC in the same
household across a wireless Internet or something like that, the Xbox 360 can
now, since it's connected to the TV set, it can actually extend that experience ->> Nick Baker: We play DVDs as well. These aren't very well advertised
features of the 360. But certainly you can play movies. You can -- we have
Netflix, which actually I use, and media center extender as well.
>> Robert Hess: Isn't this almost turning the Xbox 360 into Ultimate TV?
>> Nick Baker: Well, we don't have tuners. So not exactly. And people don't
know about these other features, probably for a reason. We are a game console
and we don't want to muddy that message. We do have other entertainment
features, a very capable box. You can do video, streaming video. We do have
Netflix. We do have a very decent sized video library, arcade, downloadable
arcade library.
So for downloading content, you don't have to go out and buy everything in a
store, you can get it through a wire into your home.
So a lot of other multimedia capabilities. But we are a game system.
>> Robert Hess: And very good one, too.
>> Nick Baker: Yeah.
>> Robert Hess: Well, I've really enjoyed talking to you. What I'd like to do now
is take over and switch over to what we call our mantra questions, a set of
questions that we're going to ask all our guests and get a feeling for how
everyone feels about technology and what they're doing. Let me grab those out
here.
So we did actually give you a preview of these questions. So hopefully they're
not quite off-the-cuff for you. But what book would you like to recommend to
everyone to read?
>> Nick Baker: Other than "The Hobbit."
>> Robert Hess: That's a perfectly good book.
>> Nick Baker: I love Tolkien, "The Hobbit" and the "Lord of the Rings." I think
more from a technology standpoint, though, obviously I have my favorites on
deep technical aspects. So I think one of the most interesting ones I read was
the "Real Time Rendering," Miller and Hanes. That gives you a lot of insight.
>> Robert Hess: Not quite as exciting as Tolkien.
>> Nick Baker: No. And then kind of a whacky one, Vonagat's "Player Piano," I
thought that was interesting.
So I read it, I believe, when it was the GM Foods scare. And it was very
interesting to see, well, march against technology and then the subtle twists at
the end, all of a sudden it was like here's the old player piano sitting in the corner
of this ball, start tinkering, start getting it going after the hordes had been going
around smashing everything.
So interesting. Written obviously when computers weren't visaged.
>> Robert Hess: Much less the Internet.
>> Nick Baker: Much less the Internet. But still the role of technology in our
society and the tendency sometimes to get carried away and hating it and then
also we take, we rely on it in so many other ways as well.
>> Robert Hess: It's more just making sure that we know who's in control.
>> Nick Baker: Yep.
>> Robert Hess: The next question is, if you weren't working in the computer
industry, what do you think you'd be doing?
>> Nick Baker: I wanted to be an astronaut, but I don't think after -- I got out of
that pretty quickly.
>> Robert Hess: How old were you when you wanted to be an astronaut.
>> Nick Baker: Actually, probably up until 16, 17, something like that. If I had my
choice now, I think it would probably be like a ski instructor or a dive instructor or
a wine grower or something like that.
>> Robert Hess: There you go. We've got those all around here. We've got
skiing and diving and wine growing.
>> Nick Baker: Got that in California.
>> Robert Hess: That's right. You're from California. What do you feel is the
most important technology in today's world?
>> Nick Baker: I'm going to have say like solar power.
>> Robert Hess: Really?
>> Nick Baker: I believe.
>> Robert Hess: Do you think we're making good progress with solar power?
>> Nick Baker: I think we could be obviously with the right investments could be
making more. We hear a lot about -- so I would say alternative energy. Solar
and wind, in particular.
But I read about us trying to make, build new solar farms, wind farms, and not
having the infrastructure and the grid capability to hook that up to where you
actually need it. So I think being able to wire these things up.
There is more investment that is needed. But try to put solar in our house and
got a no bid because we don't have a south-facing roof.
>> Robert Hess: I thought that any house could be solar.
>> Nick Baker: You need a south-facing roof otherwise they won't come in and
install it.
>> Robert Hess: 25 years from now, what technology would you like to see
available?
>> Nick Baker: As if I really knew, I probably wouldn't be here. I'm sure it's going
to be something that when I'm there I'll know what it is. And it's going to be
something around maintaining my vision and hearing and keeping me going, I'm
sure, and recovering from ski injuries.
>> Robert Hess: So you're saying more, almost a medical or biomedical ->> Nick Baker: Probably. That probably would be where my main concern is in
25 years' time, I would imagine.
>> Robert Hess: Even some of the computer technology stuff we talk about now
is moving into the biomechanical sort of realm. And so you're actually growing
chips rather than --
>> Nick Baker: Suddenly with little micro robots to help in surgery, stuff like that.
>> Robert Hess: For the last one, it's going to require some of your creative
talents here. We'd like you to draw and explain your favorite data structure.
Since you're a programmer ->> Nick Baker: I didn't think a linked list would be very exciting.
>> Robert Hess: Do you have something in mind, do you think?
>> Nick Baker: Yeah, I was always fascinated by arrays and -- arrays of
hardware. And I know it's rather simple. But from doing multiplication and
hardware. So if you're writing a program, you pretty much do X equals A times B
and out pops the answer. If you are to -- it's actually good interview question as
well, because if you asked somebody, well, so you know how to multiply. If you
were to say multiply two numbers together, pretty much be able to do that. And
I'll say design this in hardware. How would you go about doing it?
Making the leap from say you have 10 by 10 and multiplying that out. Doing that
in binary becomes, doesn't always make that leap. And so but it is pretty much
the same. Becomes very simple in hardware. So if you think about if I have two
four bit numbers, I want to multiply these together, well, it really just becomes
let's take this guy and multiply by this, which in binary is just an "and." So you
would do 0, 1, 0, 1. And for the next guy it's equivalent multiply by 10, just shift
left by 1. So you would now -- flip all zeros, and so on.
And then now becomes an addition, series of shifts and addition. So if you were
to design this in hardware, all we really need is a couple of elements.
You need an "and" gate to, and either by 0 or 1. And then you need a 4 ladder,
which is basically takes N, one bit A, plus B, carry N, get a carry out and a sum.
And then it's just realizing this arithmetic in an array structure. And what you end
up wanting to design, you would start off by doing sort of your "and" terms, 0 V 0.
These are now your B0. This is B, this is A. So this guy here is B0. B1. B2.
B3. A0. A1. A2. A3.
You can see from here that this guy just falls straight out. So that's your first
product term. From this, you would want to now look at adding this guy together
so employ one of these. And you would feed in now your A0, B1 term. Now you
see everything is beginning to get shifted over.
You've got to hook up the carry "and." This would be 0 at this point. You can
see, you can march along here and do the same thing A1-B1. A2-B1. And then
A3-B1. You wire these guys up. And now you've got to move down to the next
row. Here's your next product term coming out here. Probably haven't left
myself enough space here. And probably for the interest of time, I'll just draw out
what it will conceptually look like. Rushing a little bit too much here.
>> Robert Hess: Essentially what we've got here is taking something that started
off more as a mental problem, turning that into an understanding from a pure
software standpoint. Then taking and seeing how the software can be emulated
in hardware and then reapplying the software into the hardware, end up with the
equation coming out.
>> Nick Baker: Yep ran out of page. But you end up with what I was always
fascinated by just creating hardware with arrays. And the question you had
about security and stuff, well the result can be shown to be an eight bit number if
you have four bits so there's no overflow or no buffer overall or anything like that.
>> Robert Hess: Make sure you sign it. [laughter].
>> Nick Baker: It's incomplete. I need to probably pretty it up a little bit.
>> Robert Hess: That's part of the artwork. Well, thanks, Nick, from the
Technical Network, for being our guest today. We hope you all enjoyed this
chance to look at the technology and the person behind the code.