SN 401831454005

From Free60 Project

Reference system SN401831454005 was acquired in mid December 2005. It is a CORE system. According to the Xbox serial number standard, this box was the 18314th manufactured on assembly line 4, factor 05 (China), during workweek 40 of 2005. The manufacturing date is 2005-09-26 as printed on the case. It has no hard drive.

Interestingly, comparison to SN406999554005 indicates something about the run-rate of the Xbox consoles. It was manufactured on 2005-09-28 and is the 69995th unit. That is a delta of 51,681 units over two days. Assuming the factory runs 24/7, and the count is reset to 0 on Sunday at midnight, the numbers are consistent with a daily run rate of about 18-25,000 units, and unit 18314 being produced on the early side of 2005-09-26. One can interpolate that at this rate, the factory had to run for about 50 days to produce 1,000,000 units. This is consistent with the roll-out rate being seen in stores and the current shortages observed.

The East Fishkill, NY fab where IBM manufactures 90nm 300mm CMOS wafers with SOI/low-K technology (the type used by the Xbox360 CPU) has a throughput of 500-600 wafers/day (15,000 wafers/month). Chartered Semiconductor, IBM's second-source partner for this technology, has Fab 7, which came up in early 2005, and has a projected capacity of 30,000 wafers/month. The Xbox CPU's silicon is about 160 mm^2 (altho my measurements indicate its slightly larger than that?? should break out the calipers). Given that the CPU cannot be speed binned and resold, this must have an appreciable impact on device yield. At any rate, 1,000,000 CPUs would take only 6,000 wafers at a 50% yield from wafer to package (which I think would be exceptionally high at this time). Thus, the rumors that Xbox360 availability is limited by CPU manufacturing capability indicates that the yield must be quite bad, like less than 10%, or the fabs are not dedicating more than around 25% of their capacity to the Xbox360 CPUs. It would be interesting to see what the real number is on the cost of a 360 CPU to Microsoft...these numbers indicate finished price with margin and yield ought to be somewhat greater than $100/unit.

Reference system 401831454005 will be used to compare and contrast results with the tear-down of 406999554005. Results posted here will relate primarily to the compare-and-contrast experiments, and should prove valuable in terms of exploring how extensively each Xbox is customized in the context of the per-box unique crypto key system.