Now for the new stuff. The XBox Next/720 Oban chip is in initial production. Sources at a foundry with a blue logo, confirm that Oban wafers started running in the final days of 2011. Sources on the other side of the continent in Redmond when questioned, said, “Who the f*&$ told you that? I am going to f#*&ing rip someoneʼs head off”. We at SemiAccurate take this as confirmation that the initial sources were in the right ballpark.
Other sources at Microsoft, conveniently out of head-ripping-off range, said that the initial order was for around 10K wafers, mostly at the aforementioned three letter logoʼd company, but a sizeable chunk is being run at Global Foundries too. Again, coincidence? We doubt it.
So, time for a little speculation[/b]. Oban is being made by IBM primarily, so that almost definitively puts to bed the idea of an x86 CPU that has been floating. We said we were 99+% sure that the XBox Next/720 is a Power PC CPU plus an ATI GCN/HD7000/Southern Islands GPU, and with this last data point, we are now confident that it is 99.9+%. Why? Several licensing agreements that cover what can be made where will enrich a fleet of lawyers if Oban is x86, but do not preclude the possibility entirely, hence the last .1%.
If you assume the chip is an SoC, and is made on 300mm 32nm SOI wafers, you can come up with a bunch of interesting numbers. Yield on these parts should be pretty high, it is for AMDʼs Bulldozer, and those chips run at a much higher speeds on the same process as Oban. If the chip is huge, basically reticle sized at 550-600mm^2, you can expect to get about 100 die candidates per wafer.
With 10K wafers, 100 candidates per, and lowballing yields at 20%, you are looking way way more chips than initially necessary for dev kits. Before you jump up and down about the chances of an XBox 720 under the summer “Schoolʼs Out Tree”, these chips are NOT destined for production consoles. You will not get one unless you are in line for a dev kit, or know someone at Microsoft with a penchant for handing out top secret keychains.