The original Xbox, released in 2001, is about to celebrate its 20th birthday in November this year (2021). On the occasion of its 20th anniversary, the original Xbox designer Seamus Blackley posted an apology 20 years late on Twitter.: It should not have been decided to abandon AMD chips and use its rival Intel’s processors.
The original Xbox designer Seamus Blackley wrote on Twitter:
“As Xbox is about to celebrate its 20th anniversary, I think it is necessary to apologize again to those AMD engineers who helped us build Xbox, because we ended up using Intel processors. But it was Andy (Andy. Grove, the former CEO of Intel), it’s not me, Ms. Su Zifeng, please forgive me.”
“(When the Xbox was released) Gates and I were both standing on the stage, and AMD engineers were sitting in the front row. I will never forget the lost expressions on their faces. They did a lot for the original Xbox prototype. And to be honest, many of the game demos on the original Xbox prototype were executed with AMD hardware.”
Seamus Blackley even said that “I feel like a bastard” and also talked about the switch to Intel because of the “above policy”, which eventually made Microsoft give up AMD and support Intel.
The original Xbox console was sold in the United States on November 15, 2001, and in Japan on February 22, 2002. Later, the Xbox was also sold in other countries around the world. Its CPU uses Intel PentiumIII 733MHz, and the CPU is a special graphics chip X-Chip 233MHz (an improved version of GeForce3) jointly developed by Microsoft and NVIDIA.
Although AMD has lost the opportunity to provide chips for the original Xbox, now, Xbox Series X/S and PS5 both use AMD chips.
However, Su Ma actually joined AMD as the senior vice president and general manager in January 2012. So, in fact, 20 years ago, Su Ma was not in AMD at all! Seamus Blackley’s apology is probably the wrong target.
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