The first samples should come out of the ovens in February

Jan 21, 2012 18:51 GMT  ·  By

Redmond-giant Microsoft has apparently begun the production of the chip that will go inside the company’s next-generation Xbox console, with the first samples being expected to be finalized at the end of February.

The chip, which is known under the code name of Oban, was apparently taped out by Microsoft sometime at the start of December, soon after the company contracting IBM to build the first batch of such processors.

As SemiAccurate reports, this initial batch seems to be comprised out of 10K chips that will be fabricated using the 32nm SOI (silicon-on-insulator) process on 300mm wafers.

If this number seems a bit low is because these initial chips aren’t actually supposed to go towards end users but will rather be installed in next-gen Xbox dev kits, so only a select few will have access to them.

The first of these chips should be coming out of the ovens at the end of February, so if no problems make their appearance along the way, the dev kits should arrive into the hands of developers in March of this year.

What’s important to note here is that the chips Microsoft will use in these kits are based on a first revision silicon, so they still might have to go through a few revisions before all the flaws that made their way into the integrated circuits can be ironed out.

Sadly, little is known about the hardware specifications of the chips that will go into the Xbox Next/720, although SemiAccurate seems to believe that Oban will be based on the PowerPC architecture, just as the current Xbox 360 processor.

If this is indeed based on the PowerPC architecture, Oban should also include eDRAM memory, while the graphics core could be based on an AMD Graphics Core Next (GCN) design.