were are my chips

And today the 2 billion chips were given back! Thank you!

The reason it was removed is people were abusing it. Groups of friends across the country were all chipping in for cheaper gold. They spoilt it for people who really used it as a family the way it was supposed to be used

The RROD problem was with the chips and power supply not actually the case. The Xenon chip and the big PSU had the huge failure rate. Once they moved to the Falcon and Jasper ( couple other chips in limited production were also released) and smaller PSU's
the problem ended.

I think the new slim case will be more of a cosmetic upgrade rather than a performance upgrade, that's why if they expect us to buy a new console every two years they'll need to justify it with performance increases.

Well the 2 billion chips were given back, thank you for that, but now they have reset to zero again. I've played about another 13,000 hands since the last time this happened. Love this game (WSOP's ok but I like this one better), so please stop the resetting
to zero again, and reinstate my 2 billion chips again.

To brilliant joey, none of the suggestions worked but maybe the chips did come back by themselves and the resetting fixed itself.

And endorphinstorm, I've played 125,000 plus hands because I love the game. The 2 billion was something that happened along the way.

Right for this topic I'll come back and explain what is actually quite a simple 'theory' at this point. Whether I believe it to be true or not is irrelevant to helping others understand what is being said on NeoGAF.

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Right get yourself a blank piece of A4 paper and a pen. Randomly draw 5 circles about 1cm in size on the paper anywhere you like. These represent possible manufacturing malfunctions, and the paper the 'wafer' the chips are fabricated on. Wafers tend to be
a standard size, so the aim is to get as many chips on the damn things as you can.

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Right if that piece of paper was one chip, it'd have 5 manufacturing problems on it, and would probably get thrown in the discard pile... unless you're apple, in which case you'll put it in your new iPhone and claim it has 'character'

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But chips can be varying sizes, and out of a wafer many chips are made. So draw two lines down the middle of the sheet of paper, one vertically the other horizontally. This will split your 'wafer' into four chips. If like me you put you malfunctions (circles)
far apart all four quarters (chips) will have manufacturing problems. So lets divide those four quarters into 4 each to give us 16 chips. I now have five chips that have problems out of 16.

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Hopefully you'll be able to see that the smaller the chip (in actual physical space) the less likely that these imperfections will ruin a higher proportion of your yield.

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To complicate matters though when discussing size and scale there's also a sort of gauge to consider or scale to consider. A chip is made up of loads of tiny little on off switches called transistors, Xbox One has 5 billion of them. lol. These can be made
in different scales if you will, the smaller the scale you can make these switches the smaller you can make your chip. You still with me? Good. Yes there are complications involved in manufacturing chips at small gauges (nm), but technically speaking, the
pay off is that you can ram more chips onto a wafer, because they can be smaller. The more likely you are to get what people refer to as acceptable 'yields'. All this means is how many chips you get that work.

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Microsoft have in essence got two problems apparently, before we even get into the specifics. They are producing their chips, if NeoGAF tipsters are right at 40nm, which is a larger gauge than was intended as they were shooting for 25nm. Now the Xbox One
and PS4 chips are pretty large 'die' sizes. In short they're quite large as they contain both the GPU and CPU (amongst other things) on the same chip. This increases the likelihood if you will that a blemish or manufacturing fault will increase you percentage
fail rate, as they take up more space on the wafer. As you can see from our A4 demonstration the smaller the chips the more you have the less likely yields will be adversely affected.

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Microsoft as the rumour goes are having problems with the eSRAM that they have embedded on their APU to help speed there system up because DDR3 RAM isn't ideal for games.However, because they have a physically large chip, which is manufactured at a large
scale they currently aren't producing enough acceptable chips (yield) to get decent numbers of Xbox One's ready for launch. A disaster in and of itself, but it also means that each chip they do make is more expensive than planned because they still have to
pay for the wasted chips.

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So how does down clocking help? Well it isn't instantly apparent from what I've just told you, but all chips on that 'wafer' example I gave you aren't made equal. Some will be sturdier if you will than the target they were aimed for. These chips can be 'overclocked'
made to run faster. Think of them as the jocks of the chip world. The majority will be your average Joe's, and will work at the exact clock speed desired. Then there are the anemic hay-fever sufferers of the world who will work a bit slower. Lets for arguments
sake say that on or 16 chip example 4 are the super fast jocks, 8 are your average Joe's and 4 are your specy nerds who always forget their Gym kit at school. If you like pick three random colours to represent them and colour your squares in.

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Now the ones that can run faster you don't have to worry about. You just put some metaphorical lead boots on them as a console manufacturer and they work like they were average Joe's and you can use them. The slower ones though... well if you put them in
consoles and run them 'hot' making them go at the desired speed you'll get faileures. So you won't use them. Now looking at my 'wafer' I've actually randomly gone down from 11 OK chips to 7. More than half of my chips are now wasted after I've discarded the
slower ones. This is bad, very bad, my yields are awful, cost per chip is going through the roof and I'm not going to be making enough systems. Is there a solution?

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Yes. I accept those slower chips as OK and then lower the clock speed of my average Joe's and my Jocks to match the slower specy nerds. This is underclocking. And in a round about way this is sorta what the rumours are saying is happening to Microsoft. I've
left a lot out and it's not a wonderfully technical explanation (my semiconductor tutor will be spinning in his grave God rest his soul) but it is I think a fairly decent stab at putting it into laymen's terms. Hope it helped understand the rumours and what
they are saying.

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Cheers

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