Chief analyst Bryan Lewis, vice president at the information and technology research and advisory firm Gartner, recently revealed his speculations about the Xbox 360's serious overheating problem that caused the Red Ring of Death (RRoD) for so many.

According to him, Microsoft tried to design the GPU themselves instead of paying a professional ASIC vendor like Nvidia or ATI. The result of this design attempt was that it emitted too much heat - a problem which could have been avoided from the very beginning on. Microsoft fixed the problem by hiring a yet unnamed vendor. Word has it that no other than ATI Technologies (now part of AMD) redesigned the chip.

Instead of "saving tens of millions in ASIC design costs, Microsoft ended up paying more than $1 billion for its Xbox 360 recall." This was certainly not the best cost calculation Microsoft has ever done.

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