When everyone was sitting on the bums waiting for the Xbox 360 to hit the market, and we were all met with delays and shortages, everyone had come up with reasons behind the shortages, but they were never really explained, and now it looks like Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer basically told the story without pointing any fingers: “… [with] devices based on new chips, there’s always the question of what yield will you get out of the manufacturing process of the new chip. We’re getting a little less, but not much less than the yields we expected, and we know that the yields we expected will probably outrun supply.”
The Xbox 360’s 512MB of high-speed GDDR3 memory is only manufactured by two companies which are Germany’s Infineon and South Korea’s Samsung, and while both companies were contracted to supply the memory, Infineon had trouble producing chips that met the speed requirements leading to the shortage.
If it was the lack of memory that created the shortage, we can only hope that adding another manufacturing partner like they did will solve the problem, and fulfill Peter Moore’s prophecy of no more shortages in 4-6 weeks.