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''Jump In.''
After four years, Microsoft's contract with NVIDIA on the Original [[X Box]] was up. Their solution: release the [[Xbox 360]] a year ahead of Sony and Nintendo's consoles. The 360 featured a continuation of the Xbox Live service with improvements over the original. The system itself continued to be [[Direct X]]-based like its predecessor, thus it was still relatively easy to port games from PC. This was greatly aided by Microsoft's developer tools; said tools have been praised by, among others, John Carmack of Id Software as the best development environment he's ever seen on a console, which helped mitigate the change of CPU architectures from an X86 Out-Of-Order CPU (very much like that in a PC) to a POWER-architecture based In-Order CPU (which requires more careful programming). The 360 continued what the original [[X Box]]'s trend with one difference: it finally began outselling [[
As of the end of 2008, the 360 was in second place behind the Wii and still comfortably in the lead over the [[
Microsoft did have to take a few shortcuts to keep their system in a reasonable price range, including a cooling system that proved inadequate and a CPU that's a slightly modified version of the [[Play Station]] 3's Cell Processor PPE architecture, though limited to a 10 MB frame buffer. There were widespread reports of "Red Rings of Death" (i.e. general system failure) errors causing consoles to die abruptly, particularly in earlier hardware revisions of the console where the excess heat would cause the solder to melt and then set incorrectly as it cooled. In the end, Microsoft reported that more than ''half'' (51.4%) of all 360 systems were affected by the defects, and ultimately took the step of extending the 360's warranty to cover all general system failure issues for three years, at the cost of $3 billion.
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