TheXboxLife

If your not familiar with Project Falcon, it’s the name for the new board that will be used in the XBOX 360 Elite and Halo 3 Special Edition boxes. What’s the big deal you may ask? Current XBOX 360 boards run with a 90-nanometer chip, which is partly responsible for the overwhelming amount of XBOX 360 defective reports. Because of this large number of defective XBOX 360, Microsoft has offered [over a three-year period since purchase] an option to send your console back to Microsoft for a FREE fix. Good for consumers [because it's free], but horrible for Microsoft because they end up taking their Engineers and Hardware experts out of the drawing room, and back into “how can we make the next version not crash like this one?”

The reason why Falcon is so important is because it will introduce a new 65-nanometer chip which will result in less heating issues. Now, this isn’t ‘new’ technology. This is something that has been around for a few months with Intel & IBM. Originally, the plan for XBOX was to release a new board technology every 2 years, taking 1 year for the new board design, and 2 years for the chip technology. Obviously, consumers are overdue for a new type of stable board.

A big problem is Microsoft doesn’t know what it’s competitors plans are for introducing the 65-nanometer chip in their consoles. Right now it looks like the Falcon boards will be available by Christmas, probably to accompany the release of the highly anticipated Halo 3 game. Now, Microsoft still has a huge quantity of the 90-nanometer (original) console boxes, and those must sell before they begin selling the new 65-nanometer Falcon boards with the console. This not only means that Microsoft is going to possibly loose even more money then they already have with XBOX, but also that consumers who choose to purchase an XBOX before the new chips are accompanied with all the consoles, will not be able to tell which chip/board they are getting. This makes it not just a risk for consumers, but also for Microsoft and the possibility that consumers wait for the new stable systems.

story compiled from here/here