On November 12, 2003, Robbie stood in the middle of a group of technicians with red eyes and fluffy hair, looking at the IBM-TK300 model test machine workbench in front of him.

But they have to care about these indicators, and after half a year's hard work, no one wants to have a big problem.

"The operating system works under heavy load for 30 hours in a row, and the CPU computing performance is lost by 30%, which meets the safety expectations of linear design!" A monitor reports.

Everyone frowned, 30 hours of strong load work is theoretically the longest game time for players, 99.9% of players will not run the game console continuously, but what they are most afraid of is the 0.1% of the metamorphosis / perverts, do this kind of test to ensure that there is no problem with continuous work, but it seems that its table is not good, the longer the time, the lower the CPU running efficiency, and the 30% loss is already quite large.

"The energy consumption of 500 billion limit calculations has been calculated, which is 10% lower than the safety valve domain." Another monitor reported.

This is the instantaneous energy consumption calculation, that is, the CPU computing power peak table xiàn, to see if it will break through the CPU computing valve domain and cause CPU computing overflow, this 10% number jù is too dangerous, if the CPU is exhausted and then hit it like this, maybe it will crash directly.

"The "Halo" test is over, and the CPU is not locked after 45 minutes of high-parameter operation, and the circuit board monitoring is normal. The pass rate of 50 test machines is ...... 98%！ "This 98% sounds quite harsh, and everyone is in a tug.

Robbie pushed the crowd away with some roughness. He came up behind the monitor and asked, "What's wrong with that one that doesn't get through?" ”

"Monitoring and diagnostics system prompt. The red light numbered R14 near the power supply of this tester is constantly flashing, which is our motherboard fault diagnosis indicator light, which means that the CPU is automatically correcting, it is stuck in a redundant calculation, it is clearing the excess floating point, and the logarithmic jù chain is being reflowed and modified, which takes a short time. ”

The monitor operates the bench and then lights up the laser pointer to find the number of the 50 testing machines in the glass room next to it. Shooting the laser up, Robbie and the hardware engineer pushed open the glass door next door and walked in, finding the malfunctioning testing machine.

The temperature in the test room was very high, and the air emitted the smell of unpleasant rosin flux and rubber overheating, Robbie subconsciously fanned it under his nose with his hand, but it was to no avail, everyone did see that this bare/exposed 360 mainframe plugged into the public circuit board was not the same as the other machines next to it, it was in a self-test state.

Robbie certainly knew what that meant, and one out of 50 testers had a problem. Such a pass rate is definitely not enough, and they require a pass rate of more than 99.99%.

"Continue to monitor the test and tell me the final conclusions. James, report back to me in my office in half an hour! Robbie didn't get angry on the spot. Instead, he suppressed his anger and gave an order to James, the head of the hardware department, and then he returned to his office alone.

More than a dozen people in the on-site test monitoring department saw this scene, and everyone was nervous. After seeing Robbie off, James returned to the test machine with the flashing lights. Ask a few of your deputies: "What is the fault code?" What are the specific reasons? Is there a way to circumvent it? ”

The fault code and the corresponding instruction manual are quickly taken below, which is a standard viewing library for industrial design. The fault code of 0A401 corresponds to the explanation of "CPU is in a high-load calculation correction state".

"I think this should be an accident, just like our operating system, sometimes some looseness or dust on the motherboard may cause the CPU signal to pass incorrectly, the operating system crashes, and eventually leads to a blue screen." The hardware engineer felt that this was quite normal, and he did not have a way to circumvent the construction of the building.

James thought that this made sense, so he turned off the tester, took the cleaning brush next to it and swept it on the motherboard a few times, and helped the memory that might be loose and several important wiring ports, and let the tester continue to simulate the highest setting to retest after restarting.

After more than 20 minutes, the machine did not have the same failure, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

With a bunch of printed report sheets, James came to Robbie's office, he knew that Robbie was under a lot of pressure, and he was under a lot of pressure, Microsoft's gaming department was about to be cornered, everyone was like a frightened bird, if something really went wrong in this final testing phase, they would definitely not be able to release XBox360 before Christmas, and they would definitely be in the wrath of Bill Gates.

"James, is the situation strict?" Robbie was half-lying in his seat, massaging his fingers over his eye sockets above the bridge of his nose.

James put the information in front of Robbie and breathed a sigh of relief: "In an extremely special case, it should be the number of jù overflow in the program to guide the CPU to automatically correct, and it will be fine after restarting." ”

Robbie sat up straight and asked, "Case?" ”

"Yes! I'll let them keep monitoring though, it's just 30 hours of high-intensity operation, we should be more concerned about the results of 300 hours. ”

"We don't have that much time. James, look me in the eye, I let you answer me seriously, is this question strict? ”

Robbie's request made James unable to look at it directly, and he knew very well in his heart that if he followed this kind of test results, he had to classify it as a "system strict bug", and return it to the hardware department, let them reproduce the environment at the time, find the root cause of the problem, and then fix it, and then restart the limit test after the repair is completed, until there is no problem at the end of the limit test, otherwise he will continue to hit back, modify it and test again.

The complete testing process is like this, whether it is a hardware release or a software production zuòexe program in the IT industry, it cannot escape the final testing and repair hurdle.

It's a pity that what they lack most is time!

"What, so strict that we have to go back to work?" The bloodshot in Robbie's eyes was obvious, and James felt terrible when he saw it, but he thought of himself again, he must not be much better than Robbie, he had only slept 4 hours a day for three consecutive days.

"No...... I don't need to rework it just yet, but I still need to get the numbers of other playtesters, you know, we all use ladder testing, and if the first batch of testers doesn't have problems, I think this failure is just an isolated case. James came to this conclusion with difficulty, knowing that Robbie should be like him, and wanted this to be the truth even more.

"How long will it take to get the results?"

"20 hours, another 20 hours, our first batch of 10 test machines has been running for 300 hours, and I will report back to you tomorrow."

Robbie breathed a sigh of relief: "Very good, I have worked hard for you one last time today, and I will report back to you tomorrow morning." Just the test results, if you can stay calm, that's even better! ”

James left Robbie's office, he had been pondering the meaning of the last sentence, to stay calm? He didn't feel excited at all, at most it was just because he was tired, and his body naturally showed a hint of resistance.

It wasn't until he returned to the test monitoring center that his deputy came over to report that there were no problems with the test machine after he left, and he immediately understood.

If there is a problem with the test, the standard process of work must be to report the error code and error phenomenon description, when there are other testers to watch, you can retest the modified version in a targeted manner, once the upload error BUG, a large number of people will be involved, everyone will know what went wrong, and the influence is very bad.

"Very good, only the monitor will be on duty today, and everyone else will go home to rest, and I will report to President Robbie early tomorrow morning!" James gritted his teeth and decided to hide the matter, and the others tacitly stopped mentioning it, and each packed up their things and went home to rest, no one wanted to fall short, they were too tired.

The next day, there was no fault light, and even the test machine that accidentally had a faulty light yesterday was running normally, and it looked no different from the others, so James was completely relieved and reported the matter to Robbie, and they came to the conclusion that Xbox360 had met the requirements of the product release.

Of course, the testing will continue, with different batches of testing on multiple gradients until they are new, but this does not include this test, which is full of intriguing subtleties.

Robbie did not mention the little guy who "crashed by accident" in his report to Bill Gates, the pressure on him was given to him by Bill Gates, and it was impossible for him to hand in an answer sheet that "at least two more months of testing" was a month and a half away from Christmas, and he couldn't delay any longer.

"Microsoft's gaming department, whether it's life or death, depends on this time. If I still can't recover the decline, I won't have a chance to stay at Microsoft next year, so why should I bring up this test machine problem? "Robbie's abacus is very good, and that's exactly what he did.

Bill Gates can also only choose to believe in his subordinates, a month and a half of publicity and distribution time, those people in the marketing department have made three publicity plans, just waiting for the R&D department to determine the quality of the product and the time to market, they can do the publicity all over the world, their advertising budget is 800 million US dollars, this is the Xbox series of Jedi counterattack!

On Christmas Day 2003, millions of Microsoft gamers finally waited for the long-awaited Microsoft game console XBox360.

With only 8 months behind rival Dragon Entertainment Games' DC2, will the console be able to shine? (To be continued......)