Posted by
michael
on from the soon-to-be-illegal dept.
Tauvix writes: "AnandTech is running an in-depth article on the hardware of the X-box as compared to a PC, the PS2, and the Gamecube. There's some very interesting suprises and commentary on what was done right, and what could have been done better."
Is it worth Hacking
by
slashnik
·
· Score: 4, Informative
It is said that the XBox is being sold at a loss but does that automatically mean that it is a good deal if it is hacked to make a general purpose computer. The CPU is soldered and non-upgradeable, the memory again is soldered and non upgradeable. The hard disk and PSU are "non standard"
Can an open platform, boxed general purpose computer with similar spec be built for the same or simlar money
Anyone who says that the XBox would make a good cluster node should price up a similar spec motherboard + CPU + memory + NIC+ case. I believe that this should come in cheaper and be far more upgradeable
What are the other uses for a hacked XBox
slashnik
Single page article
by
purplemonkeydan
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Protect your sanity and view the whole article on one page here, rather than clicking 'Next' 100 times and downloading heaps of ads.
Re:Um??? Hello?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Re:Who says you can't read/write the drive image?
by
hattig
·
· Score: 2, Informative
(1) The Hard drive interface is custom - you can't just plug it into a normal PC (yet, the electrical format will probably be sussed very soon and adaptors made)
(2) The format of the hard drive may be such that you cannot even dd it.
(3) How will dd help you if you want to use a different hard drive? dd is great for copying HDA to HDB, where both HDs are the same in every respect. However, sticking in a 40GB 7200RPM drive to get more speed will not work anyway.
Re:Wonderfull Design, but Perhaps Unflexable
by
zulux
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Orchestrating four separate processors with DMA accesses flying over limited bus power is tricky.
Quite true, the Xbox is much easier platform to develop for if you want a typical game. PS2 is a bitch, reminds me of the Saturn. Unlike the Saturn though, the huge volume of shipped PS2 systems will give good developers the push they need to get out of their one-processor, one thread mindset.
As for 'simulating deformable shapes on a per-pixel basis' I've been in the graphics trade for five years, and have never heard such a made up bunch of junk.
The Slashdot audience is made up of computing professionals with a wide array of knowledge. I use terms to facilitate communication, not to shout to the world that I know arcane terminology.
You want deformable shapes? Cool;
No, what I want is beer and a good curry.
Don't get all hot and bothered because someone things that the PS2 has a bit of untapped potential left in it. The Xbox will do fine and there are plenty of fun games to make for it. I'm really looking forward to Myst IV.
--
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Re:Interesting Look
by
EMN13
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Actually, at least according to the anand tech article, you're incorrect in assuming that consoles come with specialized which would make them easier to program for. PS2 apparently came without a c-compiler, and though I have little knowledge about consoles in particular, c is still king for most embedded applications.
I only have limited OpenGL and assembler experience, but I've seen the instruction set that the vertex shader's in the X-Box use, and they are orders of magnitude simpler (and correspondingly less flexible) than implementing such vertex transformations in x86 assembler. (This has nothing to do with the x86 architecture, it's simply that NormalizedCrossProduct EBX, EAX, ECX (psuedocode) is a lot easier than working out a normalized cross product manually, though the vagaries of the x86 FPU won't help.) Given the fact that the x86 architecture is old, as is DirectX, it should be much and much easier to program for this familiar platform, especially now that it's got a unified memory architecture.
The XBox is a console in the sense that it has hardware stability; you know exactly what you're coding for, and a PC in simplicity. I'ld expect it to be a great hit in the game-programming industry...
And as to the amount of memory, while it's true that one can make good games in little ram, some things like hi-res images, animated textures, music clips, hi-poly geometry, and whatever else I'm forgetting do take a lot of ram, and it would be sad if that turned out to be the limiting factor. A smartly structured game which loads game code and story on the fly, perhaps even compressed in some way, with code reuse done well can be very small. It's just that extra ram never hurts...
I'm not sure about this, but I think that the reason for previous generation of consoles success was hardware+software stability, and definitly not the tools supplied by the manufacturer. Those tend to be great for the PC. A small simple platform has the advantage in testing (java: write once, run anywhere - sound familiar?) and complexity. The coders don't need to worry whether the user has win95 or the osr2 version, and that is GREAT.
2 slashdot whines in the same comment!
by
Ella+the+Cat
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Does anyone have the figures for the computing power of the Penteron/Celium III
Have you tried entering "Penteron/Celium III" into Google?:-)
Pentium III 2.9 Gflops at 733MHz, PS2 EE 6.2 Gflops at 300 MHz, dunno about the GameCube.
Slashdot Mirror
It is said that the XBox is being sold at a loss but does that automatically mean that it is a good deal if it is hacked to make a general purpose computer. The CPU is soldered and non-upgradeable, the memory again is soldered and non upgradeable. The hard disk and PSU are "non standard"
Can an open platform, boxed general purpose computer with similar spec be built for the same or simlar money
Anyone who says that the XBox would make a good cluster node should price up a similar spec motherboard + CPU + memory + NIC+ case. I believe that this should come in cheaper and be far more upgradeable
What are the other uses for a hacked XBox
slashnik
Protect your sanity and view the whole article on one page here, rather than clicking 'Next' 100 times and downloading heaps of ads.
NoNoNo...
four 4x32Mbit... (4x4x32 = 512Mbit)
512Mbit / 8 BitsPerByte = 64MByte
There ya go...
(2) The format of the hard drive may be such that you cannot even dd it.
(3) How will dd help you if you want to use a different hard drive? dd is great for copying HDA to HDB, where both HDs are the same in every respect. However, sticking in a 40GB 7200RPM drive to get more speed will not work anyway.
Orchestrating four separate processors with DMA accesses flying over limited bus power is tricky.
Quite true, the Xbox is much easier platform to develop for if you want a typical game. PS2 is a bitch, reminds me of the Saturn. Unlike the Saturn though, the huge volume of shipped PS2 systems will give good developers the push they need to get out of their one-processor, one thread mindset.
As for 'simulating deformable shapes on a per-pixel basis' I've been in the graphics trade for five years, and have never heard such a made up bunch of junk.
The Slashdot audience is made up of computing professionals with a wide array of knowledge. I use terms to facilitate communication, not to shout to the world that I know arcane terminology.
You want deformable shapes? Cool;
No, what I want is beer and a good curry.
Don't get all hot and bothered because someone things that the PS2 has a bit of untapped potential left in it. The Xbox will do fine and there are plenty of fun games to make for it. I'm really looking forward to Myst IV.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Actually, at least according to the anand tech article, you're incorrect in assuming that consoles come with specialized which would make them easier to program for. PS2 apparently came without a c-compiler, and though I have little knowledge about consoles in particular, c is still king for most embedded applications.
I only have limited OpenGL and assembler experience, but I've seen the instruction set that the vertex shader's in the X-Box use, and they are orders of magnitude simpler (and correspondingly less flexible) than implementing such vertex transformations in x86 assembler. (This has nothing to do with the x86 architecture, it's simply that NormalizedCrossProduct EBX, EAX, ECX (psuedocode) is a lot easier than working out a normalized cross product manually, though the vagaries of the x86 FPU won't help.) Given the fact that the x86 architecture is old, as is DirectX, it should be much and much easier to program for this familiar platform, especially now that it's got a unified memory architecture.
The XBox is a console in the sense that it has hardware stability; you know exactly what you're coding for, and a PC in simplicity. I'ld expect it to be a great hit in the game-programming industry...
And as to the amount of memory, while it's true that one can make good games in little ram, some things like hi-res images, animated textures, music clips, hi-poly geometry, and whatever else I'm forgetting do take a lot of ram, and it would be sad if that turned out to be the limiting factor. A smartly structured game which loads game code and story on the fly, perhaps even compressed in some way, with code reuse done well can be very small. It's just that extra ram never hurts...
I'm not sure about this, but I think that the reason for previous generation of consoles success was hardware+software stability, and definitly not the tools supplied by the manufacturer. Those tend to be great for the PC. A small simple platform has the advantage in testing (java: write once, run anywhere - sound familiar?) and complexity. The coders don't need to worry whether the user has win95 or the osr2 version, and that is GREAT.
Does anyone have the figures for the computing power of the Penteron/Celium III
Have you tried entering "Penteron/Celium III" into Google? :-)
Pentium III 2.9 Gflops at 733MHz, PS2 EE 6.2 Gflops at 300 MHz, dunno about the GameCube.