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IBM To Design Technology For XBox 2 CPU

Posted by simoniker on from the the-audience-is-watching dept.

An anonymous reader writes "According to Biz Ink, 'Microsoft has licensed leading-edge semiconductor processor technology from IBM for use in future Xbox products and services to be announced at a later date..' IBM are already working on the PlayStation 3 CPU alongside Toshiba, and have a relationship with Nintendo after making the GameCube CPU, though there's been no official announcement on GameCube 2's hardware. Is the next-gen hardware war heating up?"

2 of 151 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Likely to be Power5 Based.... by Acidic_Diarrhea · · Score: 2, Interesting
    You think all of the PC ports for the XBox 2 are going to run in emulation??? There's no reason that IBM can't produce a x86 chip. The article doesn't even state that much evidence to show that a PowerPC chip will be involved. Come on...

    But if you're a gambling man, I'll take that bet.

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    I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
  2. Your figures are wrong by grahamwest · · Score: 3, Interesting

    PS2 has 4megs of local memory for the graphics processor. This is used for frame buffers, Z buffer and textures. DMA from the 32megs of system memory is pretty fast - it's rarely the limiting factor in game performance.

    Gamecube has 3megs of local memory, just enough for 1 frame buffer, 1 Z buffer and whichever textures are being used to rasterise the current primitve. Textures are automatically DMAed from the 24megs of (extremely fast and low-latency) system memory as they are needed. There's 16megs of (PC100) audio memory and some games use that as a backing store for extra data - DMA to/from it is quite slow though.

    You're right about Xbox's 64megs but it should be noted that the memory is divided by the crossbar memory controller into 4 16meg chunks and by carefully arranging what is in what chunk you get better performance because each chunk can be accessed at full speed (ie. as if the overall memory wasn't shared).

    Game consoles really don't need a 64bit address space yet, but they do need a very wide data bus and wide CPU registers. Right now I'd say raw CPU performance and pixel fillrate are actually the two most limiting factors for games. More RAM would certainly be nice but throughput is a bigger concern, at least with the games I've worked on.

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    Graham