IBM To Design Technology For XBox 2 CPU

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?"

Comments

Tough Luck, Intel!

[stevesliva]

All your console are belong to IBM.

Is it still going to be X86?

[Random832]

Is Microsoft abandoning its "Intel compatibility" policy? I remember the original reason was to make it easy to port between PC and X-box, to attract developers

Re:Is it still going to be X86?

[cloudless.net]

I think it is the API that matters. No matter which CPU the XBox uses, the OS will be Windows based (Windows CE). So it will be very similar to the WIN32 API and I believe it uses DirectX too. That provides portability between PC and XBox.

Re:Is it still going to be X86?

[AntiGenX]

It seems that perhaps the "ease of portability" came back and bit them because of the modder scene. Perhaps they are looking at a non x86 platform to try to stem the tide of xbox hackers and homebrew apps.

Re:Is it still going to be X86?

[Aliencow]

Just a minor nit, the DC was not CE based, it had a CE sticker and could boot it from a CD, but almost no game ever used it cause it sucked.

um...i don't think so....

[Blob Pet]

Under the agreement, Microsoft has licensed leading-edge semiconductor processor technology from IBM for use in future Xbox(R) products and services to be announced at a later date.

That's all the detail that the article really gives. The rest is typical corporate marketing. No where did I see anything that says that IBM is designing the central processing unit for the XBox 2.

Re:um...i don't think so....

[PainKilleR-CE]

The word processor is mentioned exactly twice before you get to the 'About IBM' blurb, which is tacked onto the end of every press release that has anything to do with IBM.

The first time it's mentioned, it's in the context of processor technology, the blurb most-cited so far in this thread. The second time is as follows:

According to Bernie Meyerson, IBM Fellow and chief technologist for IBM's
Technology Group, the new Xbox technologies will be based on the latest in
IBM's family of state-of-the-art processors.

Regardless, it states nowhere in the release that MS will be using processors from IBM, simply that they licensed processor technology from them, which could mean anything in this day when IP is more valuable to most companies than actual property. They could simply license certain portions of IBM's technology and then have Intel or AMD manufacture the chips, or open their own chip manufacturing plant (or have any number of other manufacturers stamp out processors).

The best reason for designing their own chip with technology licensed from other companies is that they actually get the full benefit of increased yields and any optimizations that can be made to decrease the price of the chips. The current XBox can't take advantage of these types of things because they basically have to pay extra for Intel to keep spitting out chips that they would've stopped manufacturing months (or even 2 years) ago, because their current CPUs are running with different footprints at higher MHz (and bus speeds).

Re:Likely to be Power5 Based....

[Acidic_Diarrhea]

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.

Uhh, so which is it?

[mcc]

So is IBM "Designing and building" the x-box 2 CPU, or is Microsoft "licensing technology" from them? That's a pretty big friggin difference. And it looks like it's the latter.

Seeing as IBM does so much research these days, it seems that "licensing technology" could possibly mean something really minor. Well, it could mean almost anything.

Personally, I predict that the GC2 will be the first Nintendo console to feature backward compatibility, and will also feature an IBM chip. Which would make it really wierd if IBM made the x-box chip as well. But what do I know..

It makes perfect sense

[GreatDrok]

Why should Xbox2 use x86? The x86 32 bit family will still be around, or a 64 bit decendent anyway, but I think the experience with the Xbox is that building a games system based on commodity PC hardware actually works against you in the long run as it doesn't get cheaper over time in the same way that the more custom designs such as PS2 and GCN have. Besides which, the next Xbox will likely not be a 32 bit chip so it is sensible to move to another platform and use x86 emulation (eg virtual PC/Xbox) to allow the playing of old games. A move to something based on Power5 would likely give the necessary increase in processing grunt to take on the PS3 and that is going to be something MS will really want to do. The only reason the Xbox was slightly more powerful than the PS2 was it was so late.

Of course, it is still debatable that MS should even bother to do an Xbox2. The move into media PCs, along with a standardisation on games that can run directly from a DVD-ROM rather than installing on the HD would negate the need for the expense of selling an Xbox system. Get a standard PC into the living room and make it play games as well as a console and you would have a winner........

Re:Maybe

[DrEldarion]

Yeah, that would never happen even if they used the EXACT SAME chip. Ignoring the fact that console games are written to run on the EXACT hardware that the console has (including I/O, sound, etc - a lot more than just the main processor), there's the fact that there's going to be protection on the CDs - if they won't let us play a Japanese game on an American PS2, what makes you think they'll have games that can be played on an entirely different console?

Make things short...

[Anonymous Coward]

1) XBox and PS2 fans: "Nintendo Sucks!"
2) XBox and Nintendo fans: "PS2 Sucks!"
3) PS2 and Nintendo fans "XBox Sucks!"

It's great that I'm a IBM fan and can afford all three consoles :)

Good night!

RE: When

[swasson]

When are you going to stop being an idiot?

The majority of people who buy consoles don't give a crap about picking their own hardware and building an "l337" gaming rig. Most of them don't give a rat's ass about open source non profit emulators either. One of the big draws of having a console is that sometimes people just like to sit down and play a game without having to worry about getting the latest video drivers, or having 3 Gigs of RAM, or a Radeon 9800 just to play a frickin' game. When I turn on my PS2, I don't have to worry about any of that bullsh*t. I guaran-damn-tee that no matter what the latest and greatest hardware you stick in your "l337" gaming rig, it'll be old hat in less than 6 months because something better/faster has come out.

Your figures are wrong

[grahamwest]

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.

Re:Better Question:

[American AC in Paris]

Why doesn't IBM just cut out the middle-man and get into the console business for themselves?

Egad, man--imagine it! Big Blue with their own console--hell, just the tag line alone would be enough to induce acute narcolepsy:

Introducing the new IBM IES/90 Interactive Entertainment System. IBM IES/90: the right solution for your personal entertainment needs.

(System ships with Advanced Tactical Defensive Missile Systems Operator 1.0. Click here for a list of authorized IES/90 vendors and resellers.)