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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?"
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
We've secretly replaced Slashdot with new Folgers Crystals - let's see if it notices.
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.
"...today consumers have been conditioned to think of beer when they see a bullfrog..."
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..
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
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........
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
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!
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.
Graham
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.)
Obliteracy: Words with explosions