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More On IBM's Next-Gen Xbox Chipset Win
Pieroxy writes "EE Times reports further details on Microsoft's use of IBM chips in its next generation Xbox game and consumer electronics devices, dealing a blow to Intel and providing a much needed boost for IBM's lossmaking chip business." An analyst claims that "IBM is likely to modify its most advanced G5 PowerPC silicon, which is being used in Apple Computer's fastest Macintosh desktops, for the embedded market, reducing the cache and cutting power consumption", and further comments: "This is likely to heat things up at Intel, but it is competition that is healthy for the industry. It's ironic that IBM, with its roots in the computer industry, doesn't supply the processors for the main portion of the personal computer industry. Intel does." We covered IBM's initial announcement as a section-specific story earlier today.
Time was, when the choice of CPU meant something. If two machines used the same CPU you had a good chance of getting a speedy emulation of one using the other - for example the Mac emulators for the Amiga which were close to 100% compatible. But even though this is a Power-derived processor it doesn't seem likely anyone will be running AIX or Mac OS X on the Xbox2, or the other way round.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
It would be interesting to know exactly why they have picked an IBM chip rather than Intel or AMD. I wouldn't think the IBM (PPC?) chip would be more cost effective than the Intel/AMD but you never know...
It's ironic that IBM, with its roots in the computer industry, doesn't supply the processors for the main portion of the personal computer industry. Intel does.
That's not ironic. It would be ironic if IBM declared the PC industry dead, and said that the embedded industry was all that was viable, made this processor for the embedded industry, and someone used it to revitalize the PC industry and put IBM back on top there. The fact that they are not on top of an industry that they helped start is interesting, but it's a far cry from ironic.
Not to pick nits, but misuse of the word "irony" is one of my pet peeves.
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The Gamecube has a 486MHz PPC 750CX/e, which is 32bits, has limited front side bus bandwidth and 256K L2 on-die cache. The XBox2 will likely use a variant of the PPC 970 or 980, which are 64bits, have plentiful bandwidth and 512K on-die L2 cache, plus an altivec unit, and run around 2GHz.
Of course it'll be better.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
http://www.google.com/search?q=nt%20power%20pc
The first link should do.
At one point it was available for i386, alpha, ppc and mips. They dropped mips, cause nobody bought it, then IBM/Motorola pulled out of the ppc project for the same reason.
Alpha lasted a bit longer but was withdrawn as of Windows 2000.
More recently it has been ported to ia64, and they are working on a port to AMD's 64bit chip.
Actually, the earliest instance of easy backward-compatibility I can recall was the Atari 7800. It could read 2600 and 7800 carts, all from the same cartridge slot. Of course, the 7800 was so heavily delayed that Nintendo stole their market...
Even though the z80 hardware was built in to the Megadrive / Genesis, you had to shell out for the Master System Converter.
This, plus the fact that the Master System didn't sell too well, made it a losing feature.
When you sell millions of PS1s, and you can get an optical drive cheap that reads your old CD media, and your new DVD media, then you've got backward-compatibility that's a selling point.
ATARI and Sega did it first. Nintendo and Sony were the first companies to do it right.
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If i remember correctly, IBM didn't cancel PPC CHRP (Common Hardware Reference Platform), Apple did when they killed the mac clones. There was already a few CHRP based mac's out (Power Computer and a Motorola Starmax) and OS8 CHRP edition was about to ship. Then they bought NeXT, Steve Jobs came back, got rid of clones and effectivly killed CHRP by canceling all related projects in Apple. BeOS, NT PPC, AIX, OS/2 etc weren't going to be able to carry the platform without Apple and MacOS. With all the virtual machine and the surge of Linux we might see a comeback in an open PowerPC platform based around the G5.
Most embedded CPUs are not x86-based. They're not PowerPC or ARM based either. It's just that most people aren't familiar with what CPUs are out there, only what's available for PC boxes.
That said, consider that the PlayStation 1 and PlayStation 2 use MIPS processors. The Sega Saturn used a Hitachi SH-2. The Dreamcast used an SH-4. The 3DO console was ARM based. The Nintendo 64 uses a MIPS. The GameCube uses a PowerPC. The Game Boy Color is Z80 based. The Game Boy Advance uses an ARM. The Nokia N-Gage also uses an ARM.
In short, non-x86 based game consoles are the norm, not the exception. You simply can't put a super hot P4 in an embedded environment. Intel knows this. That's not the market they're after with the P4. This is basic embedded systems design.
Except that if Microsoft uses the G5 (PPC970) chip, as everyone is speculating, they'll have to tweak the Virtual PC code base to run on the G5. Why? Because the G5 silicon lacks the special "virtual little endian mode" that the Virtual PC code from Connectix relies upon for performance on the G3 and G4 chips.
Of course, a highly optimal bit of PPC assembly could be written to replace the missing mode and instructions on the G5.
Then again, Microsoft could twist IBM's arm and get them to make a custom variant of the G5 that includes this mode, and maybe chops some cache for cost conservation. I sincerely doubt that the chip IBM winds up fabbing for the next Xbox is going to be identical to the version currently shipping in Apple's G5 desktops.
IBM microelectronics make custom asics with PPC cores in them, and IBM:s chip designing is in higher level stuff than AMD so they can modify that cheaper at expense of clock speed that they get... But now at 0.9u the PPC970 is supposed to be quite tiny so what ELSE they will put in there besides the CPU core and cache? Instead of using altivec they might go something more excess like putting 16 FMACS. Which would give microsoft both superiour numbers and performance but also guarantee that other chips wouldn't be compatible with it, as they would have instructions that no one else has, and in other way their developement package might be really only way to port software for it, and the customizations might even make reverse engineering the thing without full developement package from microsoft impossible. They could offer packaging with low latency mainmemory in the package, and something like 4-8 channels to the memory chip, inside the package. And only put outside interface to graphic chip outside the package and put all the other supporting logic in the same chip with CPU. Hey IBM has LOTS of options and modifications and stuff that they could have offered for microsoft besides price point. IBM could have made point hey we offer you 4 times as much memory bandwith and 4 times as many flops as our competitors in same price if you take the reduction of other chips in the system in account. And AMD and INTEL in their highly tuned hand optimized design methologies where not able to offer something even resembling the beast that IBM could customize for microsoft, at reasonable price. IBM makes great business selling G3:s with lots of custom stuff attached to it on single chip. They might even maker HARDWARE decryption on the processor chip for instructions stream, that could mean a LOT harder modifications for it than for original xbox.
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Don't be so sure. Don't be fooled by the clock speeds. The GCN is as powerful as the PS2, if not moreso, and is the superior of the two machines if actual output is a layman's comparison. Check out a comparison.
There is no way they are discussing the G4... since Motorola, not IBM are the manufacturers of it.
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