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Leaked X-Box 2 Specs Include PPC CPU
Jutebox150 writes "According to the MercuryNews.com, the specifications for Microsoft's successor to the Xbox were revealed. The specs for the next Xbox, at least according to this report, are as follows: Three IBM-designed 64-bit microprocessors, the same chips now used in Apple Computer's high-end G5 PowerMac. This will give the new Xbox 'more computing power than most personal computers.' A graphics chip designed by ATI Technologies that will clock in with speeds faster than the upcoming R400. But what I found most surprising is there are no talks about an internal hard drive, rather suggesting that the next Xbox will instead rely on flash memory, and, depending on hardware cost, backwards compatibility could be out of the question."
Remember, MS has said they can't make XBox 1 profitable. You can bet they are going to try to drive down their hardware costs with XB2 so that they can actually make some money. The harddrive is a big expense that could be dispensed with without too much pain.
I've heard the reasons for not including the hard drive (I'm in the games industry), and they make sense.
1) People don't care. Believe it or not, it's not actually a big deal to MOST people. Yes, there are lots of people that do want it, but they're a small percentage of the population. It doesn't matter what they save their games on as long as it's fast.
2) With the PPC, backwards compatibility is already broken. Not to mention backwards compatibility is a pain in the ass for developers as well. They don't care about it, either. It's just not worth the money in the end to make a system that's backwards compatible unless it's easy. The PS1 is a single chip in the PS2. The Game Boy is pretty primitive, and is also easy to include in a GBA. For the Xbox 2 to be backwards compatible, it would either a) have to be the same architecture again or b) have an Intel 733 in there again that somehow gets used with XBox 1 games. Interestingly, the majority of the population isn't interested in backwards compatibility as a MAJOR feature anyway. It's just another bullet point to them.
3) Hard drives are expensive. The interesting thing about hard drives is that they never get cheaper, just bigger. Microsoft gets murdered with every hard drive they put in the Xbox.
4) They want this to be part of their digital hub thing. Since the Xbox 2 will likely have a network connection, if you want to store things more permanently, I heard mumblings about being able to do it on your PC.
5) The hard drive does a couple other things: generate heat and take up space. Getting the size down is something that they have to do if they want to make it in the all-important Japanese market.
6) Lastly, they don't want Linux running on Xboxes. If you want a PC, they want you to go out and buy a PC with Windows on it. The margins are better there.
I think this new Xbox sounds exciting. I'm not a big fan of the current model, but the new one will be a huge boon to developers and gamers alike. With 3 general purpose CPUs and a unified memory system, you can do things like generate a single tree and have each processor modify the tree in memory slightly before sending it to the GPU. Voila! Instant forest with quickly generated unique trees.
Have you ever seen VirtualPC run on a Mac? I've seen instances where VPC is able to emulate code pretty close to the x86 equivalent speed. Now if we're talking about a multi-way PPC, (tri? dual?) 970 class processor, even if you penalize one of the 1GHz processors 50%, it should be able to handle the 700MHz P3 that's in the XBox.
I found it fishy when Microsoft purchased VirtualPC. Sure, they can create virtual instances of Windows on top of Windows, but that's not very mass market. On the other hand, if they can use the technologies that VPC perfected to make their software basically architecture independant (backwards compatibility on any reasonably equipped processor), then that really gives them a bargaining chip. Of course, the Mac community felt that Microsoft was going to box VPC up in a small piece of pine and we'd never see it again, but that was not cunning enough.
I've heard that the G5 doesn't have VPC running on it because it's missing one instruction that the G4 had, and although I don't know what that is, I imagine that Microsoft can pay IBM enough to put that instruction in for the XBox2 version of the chip. Heck, Microsoft and IBM can work out a way to make custom logic interface with VPC better instead of it being exclusively modifying VPC (within reason of course).
I think, in true Microsoft fashion, we'll see the new VPC changed slightly and then become the foundation of their (gaming) business.
The problem the G5 has with VPC is that unlike the G4 it cannot accept numbers in both big endian and little endian form. The G4 was able to do this and it saved enourmous amounts of work when emulating x86 and its ass-backwards numbers.
If it's not on fire, it's a software problem.