Slashdot Mirror
Xbox 2 SDK Released On Mac G5?
Espectr0 writes "The Inquirer reports rumors, courtesy anonymous sources, that Microsoft has released the Xbox 2 SDK to select videogame developers, and they are using 'dual Apple Power Mac G5 systems running a custom Windows NT Kernel.' This ties up with earlier rumors which mention that the XBox 2 will be powered by the IBM chip, and ATI will be providing the video chip." The report also notes: "Interestingly, the SDK apparently also features an Apple logo on a side bar within the application."
Several years back, Microsoft wrote a version of Windows NT for PowerPC chips.
Here's a link.
Paizurishitetai desu ka?
Does the NT kernal run "under" the base OSX or is it an operating system unto itself?
I'd be willing to bet the NT kernel runs as an OS X application, much like OS 9 does in the Classic environment. Back when OS X was just a gleam in the eyes of Mac users, there was talk of Apple doing a Windows compatibility environment so people could run Windows apps right alongside their Mac apps. I believe it was called the "blue box," and back then Classic was known as the "yellow box," but don't quote me.
As for why that never made its way into OS X, Apple probably feared that cheap, lazy developers wouldn't bother to port their apps to the Mac and would tell people "just use the Windows version."
There is very little other than the processor and BIOS that is different about a Mac and a PC. They use the same memory, same system busses, same architecture, same periphals. The periphals are, in most cases, totally interchangeable, needing only appropriate OS drivers.
Also, NT has been on PPC. NT 4.0 was available for x86, Alpha and PPC architectures. However the target of NT 4 PPC was IBM systems, not Macs. Neither it nor the Alpha version did well, so they were discontinued with Windows 2000.
The NT architecture is highly portable and was designed that way from the beginning. Porting it to a new chip is not a major feat. For something like the X-box, even easier since it runs a much stripped down version of Windows.
if i remember correctly, XP IS built on the NT kernel, just a newer one then NT4...
insert generic
Here's the slashdot story.
And here's the original blog posting.
Ummmm, the 64-bit IA-64 version of Windows XP has been available for a long time. Full release version, not a demo.
About six or seven years ago, MS bought a small amount of Apple preferred stock (which means non-voting shares). It was intended as a public show of confidence in Apple's future. Apple's stock price went up quite a bit in the time after that, so MS sold the stock for a nice profit. MS never had ANY control over Apple, contrary to what people mistakenly repeat.
XP does have an NT kernel.. so likely it's the same sort of thing, yes.
Blue box was/is Classic, I think the Windows part was rumored to be the red box. Note: it was just a rumor though, I don't think there's any evidence that it actually existed.
Now there actually is a project that combines Wine with X86 emulation for OS X.
XP IS NT. The official name for it is Windows NT 5.1.
hey!
No I mean like the IA-64 version was out years before the x86-64 version. It came out a few months after the Itainum 1. It's pretty much been a non-story, given the Itainum's less than stunning success, but it's been around.
Will Darwin or Linux be ported to Xbox first?
NT ran on PPC and Alpha back when everything went through an emulation layer. Now that graphics and sound are straight to hardware they're likely going to have some fun restructuring their low-level architecture.
And technically, it's possible the XBox2 SDK could be backwards-compatible with the XBox1 SDK, requiring only a recompile to get a game working on the new platform. But while this is possible I also think it will never happen. It makes no economic sense to do so.
Just a tidbit of info. My version of Safari seems to be v1.2. IE is still included with the freshest build of Panther, but it is no longer the default browser.
No one's turned the GameCube into a Mac.
Nope. Because the GameCube has very little in common with a PC. It has a G3 CPU, then a massive all in one control chip that contains the ArtX designed GPU and other components.
The XBox on the other hand was very much like a computer.
Let's see here:
For Nintendo:
SNES: Success, not backward compatible with NES.
N64: Success, not backward compatible with SNES or NES.
Gamecube: Success, not backward compatible with N64, SNES, or NES.
For Sega:
Genesis: Success, not backward compatible with SMS.
Saturn: Failure, because of lack of 3d. The Saturn was designed to be the ultimate 2d console, which it was. 3d was an afterthought, and never worked well.
For Sony:
Playstation: Success, not compatible with ANY other system, being their first.
So it looks to me like backwards compatibility is a nice feature, nothing more. Nintendo, being the oldest company, is the most shining example. NONE of their consoles have been compatible. They thought about it with the SNES, hence the use of the 65C816 (which has a compatibility mode for 6502 code) but didn't end up doing it. The rest of the consoles aren't even remotely compatible. None the less, each has been a success.
What makes a console succede? Two main things:
1) Having flashy graphics to attract people, and the marketing to let people know about them. You may not, but most people gravitate towards pretty graphics.
2) More importantly: Good games. This is REALLY what makes or breaks a console. If your system has the games people want to play, they'll buy it. If it doesn't they won't. This is also a positive feedback loop since the more good games you have the more you sell and the more consolse you sell the more developers that will want to release for your console.
That's why Sony succeded, despite being new to the market. They released the games people wanted to play, and had stunning graphics for the time. Combine that with good marketing, you've got a winner.
(Nobody can exactly figure out why Mario characters were stuffed into Doki Doki Panic [emuverse.com] for the US sequel.)
Have you played The Lost Levels? Imagine Super Mario Brothers as designed by a team of sadists who get off on making gamers suffer.
Seriously, it's level after level of the meanest jumping puzzles ever designed. Also, the original's graphics were identical to SMB1, which IMO would not have been a good selling point.
I'm sure Nintendo needed a sequel that would sell well, and the US SMB2 was a much better choice. It had nicer graphics and wasn't impossible for all but a tiny portion of gamers to ever finish.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
As of late IBM's chip division has kind been seen only as a high-end server/supercomputer thing. Thier midrange market is almost non existant and their embedded market has been shrinking. Well the 970 is a serious midrange contender and I'm sure they want people to know it.
"midrange" is a very subjective term. IBM has been making some of the G3s for Apple for some time. However, it is true that IBM processors generally go into their servers (This isn't limited to just "high-end" and supercomputers). You can buy a IBM p615 with a real POWER 4+ processor for a relatively affordable (depending on what you consider relatively affordable) price of $5745. But I do agree that their consumer processor business as well as embedded market has been shrinking.
Reason for Sega Saturn's failure - lack of backward compatibility for Sega CD
I doubt the Saturn choked because people couldn't play Night Trap. Maybe it was the fact that the machine was (reportedly) a bear to program for, with something like 6000 SH-2s, 14 68Ks, 11 i960s, and 3 Z80s running in parallel.
The PPC build of Windows NT 4.0 wasn't for the Macintosh platform. It was for IBM's, and possibly other company's, small and seemingly unpopular PPC based "PC"s (for lack of a better term) for the workgroup / business markets. You can find them on ebay.
but they have turned the gamecube into a linux machine.
This reminds me of when the Apple IIgs was used as a development platform for the Super Nintendo, since they both used Motorola's 65C816 chip.
:-)
If the Inquirer's report is true, maybe Apple should take a hint and revive the Pippin program. Others seem to think Apples are good for game programming.
Actually considering that IBM is manufacturing/assisting with the design of CELL for Playstation 3 - designed & built the Gecko processor for the Gamecube - and now finds its way into Xbox 2 would indicate that:
"Well the 970 is a serious midrange contender and I'm sure they want people to know it. Being the chip in one of the big 3 consoles certianly goes a long way for that."
IBM doesn't just have 'a chip' in one of the big three consoles - it is making all the chips in all the consoles.
As well process innovations in fabrication will allow IBM to reduce the cost of production on the 970s over the lifespan of the X-Box 2 - in addition - economies of scale should kick in to a large degree considering the scale of the resource commitment for the cpu's in a console.
No, long ago AMD had a cross-IP licensing agreement with Intel, because AMD got a big start helping Intel supply x86 chips. There was a court case brought by Intel against ADM when AMD started making their own compatible chips, which AMD won, around '486 times, that enabled AMD to continue to use said IP up to a certain tech level, essentially in perpetuity. So, no, AMD does not have to pay licensing fees to Intel for some of the X86 stuff that they use in their chips.
Otherwise, there would be no point in AMD making chips.
Which is why AMD has a different set of X86 extensions to do mostly what MMX does compared to Intel, which was some of the first new tech on X86 chips that AMD could not duplicate (terms of the lawsuit judgement).
Intel tried to first kill AMD with MMX, but that did not really work as well as Intel wanted it to, as Microsoft kept their options open and also coded Windows 9x to use AMD's multimedia extensions as well.
At that time, while 99.5% compatibility between K5 and K6 chips with Intel-equivalents was there (which should have been good enough for everyone), there was quite an anti-AMD bias amongst those who bought computers in large quantities, because the occaisional problems with K5/K6-based computers at the time wasn't necessarily the CPU's fault, but crappy drivers and bad motherboards.
As it stands, how many companies (esp. Fortune 500) have tried to save a few thousand dollars on their big computer upgrade cycles by getting AMD-based instead of Intel-based computers for their Windows users? Not too many.
Yet somehow AMD has managed to find a niche in the computer market, and enough collective mindshare to survive to the point that now Intel is reacting to AMD's moves, not the other way around.
I know that the next x86-based computer I get/build will probably be AMD-64 based.
As much as I want one, I can't quite justify getting a new Macintosh. I don't do Photoshop, and too many of the things I do/like do not provide enough options for Macs.
Heh, you obviously didn't follow my link *to the giri giri FAQ*. Look under headings like "Why is SSF / Giri Giri so slow?" and "Why doesn't giri giri play audio?" to understand why I stated that there was still no decent Saturn emu. Though this is by far the best out there, and hats of to them!
Wouldn't XP be Windows NT 6.0? I though Win2k was 5.0
Windows 2K is NT 5.0 and Windows XP is NT 5.1. Server 2003 is NT 5.2. These are the official version strings from Microsoft.
There is very little under-the-hood change between Windows 2000 (NT 5.0) and Windows XP (NT 5.1) aside from GUI modifications. From an application's point of view (or even a power user who makes all of his settings via the registry) there is not much different between the two. A lot of little things have been refined and updated, yes, but nothing huge.
And really... Win2K (NT 5.0) isn't a whole lot more than NT 4.0 SP4/SP5 + modern version of Direct X + modern drivers + light GUI polish. When NT 4 first shipped it did not come with Internet Explorer... later versions included a standalone version of IE... and still later versions included the deeply-rooted IE that we know and hate today.
NT 3.x was pretty archaic *looking* (Windows 3.x GUI, ugh!!) but still had most of the guts that NT 4 later used....
Call it what you will, but NT was the best thing Microsoft has ever done. We could all be using a heavily patched version of Win95 running atop DOS 7. "Win98 Seventh Edition!"
Get a Family Pack. Only $199 for up to five licenses.
Compiler option handles endianness? What magical compiler option would that be? Can you point it out to me?
And let's see how it handles this:
char* pChars = new char[8];
pChars[0] = 1;
memset(pChars, 0, 8);
int* pInts = (int*)pChars;
pInts[1] = 1;
if (pChars[0] != 1 || pChars[7] != 1)
printf("Oh no, the universe is broken!\n");
Random and weird software I've written.
Actually, the new G5 tower has a completely different system architecture which uses HyperTransport technology co-designed with AMD. Each processor has it's own point to point bus to the system controller.
http://www.apple.com/powermac/architecture.html
I believe that only AMD Opteron systems have a similar architecture.
While both PCs and Macs support the PCI, USB and Firewire standards, the connections between the chips that implement these standards is quite different.
not out of the question, but NVIDIA is probably going to make damn sure that ATI doesn't get details about the Xbox graphics implmentation.
Splinter Cell is one game that uses NVIDIA proprietary stuff. If you don't use an NVIDIA >= GeForce3 (excluding the 4 MX series), you'll notice that the shadows in the PC version will run differently to the Xbox one, even with a Radeon 97/800 something.
Atomic MPC ran an article on how Splinter Cell was ported across four platforms. Very interesting read. The PlayStation 2 ended up being the worst of the lot.
Not anymore they don't.
If you were to actually look at the specifications, you'd find that today's Macs use standard PCI and AGP slots, along with standard 184-pin DDR modules.
Really...the only thing that is different is that Apple uses their own motherboard chipsets and CPUs.
XBox campus is quite far away from Microsoft campus in Redmond. While theoretically they could be using the same loading docks for both, it's more likely stuff ordered by XBox people gets shipped to XBox offices, not Microsoft.
"that's the other inquirer."
Heh. No. This one hates MS. Once they posted a story about how an airport was disrupted because IE (they use it for showing departure/arrival times...) had crash. The 'evidence' they showed was a user submitted photo of a terminal screen showing an unmistakable IE error message. It was a "no internet connection found" page.
Either every other browser out there can run without a net connection, or the Inquirer jumped the gun by labelling it an IE crash. Something broke down that day. It could have been an MS server, but it wasn't IE. Somebody probably just unplugged a network cable.
You'd think a web based news site would know the difference.
"Derp de derp."
> everyone knows Xbox and PS2 and all those game systems are sold at a loss.
no everyone doesn't know that.
some informed people repeat it mindlessly, but otherwise everyone else ignores it.
The last console manufacturer to sell the consoles at a loss apart from Microsoft was Sega.
remember Sega?
Er, not really. the API is a construct of the software, not the hardware. It would probably be childs play to get an NT kernel with DirectX running on PPC, all you'd have to do is recompile the app to the new system (after some endian and minor tweaking).
The whole point of an API is that you have an abstraction AWAY from hardware to either make coding easier or code more portable.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
The PPC970/G5 is *not* a cool running chip. Just look at the facts:
Apple 2Ghz G5:
-- requires expensive case made of perforated aluminum
-- has NINE fans
-- only supports 2 relatively low power drives
-- has GIANT heatsinks for the processors
-- has a 600 WATT power supply!
You can run a dual 3.2Ghz Xeon with 3-4 SCSI drives (not just the two low power drives the Apple G5 supports) on 450W-500W.
It is a great myth that the G5 is low power / low heat. If there were any truth to Apple/IBM's claims about the PPC970/PPC970FX, laptops and iMacs would have been running PPC970 a long time ago...
So far for all the hype and hoopla, the G5 has made a rather pathetic showing. Apple shipped it months late and then even when introducing the new 90nm PPC970FX, didn't offer any more speed, still just 2Ghz.
I wonder if IBM hates working with Apple as much as Motorola did.
ENTIRELY missed the point.
It was easy to go pc-xbox and xbox->pc for 1 reason, they ran the SAME OS(kernel) and directx. Mac's dont' have directx, and they run MacOS, not XP. It will be no easier to port to Macs simply because it is still porting from a stripped down Windows OS to a desktop MacOS.
Just because they are on the same processor, doesn't make it the same OS.
Actually designing the kennel panic screen would be graphic design.
:P
--designer
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Be VERY careful with IBM's power specs, they don't tell a very complete picture.
For example, IBM lists the power consumption of the PPC 970 as being something like 48W "typical" power consumption at 1.8GHz. Unfortunately the maximum real-world power consumption is a LOT higher than that, and when you start comparing a 2.0GHz PPC 970 (aka G5) to a modern x86 chip from AMD (2.0GHz Athlon64) or Intel (3.2GHz P4), you end up with pretty darn similar power consumption figures.
Besides, it's not like Intel doesn't already have a low-powered design in their Pentium-M. Intel has even hinted that they might make a dual-core version of that processor sometime late next year.
In the end, I'm sure that the MAIN deciding factor here is cost, nothing more, nothing less.
As for an MS supported OS on PPC, that already exists. Current versions of WinCE run on PPC chips.
Keep waiting...because unless you move your ass outside of your closet you won't be able to do it.
You need a MechAssault or 007 game and a memory card with a savegame exploit.
If you need more info, use google.
Another, more accurate way to put it is: Everyone knows Xbox and PS2 are sold for near-cost, making a little money (more in Sony's case), and games are sold for a profit.
(apologies to simpsons)
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Never released it? Got an NT4 CD? Throw it in, and look for a "ppc" directory.
One 1.8 PPC970 will consume 42 watts
One 2.8 GHz Xeon with a 2MB L3 Cache will consume 83 watts
I can't find specs on a 2GHz PPC970 or a 3.2GHz Xeon, but it won't look pretty.
A 2GHz 970FX on the other hand will only consume 24 watts.
Components are similar, but the architecture (beyond general concepts) is not.
The current Dual-2GHz G5 utilises a 1 GHz bus, with no contention between the CPU's. The G5's use a 0.5xCPU-clock bus, so the upcoming 3 GHz machines will be using a 1.5GHz bus.
An overview is here
Anyone who claims Apple have no microprocessor design expertise needs to look at the system controller. It's an all-Apple part, and it's beautiful. Dedicated buses for each CPU, AGP-8X, PCI-X, Serial-ATA, 400MHz RAM interface...
The PPC970's are slick, but it's the architecture that really sets the G5 apart.
Cecil,
The universe is always broken in this example, as there's nothing there to overwrite pChars[0]. pInts[1] == pChars[0] + sizeof(int). Since on no platform is zero the size of an int, pChars[0] (which was memset back to 0) will always be zero.
Endianness refers to the internal representation of the numbers, i.e. what's happening in pChars[3] through pChars[7]. The ints themselves still advance normally.
--Dan
www.doxpara.com
The "Gekko" CPU in the Gamecube is not, nor is it derived from the PowerPC 750. It's derived from a PPC 4xx series chip, which was never used in a Mac.