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Xbox 2 Architecture Documented, Almost 2004-Launched?
An anonymous reader writes "Over at Xbit Labs, they seem to have new information on the Xbox 2 hardware specs, evidently originating from China, although the date and veracity of the document can't be confirmed. Noteworthy is the inclusion of (3) 3.5GHz CPUs [some say a 3-core CPU?], only 10 MB of dedicated graphics memory, and the undecided comments on whether the hard drive is 'built in'. The high speed bus to the GPU and the small amount of video memory point directly at Microsoft's upcoming DirectX Next, which will supposedly feature virtual graphics memory." Elsewhere, Gamaroo writes "Gamesindustry.biz is reporting that Microsoft originally wanted to release Xbox 2 for Christmas 2004. However, the new system has since slipped from schedule, but the piece claims Microsoft hopes to release the new console in mid-2005, to get ' a full year's head-start on Sony's PS3, and possibly even more'."
Pshaw. Not that they won't exist, but at what prices?
:D
Unless they are *severely* stripped G5s, I wouldn't expect much past 2.5GHz in these things.
Why? Because price, because complexity, because benefits! Now if these aren't 64bit CPUs, but 3 32bit PPC+VMX from IBM... okay, and that would be perfect for IBM to pop into iBooks as well
GPL Deconstructed
THe headstart means nothing without a completely killer app. The dreamcast beat sony by a year and it was twelves months of people saying "I'll wait and see what sony comes out with" not because they couldn't afford more than one system over the year, but because there was no killer that every one had to have (Halo, MGS, Zelda, etc).
:)
What either MS or Nintendo have to do is come out with there systems with some very nice launch or near launch games, and heavily push a good line up. thats the only chance they have in the next round.
Of course I didn't own any of the current gen systems till I got a GameCube back in december, so I really am not the best to comment on console systems
Now, I know MS has been eating a loss, but the things that are being talked about for this thing are ridiculous.
They are not going to put 3 3.5ghz G5s in there. Not unless they want it to be the size of a tower to fit stuff in there to cool it.
The things people believe these days are really amusing.
--Moo.
65 nm promises to be a similar order of magnitude of problems. I'm not convinced, and I won't be until I see more details on what problems have been encountered in the rush to 65 nm, and how they were overcome.
If microsoft has a license to produce the chips, and hires IBM to do it, they won't necessarily pay a premium, and IBM gets essentially an enormous subsidy to their chip making and don't have to worry about competition unless people figure out how to make clusters of Xbox2's. With some of the heat transport techniques, and the thermal properties of the G5, it's within the realm of realistic.
Either way, there are Sony excutives that are concerned about the development.
3 3.5 Ghz Chips.
This wouldn't even fit right in a mid-tower. On top of that...how the hell are you going to cool this? And what unheard of power supply are you going to have in this?
Furthermore...even pricing these at say what a present day Intel 2.8Ghz chip costs...that's like freaking $900 of CPU right there. You honestly don't think someone isn't going to figure out how to bust that puppy open strip out the CPUs and start using them for other non X-Box purposes if you sell the console at $300-$400?
This doesn't even get into the 65nm manufacturing, and all, nor for that matter the fact that there still isn't any software for the damn thing. It sounds like Microsoft was like, "Well, if everyone bought the "leaked" doc about not having a hard drive, maybe they'll buy this "leaked" doc about these insane specs for the X-box and get all hyped about it.
This is a bunch of crap. I'll be shocked if the machine has *1* 3.5Ghz 65nm chip in it.
Netjak.com independent reviews of domestic & import video ga
You will win the battle by offering an experience on your console that is highly desirable and can't be played anywhere else. Next-gen hardware is just a way to hedge your bets in that area.
It's been said before, and it'll be said until they come up with a catchier phrase- it's software that drives this thing.
Every target market teenager I know who bought a PS2 to play GTA III doesn't know the hardware difference between the PS2 and the Xbox any more than they know who the President is.
Bleeding edge hardware doesn't guarantee that one-in-a-million type software experience, but if these specs are true I certainly wouldn't bet against Microsoft pulling one out.
My bold, ridiculous prediction: Live enabled Halo 3 on Xbox 2 will make the competitive FPS more popular than NASCAR and the NFL put together. Of course, I could be wrong...
How fast does a console need to be before increases in performance simply make for no visual improvement on a TV's crappy resolution? It seems there has to be some point of diminishing returns. Will real-time raytracing take over, eventually? Or will everyone be laughing at me still holding onto my 15 year old monophonic TV while they all have HTDV and THX waking up the dead in China?
Vote in November. You won't regret it.
And they said the hard drive was too expensive
Look it's a joke about my sig IN MY SIG! LOL!
Why 3 (CPU's or cores)? All modern hardware seems to do things in power of two, for obvious reasons (largest number of components for a given address space). Many algorithms are simplest to express if they operate on data sets with 2^n elements. So why does Microsoft go the odd route?
My guess, just based on numerology, is that this is a fake or a joke.
Whose ass did you pull that out of?
I want 2D games back.
The article calls it the "Xenon"...? Didn't Microsoft already say they're calling it the XBox Next? Not to mention Xenon is a terrible name and will probably be rampantly mispronounced.
Couple bullets for the speculative monkeys...
;)
- It's *likely* not 3 CPUs but one CPU with 3 cores (each with it's own L1 cache).
- at 65 nanometers the cpu will cost less to manufacture than even the current 180nm XBOX CPU. (assuming the transistor count is less than 3x)
- 3.5 GHz is a conservative speed for a 65 nanometer CPU. It will still require active cooling (i.e. a fan on the heatsink) but it should be able to run RELATIVELY cool at that speed if the 65nm process tech is good. Note that intel will be running 65nm chips at 5+ Ghz in the same timeframe (2005).
- lastly the dude going on about the virtual graphics memory... I don't know how you figured that had something to do with broadband, but it doesn't. It's a feature of DirectX 10.
This document looks reasonable, albeit old... because MS has likely known their harddisk plan for many months... so if it was a recent doc... it would have finalized the HD info.
Between the super powerful CPU and wicked fast graphics courtesy of ATI's custom R500... both the Xenon and the PS3 will be close enough in technology and performance people should really be choosing the system based on the games. (Cause god knows the price will be the same)
GrandTrain
where did i pull that out of? the part in the article that says: "only 10 MB of dedicated graphics memory, and the undecided comments on whether the hard drive is 'built in'. The high speed bus to the GPU and the small amount of video memory point directly at Microsoft's upcoming DirectX Next, which will supposedly feature virtual graphics memory." so, i get modded to 0 for talking about something in the article, and this jackass gets 2 for not? brilliant.
Wow. From what I've seen, that's a very powerful console. It looks as if the Xbox 2 is shaping up to be just another power-house console, as its predecessor was. Hopefully they can release a good set of games to go with the excellent hardware though.
Maybe we'll be seeing computers and consoles competing once again? Very doubtful, but just remember back when idSoftware wrote Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement? That was a work of art, and a large leap in the computer-gaming industry. Since then, computers have down-shifted and took off past consoles... but you never really know when that day will come when they are side by side again. I doubt it will ever come though...
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
I would assume he pulled it out of the article blurb :
The high speed bus to the GPU and the small amount of video memory point directly at Microsoft's upcoming DirectX Next, which will supposedly feature virtual graphics memory."
Had you even read that much you might have realized that.
This document looks reasonable, albeit old... because MS has likely known their harddisk plan for many months... so if it was a recent doc... it would have finalized the HD info.
The cool thing though is that it says:
("built in" not decided)
Which hopefully supports the rumors that there will be a HD for sure, but it might make an appearance as an optional plugin HD/MP3 player. I'm keeping my fingers crossed on that one.
The use of the 10MB of EDRAM is shown in the picture. It contains the back framebuffer (including Z and alpha). Main memory contains the textures and the (front) buffer being scanned out. This last fact is also shown in the picture (the video output scalar reads from the Northbridge).
So the only thing that might be "virtual" is texture memory. Obviously there must be an undocumented texture cache in the GPU (to do the 16 bilinear texture fetches per cycle from).
They've got to be kidding if they're going to put 3 CPUs in the thing. MS better expect a lot of returns when they over-heat. Worse yet, is that keeping just 1 CPU cooled is hard enough on a PC without making it sounds like a vacuum cleaner. Having 3 CPUs cooled is going to make the Xbox gets it's new nicknake as the Dust-Buster. But the way things are going.... all the major consoles are going to be using Power CPUs, and going with ATI graphics. In what way will they technically be any different?
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
This stuff is so outlandish I'm inclined to believe there's a javascript random rumor generator floating around the web that kicks in for the month preceding E3. It almost always begins with some kind of information from a Japanese developer or, in this case, a "Chinese BBS." It's the classic beginning to an urban legend. It's Asian, so it holds an air of reputability. At the same time, fewer people can just start researching this like we collectively did with the "Infinium Urban Legend." They have a picture, and in a community that orgasms a Doom III screenshot every three months, visuals are everything. Plus, people can comment on it and sound like they know what the hell they're talking about, as if they themselves worked on the machine.
Just to get this out the way so we don't take up anymore of Slashdot's not-so-precious bandwidth: Microsoft will announce that the Xbox2 will be released this year, will have a clock speed of 16ghz, and will be supported by ATI, IBM, and McDonald's. It will both have a hard drive, and not have a hard drive. Not only that, but they will be releasing Halo 1.5 within weeks following E3, and Halo 2 will be pushed back to the Xbox 2. Also, Microsoft will buying at least three major developers, not the least of which are Bioware, Valve, Blizzard, and Sega. And Nintendo. And maybe Sony. And probably Microsoft, if they're feeling particularly moody. These are all true, because a Thai website (Http://www.thaixxxmassage.com) posted it a few days ago after Bill Gates stopped by. Actually, it was Bill Gates' gardner. Or at least his friend. Relative of. The friend. Who lives in Thailand.
Everything I've read and seen says that Microsoft is ditching the hard drive so the unit can't be used as the Xbox has by the hacker community. When did this change?
This is meaningless information. EVERY console sells out at launch ... early adopters virtually guarantee that. Dreamcast failed because it was inbetween generations, something Sega always managed to do. Launching between the times when everyone is planning to buy a new console is just unwise.
Nintendo will launch precisely when Sony does specifically to avoid this mistake.
I don't get why everyone thinks this diagram is so outlandish... are your expectations that low?
It's a 3 core CPU... big deal... 65 nanometer tech is almost exactly 1/3 the size of the current Xbox cpu's tech... and they decided the real estate is best spent by having 3 cores.
Secondly, why are you up in arms over 3.5GHz? The fastest intel cpus will be much faster than that at launch time... just like how they were faster than current 733MHz Xbox cpu when it launched.
~256MB of main RAM is expected, and ~10MB of embedded Video RAM is expected too, hell they have embedded ram in the GameCube. Not 10MB of it, but that's what's required for an anti-aliased HDTV frame.
I tend to think the document is real only because everything *IS* so achievable. I don't know... maybe I'm missing something but that design looks do-able, elegant and fast... I'd expect nothing less from the combined efforts of IBM and Microsoft.
2005 will be an interesting year.
GrandTrain
If the PS3 is released a year after XBox2, it should be more powerful than the XBox2. Xbox groupies can no longer say "Xbox has better graphics" when you point out that all the games are on PlayStation. :-)
I'm no coder, but isn't programming for multiple processors harder? I have always heard that this is the reason why the Saturn has failed.
That was a really damn powerful machine, maybe more than the Playstation (check out Radiant Silvergun and you will know it is true). But it had fewer games, because many developers found its multi-processor architecture made it too hard to code for.
It just means a virtual address space, like your main memory already uses. The graphics chip will reference polys and textures in a massive virtual address space and the data will be paged in from the 256mb of main system memory when required.
You just need an MMU on the graphics chip somewhere.
"Taligent is still pure vapor. Maybe they'll be the last who jumps up on Openstep... "
3 x 3.5 ghz, 90w x 3 = 270w...for the CPUs, and also the graphic hardware... Imagine millions of XENON consoles sucking the powerlines, whit entire termal plants smoking all day and night...
Thats why EEUU dont agree to sign KIOTO PROTOCOL!!
hardware is really what makes a console system successful right? I didn't think so =)
What's the big deal? I thought we already had this capability with AGP and Direct Memory Execute (DiME)?
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Perhaps i should have included the part where you infered that this 'virtual graphics memory' would require ethernet or a pay service to enable.
I want 2D games back.
Oh, then they must be using the new Heisenberg UncertaintyTM hard-drives as an anti-hacking measure.
If you open the case to mod, the Heisenberg drive will assume either a *present* or *absent* state.
Mod at your own risk!!
"Cheeze it!" - Bender
For anybody who went to this years GDC and saw the XMA demo, maybe now you can sleep at night knowing what *that* was all about. ;)
Nobody I talked to could figure out *what* Microsoft was try to say. It looked poorly rehersed and slapped together at the last moment (like my comments ;)). Now it makes sense, they planned on announcing the XBox2, and ATG had a bunch of cool looking tech-demos for it, but they couldn't talk about the hardware so they "created" XMA.
Spell cheek you've failed me four the last thyme!
Namco released several arcade machines with 3 CPUs - galaga, dig-dug, bosconian, xevious for example.