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Inside the Xbox 360
QT writes "Ars Technica has an in-depth look at the Xenon processor
that will power the Xbox 360. It's the first technical look at the CPU itself, its design goals, and some of the differences between it and IBM's Cell processor. The Xbox
360's procedural synthesis capabilities look quite impressive, and I'm not as convinced as I was before that the PS3 would spank the Xbox 360."
Because its the only M$ product that gets positive attention here :)
crap
While art asset costs are rising, programmer time is getting cheaper all the time.
... leading one to conclude that MSFT won't fight Disney et al on art costs and copyright/trademark extensions, but will outsource the programming.
... um, wait a sec, one of my five programs just finished ...
We see the above in the article about the chip internals of the xBox 360
Either that or we're just getting more productive at doing our work
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Clearly you arent, since you are about the 1500th person to mention it.
All the fanboyism?
All three of these consoles are going to be wicked powerful, omfg just because ps3 is 1.32012535x faster then xbox360 doesn't mean that it sucks all of a sudden. Fanboys need to take some chill pills!
Anyways, I await the revolution, im going to be dissapointed if its not revolutionary =(
Why would IBM name a PowerPC chip "Xenon", when Intel has been using the confusingly similar "Xeon" for years now?
The Xbox 360's procedural synthesis capabilities look quite impressive, and I'm not as convinced as I was before that the PS3 would spank the Xbox 360.
What the heck? This is 99% speculation. Is there any reason to start off with a fanboy potshot?
The only power that any next-gen system needs is the power to output an HD resolution. None of the graphics I've seen so far looks like they couldn't be done on a Gamecube or Xbox.
Hopefully, now that we've got this nearly photorealistic power at our command, games will evolve the way that painting did when the camera was invented. Realism just becomes another style (and a boring and lazy one at that). Let's see some avante-garde approaches to video games for once. Stylistic innovation that I can butter my teeth with.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
I actually read the submission and my first reaction was "Wasn't the XBox 360 going to have a PPC processor?". Then I noticed that I misread the name.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
The computer/electronics industry changes extremely quickly from a historical point of view. We should expect alliances to be made and undone all the time between competitors.
Isn't this CPU more like a "do everything" CPU compared to the CELL which is focused on entertainment media?
I thought that was the biggest difference between the two.
who gives a damm what their console runs... the point of a console is playing games... I had way more fun on my SNES & N64 then on PS2 and PS2 is like a 99999 times faster... ok you can have better graphics WOW but really the point his to have fun not make a reality "show" game... the most popular game in pc history where never the pretiest ones... for shure the engine was powerfull but the details were no that impressive... you think people played CS for graphics ...lol?
Apple isn't switching their CPUs to Intel, they are using Intel chipsets for other components of their computers...
Why would it?
You're refering to Intel's Xeon.
The XBox 360 has IBM's Xenon CPU.
Hope this clears it up.
^_^
OK, now that we have a PowerPC chip here, who thinks they can port what to the new XBox 360?
Because every developer on the floor knew that the most impressive demos for the PS3 were totally prerendered. They could even name the people who worked on them. And for some reason no one in the games journalism community would point blank persistently ask Sony and groups like Axis Animation what the deal was. Look at this article where it's all speculation and guessing. The public deserves to know that what they were shown is not exactly how a game is going to look on PS3. Meanwhile, closed door demos of the Xbox 360 were actually impressive. I don't work for either company or work in games for that matter, though I do love them. I am totally neutral about both machines. My bias is negative towards Microsoft as I'm a Mac zealot and my Xbox is my least favorite console. I went into E3 feeling Microsoft had blown it. Then I saw what it could do, held the controller in my hand, and now am impressed and rather excited about the Xbox 360. And privately a developer told me that they aren't anywhere near having the machines run full speed or utilizing their full power in the very obvious Mac G5 dev kits they're running everything from. But I will say this: HDTV is going to be a requirement. The PS3 remains vaporware in my mind - I recall claims of rendering scenes of the Final Fantasy movie on PS2's "emotion engine". And ultimately what's even sadder is there were a mere handful of games at E3 that made me excited. Okami, the new Zelda, We Love Kattamari, Shadow of the Collossus, Stubbs the Zombie, and that's pretty much it. Horsepower may be here, but games are as stunted, as juvenile, and as retreaded as ever. Future marines vs. monsters and bimbos galore. Meanwhile next gen gaming is going to cost more, Microsoft have shunted most PC development to the Xbox, killing the richness of PC games for the most part other than MMORPGs. And now we're going to have live updating advertising in games, along with additional content that will have to be purchased. Want that sword +2? You can buy it for $4.99. Welcome to gamer hell.
** http://www.nkhumanrights.or.kr/ ** Human rights in North Korea. 1 million estimated dead from starvation.
Amazingly nobody mentioned OS/360 released by IBM exactly 40 years ago http://ldworen.net/fun/os360obit.html and still downloadable from http://www.cbttape.org/os360.htm
You mean all these years I've been trying to figure out the composition of the magic smoke that makes my machine run and its been Xenon the whole time!?
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
I don't get how this could be patented? How is this different than any of a 1000 fractal plant or landscape programs that are out there?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Why am I so happy ? beacuse with such game consoles out there (despit the fact that I'm a full fledged PS3 fan, coolest thang, great stuff) Linux has a greater chance than ever.
:D
I, for one, will probably no way buy PC games in the future. Why the hell would I do that when I can have a quite powerfull and nice looking console hooked up to a hdtv in the living room. I ain't gona need no PC to play my brains out, the wish should arise.
And, added to the above and returning to my Linux idea at the beginning, don't forget that very very very many average clicking guys come with the "argument" that they won't even consider chaning or even trying Linux, because all the games run on Windows.
All in all, these consoles will probably be great, I hope so. Given the specs, the reviews, etc., I'm still nto convinced any bit of XBox's superiority over the PS3, but that's no problem if I can buy which I want and play, play, play
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
both will have some great games
You didn't think you were watching real footage of _anything_ from Sony did you? You didn't think that the PS3 they "showed" would be final form of the box, did you ? Do you think the "dualshockboomerang" is the final form of the controller?
You don't actually beleive that giving the 7 SPE's hand coded routines to do (that accomplish nothing, btw) and then proclaiming it is the tflops king makes a better video game machine, do you ?
Which of those 7 SPE's is going to run the IP stack for all the networked games (that wont have an online service comparable to xbox live).
None of them.
Sony made _ridiculous_ claims about the PS2, the fanboys ate them up, and sony way, way underdelivered. "The PS2 will do Toy Story in real time!!". Riiiiight. What part of Toy Story did Sony do, exactly? What do they know about making a Pixar quality film?
For that matter, if the PS2/PS3 are so great, why aren't they _actually_ in the Top500 list? The best supercomputers from Japan aren't made by Sony - they're made by NEC. Where is their supercomputing architectural experience? How is it that a stereo/walkman manufacturer gets by claiming that it is building a faster machine than just about anybody thats been doing it for 30 years, and that they'll sell it for $300 to boot.
The real tragedy here is that Sony fanboys didn't learn from PS2. Sony has the hype cranked up to 11, and people are eating it up, just like they did last time.
I am sure that the PS3 will allow you to have fun playing games.
I am also sure that it will NOT be the hardware equivalent of the return of Christ. Please see through the BS.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
ARRRLovin has never even seen a single page of detailed chip ANALYSIS generated by HANNIBAL at ARSTECHNICA. It's nice to see the ancient art of "trolling" still being practiced.........but not really.
(IOW, RTFA)
Yes, this is real time. You can download the demo. That demo requires a high-end PC, and will give you a sense of what SpeedTree will look like on the new XBox.
Because that's what the somewhat clueless original article is about. SpeedTree will be available for the new XBox. This was announced back in March.
The trick is cramming something like SpeedTree into a wierd architecture like the new XBox. That's a headache, but not a breakthrough.
When traditional games need artwork, the illustrators draw it (with curves), and then use fancy software to make sharp polygons out of the curves (process called tesselation). When the add this information to the game database, it's a large list of verticies, which is unweildy to handle.
With the xbox 2*pi, the tesselation will be delayed until runtime. The data will be stored as curves[*], and will not be converted to polygons until it needs to be displayed. This won't affect the GPU, since the tesselation will happen earlier in the pipeline.
[*]Specifically, humans will be stored in separate poses, where a bone structure (and other solids) is saved for each pose. The skin, of course, is a deformable covering that will be added during the tesselation process. An intelligent algorithm will be used to fill in the segments of time between 2 given poses.
Lastly, Microsoft has received a patent for this idea of runtime-tesselation. My opinion
1) Is this really better? They emphasize the reduction in hours creating the vertex database, because the quantity of information is reduced. Is it really easy for a graphic designer to fit a mathametically curve to a particular line in his drawing? Is it really less information?
2) How did they get a patent for this idea? I'm sure there are lots of 3d games, probably even back to the 90's era, that used a similar princicple of representing objects with curves, and then displaying them at runtime with polygons. The patent is probably not really for that idea, but just for the architectual design (hardware) to handle such software.
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"Starting to"? As long as computers have been around, the trade-offs between the CPU, coprocessors, and I/O processors have been changing.
The earliest reference to it that I know of it dates back to the early '70s:
No idea about the ToyStory claim, but the FinalFantasy one came from Nvidia and was real, since they actually did render some scenes in realtime, however with quite a lot less detail and low framerates, Wikipedia has some screenshots:
p irits_Within
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy:_The_S
You might be able to, however if you open it to check you'll change the outcome.