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Xbox 360 GPU A Vector Co-Processor?

Posted by Zonk on from the number-crunching dept.

Anyone Seen Thomas? writes "While Beyond3D's article on the ATI C1 (XENOS) graphics processor in the XBOX 360 gives you all you need to know about ATI's next generation hardware in terms of generating screen pixels, it also gives a big clue as to how it'll be useful for general purpose vector programming. XENOS is able to write data out of its unified memory architecture into system memory, and read it back again later. So with a large pool of powerful vector hardware available, does anyone fancy the idea of having a generalised , high-performance vector processor in their PC?. Read about that and the rest of XENOS." From the article: "Since XBOX 360's announcement and ATI's unleashing from the non disclosure agreements we've had the chance to not just chat with Robert Feldstein, VP of Engineering, but also Joe Cox, Director of Engineering overseeing the XBOX graphics design team, and two lead architects of the graphics processor, Clay Taylor and Mark Fowler. Here we hope to accurately impart a slightly deeper understanding of the XBOX 360 graphics processor, how it sits within the system, understand more about its operation as well as give some insights into the capabilities of the processor."

1 of 55 comments (clear)

  1. Re:PSP has at least 2 VPUs... by gabebear · · Score: 3, Informative

    The PSP's CPU architechture is VERY close the the PS2's, but the PS3 is a whole nother beast. The PS2 has 2 VPUs with 32 128-bit(4x32bit) floating point registers and 16 integer registers with 16KB of Data Memory. The main CPU is MIPs based. The PS3 uses the new CELL CPU which is PowerPC based, the CELL will use 7 SPEs that each have 128 128bit registers and each has 256KB SRAM.

    The PS3's SPEs will be used very sililarly to the PS2's SPUs(dot-products, etc) although they are much much bigger, there are a lot more of them, and they are a LOT faster. The CELL CPU was developed by Sony, Toshiba, and IBM and is slated to be put into TVs, PVRs, etc. It is very good at compression/decrompression, showed it off decoding 48 MPEG2 streams with power to spare.

    So the answer to your question is; not yet. Sony will put a CELL CPU in many of their electronics, but not until it is cheaper.