Xbox 360 Hardware Disassembled and Analyzed

Hack Jandy writes "Here is the first article I've seen about the Xbox 360 hardware internals. The article details everything from the storage devices to the CPU and GPU core."

Comments

Wrong Link

[Anonymous Coward]

The article should point here.

Is this or is there not something to see?

[nsasch]

First you say there's something to see, the details of the XBox 360, now you say "Nothing for you to see here." Make up your mind!

Re:Is this or is there not something to see?

[tuxnduke]

The uri is here.

Vapourware?

[jonoton]

Nothing behind the link

Wrong link

[GrAfFiT]

Correct link : here

LGN

[Anonymous Coward]

How about this one?

AC to prevent karma whoring.

Errr...

[Donniedarkness]

The link doesn't work...

Try here: http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=26 10

But isn't this old news? I know I've read about all of this AT LEAST a month ago...

It's just cool

[cybrthng]

Thats all i can say. I'm no big microsoft fan. I'm an open source, open idea and freedom of information zealot however the xbox 360 is just cool.

Been plenty of stories on it here but i have to agree with what others have said. The entire package of the 360, the games, the service (xbox live) and the experience is going to make for one hell of a system.

Marked for inflation the 360 costs less than what i spent on an atari years ago, and that is pretty amazing.

I'll be buying it at day one.

I've got 30-45 mins a day at max i can play, and the experience, ease of use and integration of the xbox and xbox live service is what makes it for me.

Game on!

Re:It's just cool

[Spit]

I'm an open source, open idea and freedom of information zealot however the xbox 360 is just cool.

Zealot doesn't appear to mean what you think it means. It certainly doesn't mean dropping your ideals when the opposing ideals are "just cool".

Re:It's just cool

[batknight23]

The real kickers are the development tools MS has provided and the way MS had a vision for a unified infrastructure (read: Live). Simple things like common interfaces in each game, a well thoughout voice system, and stable matchmaking servers add up. They aren't flashy, but you really start to notice them over time.

I think Sony's going to really regret leaving everything up to developers (ad hoc).

Re:It's just cool

[Anonymous Coward]

You sound JUST like a grass roots marketer!

Re:It's just cool

[thesnarky1]

"I'll be buying it at day one."

Only if you put your order in now. Remember this article about shortages?

Re:It's just cool

[hugzz]

Marked for inflation the 360 costs less than what i spent on an atari years ago, and that is pretty amazing.

Not really. Basically all technology improves while reducing in price over time. That's like saying that, amazingly, your new mobile phone has more features than the first mobile phones available, and yet it costs less.

Re:It's just cool

[freshman_a]

Seeing as how there are no "open" game consoles, I guess us open source people are SOL when it comes to console gaming then, huh?

Re:It's just cool

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

I'll be buying it at day one.

I've got 30-45 mins a day at max i can play, and the experience, ease of use and integration of the xbox and xbox live service is what makes it for me.

You play less than an hours worth of games a day, yet you want to splash out on a new console system the moment it comes out?

I'm finding it hard to believe you've finished all the games you own on your current system, so whay the rush to buy a new one? Prudence would dictate that you take the time to expierience the top quality titles of the current generation, before moving onto the next.

I usually don't buy a system unless I can pinpoint at least three games on it that I simply must have. I've yet to see a console released on day one that offered even two "must have" titles for me.

Save your money and buy some of the quality titles that you haven't played on your current system. The 360 will still be there in 12 months time, at a cheaper price, and with better games, so why pay more now for less?

Re:It's just cool

[koi88]

the experience is going to make for one hell of a system.

You bet. I'm using one hell of a system made by MS here at work, too.

Re:It's just cool

[Anonymous Coward]

Only if you're a zealot.

Re:It's just cool

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah right. But if I'm in the MS Windows camp and I say something like "XYZ for Linux is just cool" that would be ok by you, right? Be honest.

Re:It's just cool

[Junior J. Junior III]

Agreed. Grandparent reads like an astroturfing MS shill, to me.

Re:It's just cool

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

Zealot doesn't mean that you stop living. Every one of us depends on Microsoft products in some way, every day. My bank runs on Windows. So does the software that coordinates bus schedules for the transit district here. So does much of the software that handles credit card transactions.

You cannot escape the fact that we live in a world of proprietary technology. Your BIOS is proprietary software. The software in your vehicle is proprietary technology. Your CPU is proprietary technology.

Re:It's just cool

[|/|/|||]

The entire package of the 360, the games, the service (xbox live) and the experience is going to make for one hell of a system.

Yeah, so wake me up when somebody besides Microsoft makes one. Owning a hell of a system is not worth having them expand their monopoly to include the console market.

Re:It's just cool

[Anonymous Coward]

Does being an "Open source zealot" mean you can't enjoy the xbox just because it was made by microsoft?

Re:It's just cool

[Spaceman Spiff II]

Actually there is one that I know of. It's called the GP2X and runs on some form of Linux. It launched earlier this month, I believe, with no commercial games, but apparently has a pretty strong homebrew scene.

http://www.gbax.com/indexgp2x.html

Re:It's just cool

[Khuffie]

Why is paying more now considered to be less? You forget that I do get the advantage of having an Xbox 360 for 12 months before it becomes less.

Re:It's just cool

[NanoGator]

"Agreed. Grandparent reads like an astroturfing MS shill, to me."

That's lovely. Microsoft makes a product that impresses him and he's an MS shill. Sounds like an OSS shill to me. Don't accusations like that make me sound really level headed?

Re:It's just cool

[cornface]

Because for many people there is inherent pleasure in experiencing something new.

Many people don't feel the need to regulate and restrict their fun to careful guidelines based on what is "prudent."

Re:It's just cool

[DogDude]

Good troll attempt, but unfortunately the console market is definitely not monopolized by MS. Try a different industry, like soft drinks, which is an dualopoly, complete with price fixing!

Re:It's just cool

[bigman2003]

Hey, I'm in the same boat as that guy. I get to play about 3 hours a week. Usually in one chunk, because I can't sleep for some reason.

I'll be buying this ASAP...in fact, I've already scheduled my morning on the 22nd. One retailer is opening at midnight, another at 7:00 am, and another at 8:00 am. I'll just go down the list, and hopefully one will have it. And yes, I am willing to buy a $700 bundle.

Why?

As I've said here a million times- I have more money than I have time. So if I do get to play for 3 hours, I want it to be a very good 3 hours. And I do like pretty graphics, so I want the machine that can give me graphics. And yes, I have an HDTV. Even though many people think it is bad that Microsoft is pushing the HD thing too much. Once again, those of us with the TVs are willing to pay the money to actually USE the TVs.

Most of us here on Slashdot work in the tech industry. This industry CAN be high-paying. So it doesn't surprise me at all that many people are willing to shell out $700 on something that will only be used casually. Crap, my wife can spend that in a quick trip to Costco...so I don't feel bad about buying this console.

No offense to anyone who is poor..but remember, some of us have disposable income. Just read the 'how much do you get paid' stories that come out occasionally. There are many people here making over $100,000 per year. Spending a little bit of that to have the newest toys isn't that big of a deal.

Re:It's just cool

[WalterODimm]

monopoly ( P ) Pronunciation Key (m-np-l) n. pl. monopolies
Exclusive control by one group of the means of producing or selling a commodity or service: "Monopoly frequently... arises from government support or from collusive agreements among individuals" (Milton Friedman).
Law. A right granted by a government giving exclusive control over a specified commercial activity to a single party.
A company or group having exclusive control over a commercial activity. A commodity or service so controlled.

Exclusive possession or control: arrogantly claims to have a monopoly on the truth.
Something that is exclusively possessed or controlled: showed that scientific achievement is not a male monopoly.

Enjoy the stone age while you boycott the advancement of technology based on your mythical idea that all big business is bad. M$ are huge, yes, and they have been found to use antitrust practices, but they do NOT and never have had a MONOPOLY. Tiger's share of the market, to be sure, but not monopoly.

Here's an idea! How about taking technological advancements on a case by case basis, and ignoring who made them?

I'm right there with anyone who says that Microsoft has some crappy business practices, and pawns crappy operating systems and bloated software on the masses via nothing but marketing magic, and strong arm side deals with other large companies. But to take the stance that everyhting they touch turns to shit, and shun a superior product in it's category because it has their logo? Rediculous.

But it's no skin of my nose, really. Go ahead, keep watching your beta tapes of the wizard of oz, and listening to your Jethro tull 8 tracks, while connecting to your BBS via your 56k Modem, on your nextstep box. To some people, I'm sure, that kind of avoidance of monopolistic technological advancement is cool, I'm sure... somewhere.....

Re:It's just cool

[tabrnaker]

Of course, not owning one leaves Sony having a monopoly over the console market. And you know sony doesn't even care anymore about the appearance of caring about their customers or developers.

Re:It's just cool

[Anonymous Coward]

if you think freedom matters, then yes.

Re:It's just cool

[KDR_11k]

Well, pastors are SOL when it comes to whores so it's not like that's something extraordinary.

Re:It's just cool

[KDR_11k]

s/now/in January/

Re:It's just cool

[aesiamun]

Actually considering there really is very few good "open" games to play on any digital medium, the zealots are pretty SOL.

Re:It's just cool

[talksinmaths]

Your point is valid, I don't buy your argument. One could just as easily say something like, "My bank couldn't function without the regulations established by dirty politicians and sleazy lobbyists, and the services provided by my city government depend on inept local politicians. However just because I give my money to these scumbags doesn't make me part of the problem."

The GP wasn't making a point about our dependence on proprietary technologies, but rather about how ideals aren't something like a comfortable jacket that one puts on or takes off on a whim.

Re:It's just cool

[fwitness]

If that means something to you, the fact that you will "have" an XBox360, then so be it. What the grandparent post states is logical reasoning. If you are gaming less than an hour a day, it's very likely that the current generation has a multitude of gaming experience that you haven't tried and will likely miss out on as you spend your money on 360 games. If you have a choice between a 360 game, which will showcase your fancy new system, and an XBox game that will play on your 360, I think your dollars will go to the shiny. The *only* benefit you'll have buying on day one is that you'll "have" a 360.

That said, if you're into the conspicuous consumption thing, I'm not going to stop you. Have fun and I hope you enjoy it. Me, I've still got a least 10 games (bought for less than $20) for my cube, ps2, and current XBox that will occupy me until the new generation dust settles.

Re:It's just cool

[mrjackson2000]

what if he's using a system that has openfirmware for the bios?

Re:It's just cool

[Anonymous Coward]

Your freedom to get anything you like if you whine loud enough? Waaaaah! Grow up.

Re:It's just cool

[PinkyGigglebrain]

"advantage" ?

Would that be tactical, financal, phsycological or sexual? And over whom?

What is the advantage of having a 360 now as oposed to 12 months, and likely a few patchs, from now?

Re:It's just cool

[rAiNsT0rm]

You sir, have commited the cardinal sin of LOGIC. As computer folks/geeks we all work in a very logical way... however, when it comes to consoles/cars/women/sex something short circuits and all that is thrown out the window.

I've worked in this industry, and the funny thing is how many game developers/designers/etc. don't even own certain systems. It's because they look at it logically and don't get caught in any of the hype. Why anybody rushes to buy a console the day it appears is beyond me, you get one or two games (generally one of them you buy just 'cause, and there is only one major title) you tire of both quickly, because the wow factor wears thin and you now have a massively expensive paper weight until the next round or releases which is some time off of which may be one more must have... rinse repeat.

Stupidity.

Re:It's just cool

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, you're not SOL at all... Microsoft & Sony will still sell to you.

Since when do "us open source people" not use the best tool for the job?

Re:It's just cool

[Anonymous Coward]

Because your current games will look a lot better on an XBox 360?

Re:It's just cool

[WinDoze]

Prudence would dictate that you take the time to expierience the top quality titles of the current generation, before moving onto the next. You're damn skippy there. Did I mention my wife's name is Prudence?

Re:It's just cool

[Phisbut]

Marked for inflation the 360 costs less than what i spent on an atari years ago, and that is pretty amazing.

Not really. Basically all technology improves while reducing in price over time.

So true... about 20 years ago, my father bought a 8086 computer with 640k RAM and a 40MB hard drive for about $3000 (if my memory serves me right). Inflation would bring this to well over $5000 today. There is no way in hell I'm gonna pay $5000 for a computer today, even a top-of-the-line one.

Using inflation to compare prices on electronics is utterly pointless.

Re:It's just cool

[talksinmaths]

Oops. I meant, "Although your point is valid,..".

Re:It's just cool

[|/|/|||]

I didn't mean it as a troll, it's something that I'm legitimately concerned about. I don't give a shit about soft drinks, but I happen to enjoy video games. Sure, all corporations are only out for themselves, but MS has a pretty consistent track record when it comes to muscling its way in with heaps of cash and then dominating the market. My first thought when I heard about the XBox was, "Oh shit, in ten years there will be nobody else." That wasn't based on their technical specs, or on what games were coming out, it was based on the way that MS fights.

Oh well, with all the Slashdotters excited about it I know this is a lost cause. The competition that MS is fostering is a good thing in the short run -- I just hope it lasts.

Me personally, I'm not getting an XBox. Maybe it will have some fun games, but the risk isn't worth it.

Re:It's just cool

[Anonymous Coward]

"Many people don't feel the need to regulate and restrict their fun to careful guidelines based on what is "prudent.""

So true, and the hospitals and morgues are full of them.

Re:It's just cool

[acaspis]

I'm finding it hard to believe you've finished all the games you own on your current system

Uh ??? It's almost 20 years since I last got stuck in a game (a text-based adventure). I had to learn electronics to build an autofiring joystick and complete a few side-scrolling shooters of the early 1990s, though.

All the recent games are dumbed-down so as not to frustrate customers. Can anyone recommend a challenging one ?

AC

Re:It's just cool

[snuf23]

Frozen Bubble? Tux Racer? Free Civ? Battle of Wesnoth?

There are some open source games and some are quite decent. Pretty much none of them have anything close to the production values of most commercial releases however.
That doesn't mean they can't be fun though.

Re:It's just cool

[tepples]

Even if you are running LinuxBIOS or some other Free firmware, how many commercial computers are built on top of hardware whose schematic or vhdl description is published under a Free license through a repository such as opencores.org?

Re:It's just cool

[klubar]

Or how about portable music players (aka iPods) for a monopoly? I forgot-this is /., Apple: good. Microsoft: bad.

Re:It's just cool

[tepples]

Frozen Bubble? Tux Racer? Free Civ? Battle of Wesnoth?

Compared to even the number of titles on the Xbox 360's official launch list, how many notable Free real-time games are there?

Re:It's just cool

[tepples]

Can anyone recommend a challenging one ?

Want a bullshit challenge that will take you more than 573 plays to overcome? Try In The Groove for PS2. Then beat the "Breaking Point" course on intense.

Re:It's just cool

[Anonymous Coward]

Expanding on parent's idea... Wait for 5 (or more) years, then pick one up at a yard sale! Dirt cheap PLUS you will probably get all the games too!

I would suggest picking up some isopropyl alcohol if you see the newest Dead or Alive in that stack, to wipe the controllers down before using them. Other than that, you are GOLDEN!

Re:It's just cool

[edrain]

Ninja Gaiden for XBOX will wish you'd never been born. I'm not sure that's a good thing, but some people really like it. The controls / graphics / etc. are cool, but the game is HARD.

Re:It's just cool

[edrain]

Nursing homes are full of people who play it safe, for all that's worth.

Re:It's just cool

[sogoodsofarsowhat]

Man i love your sig line. Good days...good memories :)

Re:It's just cool

[Anonymous Coward]

You can purchase a PS2 Linux Kit. The same thing will happen with PS3.

Re:It's just cool

[Spit]

No, I'm not passing judgement on Xbox or MS. But you can't say your a free-software zealot if you use non-free software when it may inconvenience you.

It's like saying "I'm heterosexual, except when I see a big fat cock!"

Re:It's just cool

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm only going to wait as long as it takes for Oblivion to come out.
Morrowind is about the only game I play on my XBox at the moment, and I figure that a game that I will spend over a hundred hours playing is more than enough to justify the purchase of a console.

Re:It's just cool

[snuf23]

Hey man - Frozen Bubble AND> Tux Racer are real time!

Notable... hmmm... nevermind.

Re:It's just cool

[ad0gg]

No open source ATMs, store you money in your mattress. No open source car computers, i guess you can't drive either. No open source Airline computers, can't fly too.

Re:It's just cool

[Jozer99]

You could (GASP) play a closed source gaming system once and awhile.  I understand the lure of open source, I run Firefox, Thunderbird, GAIM, ect on my main machine, and am considering converting one of my backup machines to full time linux.  However, turning against all that is closed source makes about as much sense to me as religious fanaticism.  MS Office still beats the pants off of Open Office (however, 2.0 seems to fix many problems).  Windows XP is still simpler to use than any Linux Distro.  Pick and choose the best of both worlds, and I think you might be happier and more open minded.

Anyway, an open source console wouldn't sell.  Back in the day, when games took months and thosands of dollars to develope, it was possible for hobbiest to put together games that rivaled the quality of comercial releases (speaking of comadore and atari here).  Nowadays, games require huge teams of developers and tens of millions of dollars to make.  Hobbiests, no matter how organized, could not put together a constant supply of high quality games that would make such an open source console feasable. 

Re:It's just cool

[tricorn]

Unlikely it was a 40MB drive, 10-20MB was quite large if you even had a hard drive. A computer with 640K wouldn't have had a 40MB drive (you'd spend the money on extended/expanded RAM first). My first computer was a Lisa, with 1MB RAM and a 10MB hard drive, 22 years ago, for about $5000 (including a printer).

I could see spending $5000, on a quad G5 with 4GB RAM and 500GB disk space, if you really needed the speed and storage. However, if I really needed that much computer, I'd probably want to just boost it to around $12K and get the 1TB disk space, and the dual 30" widescreen monitors (and get more RAM from other than Apple, of course - e.g. RamJet 8GB ECC for $1029 rather than Apple at $3100, though RamJet doesn't yet have 2GB ECC modules available, so getting to 16GB ECC from Apple will cost another $12K - funny that their RAM is so much more overpriced than their disk drives).

Re:It's just cool

[Anonymous Coward]

Stepmania, Nexuiz. OK, Stepmania is principally notable for being a clone of DDR, but the extra game modes are better than the original. Getting music for it legally is damn hard too.

Besides, plenty of turn based commercial games! Right now I'm lusting after Advance Wars DS and the new Fire Emblems for GBA and GC. I hear Disagea is superb, and isn't Metal Gear Acid turn based? Plus any number of chess and card games. Wesnoth belongs on the list of good commercial-style OSS games.
And, come to think of it I paid real money for a second hand copy of GC Bust-a-move (basis of Frozen Bubble) a few months ago, so FB should go on the list too.

Re:It's just cool

[tepples]

Getting music for it legally is damn hard too.

Which is why I excluded it, as the lawful use of StepMania that I've seen is not especially notable, on a comparable order of magnitude to the noninfringing use of KaZaA.

Besides, plenty of turn based commercial games!

True, MMC4 games (Fire Emblem and Famicom Wars) and their sequels have their fans, but I said "real-time" to shut up fanboys of a particular Rogue clone.

And, come to think of it I paid real money for a second hand copy of GC Bust-a-move (basis of Frozen Bubble) a few months ago, so FB should go on the list too.

So we possibly have Nexuiz, Frozen Bubble, some abandoned version of Tux Racer, and Wesnoth. What else do we need to make a decent launch lineup for some hypothetical Free game console that acts as an alternative to the Xbox 360?

Re:It's just cool

[MrNiCeGUi]

I had an 8086 with 640k and 20GB hard drive, so that's possible. Can't be bothered to look in the attic for it now, but it had a 13" color monitor and a VGA card. The year was 1984, if I'm not mistaken. I bet it still works if I plug it in.

Re:It's just cool

[MrNiCeGUi]

The power of habit. Please read that as 20MB hard drive, not 20GB.

Re:It's just cool

[tricorn]

Yeah, 20GB would have been in the hundred-thousand dollar range, probably in 10-30 units taking up a whole room...

You confirm what I said, which was that 10-20MB was a large drive, and that 40MB was unlikely (but not impossible). I think I had a 20MB hard drive in 1985 (or whenever the Mac Plus came out). I had a 40MB drive on the Mac II, which I supplemented with an external 70MB drive, then later a 320MB drive, each of which cost around $300-350 (SCSI). I did a Linux install on that 70MB drive years later (also on a 100MB Zip drive).

Re:It's just cool

[Phisbut]

Unlikely it was a 40MB drive, 10-20MB was quite large if you even had a hard drive. A computer with 640K wouldn't have had a 40MB drive (you'd spend the money on extended/expanded RAM first).

I just checked, you're right. The computer simply didn't have a hard drive at first (only 2 floppies). He bought the hard drive (which was indeed a 40MB) about 2 years later.

Re:It's just cool

[Nykon]

No native games,but it runs several emulators which means it has the advantage of being able to play games from other portables and consoles, plus memory is a non issue on it since it is swappable and cheap to buy now a days for the unit.

Re:It's just cool

[cornface]

So true, and the hospitals and morgues are full of them.

Yes, the sheer number of injuries and deaths from irrational console purchasing has brought our healthcare and funerary industries to a screeching halt.

Sheesh.

Re:It's just cool

[AvatarofVirgo]

This person deserves Score:5, mode them up.

They spend arm and leg on these games when you can get plenty of fun games for the PC at at fraction of the price. I could never understand how any one can spend almost $70 on a xbox game when you get the same quality of games for like $20 for the PC. I'm not saying PC games are all that price. I think when Doom3 came out for PC it was selling at Best Buy for like $50 something. I could be wrong and just my observation but I noticed the prices of PC games drop a lot faster within a few weeks then console games.

I also have a hard time understanding how any one actually pays for xboxlive. I've allways enjoyed using GameSpy Arcade for free and it works with all the PC games I have like SOF and SOF2. GameSpy also have some "tunnel" software that lets you hook your xbox to their servers for free.

Actual Lnk

[shamowfski]

Real Link..

Working Link

[dc_cypher]

http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=26 10

That's nice

[Peregr1n]

It's all very well taking it apart and all, but have you installed Linux on it yet? Get your priorities right!

Re:That's nice

[clonmult]

Linux? We want OS/X running on platforms other than Macs and Dells ...

Re:That's nice

[pkvon]

Look at this picture, on the top left corner right above the chip with a silver circle and xbox360 on it you can see 13 silver dots - they look exactly like the place where you'd install the modchip in the xbox1 :)

So there is still hope, even if MS said one mod will work only on one xbox.

Who needs a 360?

[bennomatic]

My Sega Genesis still works great!

Re:Who needs a 360?

[hal2814]

I would've bought one of those but my Master System never died on me so I just couldn't justify the purchase.

Re:Who needs a 360?

[SillySnake]

Yeah, but does it run Linux?

Re:Who needs a 360?

[ozamosi]

Actually, I just got of playing some Sonic the Hedgehog 2 on a Sega Mega Drive 2. Good stuff, however, a bit slow. I will not buy a bloody X-Box when I have sonic, and a NES with duckhunt and zelda. What more could there be to get for me?

Re:Who needs a 360?

[Ulrich Hobelmann]

Well, there's a huge number of Genesis games that don't suck but are (still) great fun.

So that leaves some room for XBox fans ;)

I don't own any game console because I neither have time for boring modern 3D games nor for addictive Genesis ones.

Re:Who needs a 360?

[ultrafunkula]

You could get an XBOX and install emulators to play SNES and Megadrive games (and NES, Master System, MAME, N64, ...). And never have to get up to change the cartridge again.
I wonder how long it will take until the 360 is also hacked to run emulators...

Re:Who needs a 360?

[ivan256]

The master system kicks ass. If you've got Shinobi, Spy vs. Spy, and Wonder Boy in Monster Land, who needs any of these new-fangled things?

Also, the master system has the best D-pad. If you greased up your thumb with potato chips before playing, you could bang out combos on that thing like no other.

Re:Who needs a 360?

[Lusa]

The control pad was great. So great that it worked without mods on the C64. I rewired mine slightly so that the second fire button acted the same as pressing up. Made playing platform games much better IMO :)

Re:Who needs a 360?

[tepples]

You could get an XBOX and install emulators to play SNES and Megadrive games (and NES, Master System, MAME, N64, ...)

How would you afford to build dumpers for your existing NES, Master System, Mega Drive, Super NES, and N64 cartridges and for all your arcade PCBs?

Printer Friendly

[TubeSteak]

http://www.anandtech.com.nyud.net:8090/printarticl e.aspx?i=2610

The site seems to be weakening (the images aren't loading)
and networkmirror & mirrordot have yet to get working link up

Re:Printer Friendly

[petermgreen]

mirrordot has a working link but first page only, network mirror doesn't seem to have anything yet.

Re:Printer Friendly

[BushCheney08]

Thank you. At least I now have something to read while waiting for the images to load...

Re:Printer Friendly

[TheReckoning]

nyud.net doesn't resolve for me, so I'm using this:

http://www.anandtech.com.http.l2.l1.l0.nyucd.net:8 090/printarticle.aspx?i=2610

Re:Printer Friendly

[Anonymous Coward]

you know, those nyud.net links have not worked for me for a very long time.

Re:Printer Friendly

[TubeSteak]

.http.l2.l1.l0.nyucd.net:8090
wow... that works.
never heard of it before now.
Did you actually read the coral cache FAQ?

Re:Printer Friendly

[TheReckoning]

I'm not sure if you're insulting me or not.

I got that URL by doing a DNS lookup for anandtech.com.nyud.net since nyud.net never resolves at all for me. I then appended the :8090/... stuff to the end and got it.

Until today, I had no idea what "CoralCache" was because "CoralCache" doen't come up on Google with any non-cryptic answer. I just assumed it was some poorly-implemented thing that I couldn't get to.

Thanks to WikiPedia's article on Slashdotting, I found that CoralCache isn't "CoralCache" but actually the Coral CDN, whose web page is here, and whose FAQ is here. So all this time I could've been reading Coralized links if people had just bothered to call it something that actually resembled its name.

Re:Printer Friendly

[Anonymous Coward]

I know this is OT, but you're absolutely correct. I have had similar problems with Coralized links resolving (i.e. they don't).

Whoever moderated the parent as a "Troll" must have something wrong with them, you know, mentally.

Re:Printer Friendly

[TheReckoning]

I hate to get in the way of you being a jerk and all, but my point is that I was looking for "Coral Cache", not the "Coral Content Distribution Network", which sounded like a totally different thing (since everyone calls it by an incorrect name).

Also, I was searching for "Coralcache" because I'd seen it written that way several times. I won't provide you with a link, because I'm not a pedantic ass.

Re:Printer Friendly

[emurphy42]

...which turns up the following on the first page of hits (#8 to be exact; emphasis mine):

Transformers Cosplay
Dev notes: I'm running the remotely linked photos and TFCosplay itself though
Coral CDN ("CoralCache"), so with any luck neither they nor I will be hammered ...
tfcosplay.buildtolearn.net/ - 19k - Cached - Similar pages

Furthermore, Googling (nyud 8090) turns up the following on the first page of hits (#4):

The Coral Content Distribution Network
Just append .nyud.net:8090. to the hostname of any URL, and your request for that
URL is handled by Coral! Try this page, or any other site: ...
www.coralcdn.org/ - 8k - Nov 14, 2005 - Cached - Similar pages

I'm not saying that Coral Cache or CoralCache is an official name, because of course it isn't. I am saying that any geek worth his salt should be able to figure out (1) what it means in about five minutes by using searches such as the above, and (2) why people would so readily adopt it as an unofficial name.

Incidentally, I don't think TubeSteak was insulting you; his comment seemed to imply that he felt he should have read the FAQ.

!!!!!!GEEK PR0N ACTION!!!!!!

[apexdawn]

Very appropriate for the, "hey here's a hot toy, lets take it apart!" With all the power that the next gen systems are reported to have I was expecting to see a glowing corona of pure energy (maybe like some blue and orangey colors) not a aluminum heatsink. When will manufacturers and designers make it look powerful as well as "be" powerful. *sniff* this is ruining a fantasy! :P --Reed

Re:!!!!!!GEEK PR0N ACTION!!!!!!

[meringuoid]

With all the power that the next gen systems are reported to have I was expecting to see a glowing corona of pure energy (maybe like some blue and orangey colors) not a aluminum heatsink.

Well, there was that arcade box Namco once built, which ran off fissile decay, needed a fearsome cooling system based on liquid sodium, and lived in a lead-lined cabinet... That, once opened, I'm sure would glow something amazing.

Unfortunately, when the first arcade opened in Japan with one of these things, the sheer power awoke a zilla, and the whole place got stomped flat. Wonderful system, but really wasn't practical in the real world.

Coral cache

[neovoxx]

Linky: http://www.anandtech.com.nyud.net:8090/systems/sho wdoc.aspx?i=2610

OMG!

[Yahweh Doesn't Exist]

that power supply really is huge!

the age of power supplies doubling as heaters/cookers has truely dawned.

Re:OMG!

[Anonymous Coward]

Can I sue Microsoft if it causes my house to burn down?

Re:OMG!

[Anonymous Coward]

"the age of power supplies doubling as heaters/cookers has truely dawned."

I doubt it. Efficiency of this PSU is probably around 80%. If this xbox consumes 200W that is only 40W of waste heat. Try to heat your room with a 40W light bulb and let us know how that works out for you.

OS X

[LoSLapPy]

Am I smelling OS X on an XBOX 360 in the future???

Re:OS X

[bjoeg]

Since Apple is changing to standard Intel x86 CPUs, no.

Re:OS X

[LoSLapPy]

10.4 is compiled for powerPC... yes. Since they are still selling PowerPC's... will 10.5 be compiled for PowerPC... yes... OS X will be on PowerPC for at least the next two years.

Re:OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

People had OSX running on the regular XBOX long before the Intel announcement. If someone is motivated enough, it will happen.

CPU, GPU

[Janek Kozicki]

for those who are too lazy:

CPU: 3 PowerPC CPUs, each with 2 threads. that gives maximum 6 threads.
GPU: some special dial core ATI card (one core smaller one bigger)

Re:CPU, GPU

[c_forq]

some special dial core

Dial core? Does it go to 11?

Re:CPU, GPU

[ds_job]

some special dial core

Dial core? Does it go to 11?

To be honest I am more concerned that they reckon that having two cores each on a separate die makes them two dice instead of two dies.
When they said
Once both X plates have been removed, you can turn the motherboard over and simply pull the heatsinks off to reveal the GPUs (two dice on the chip) and CPUs (single die, 3 cores on the chip).
I looked at the damn photo to see if there was a picture of a pair of d6 dice. It honestly took over a minute to figure out what the heck they meant.

I was prepared later for this quote:
The 332 million transistor GPU is split into two separate dice, the larger of which looks like a conventional GPU, and then a smaller die
I did not look for a d20 and a d6. I might send them a link to http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/ in the hope that if they must use jargon they might at least use sensible jargon.

Re:CPU, GPU

[Anonymous Coward]

C'mon, mods! Funniest post of the week by far!

Another hardware site bites the dust

[jandrese]

I've got to remember to get these links before they show up on the main page. These hardware sites always collapse under the weight of the Slashdot crowd. The link was even broken on this article for some people and it still collapsed.

everytenminutes.com

[MikeyTheK]

Yeah, well I will on Saturday. I got my confirmation from Pepsi that the 360 I won in the everytenminutes.com contest will be shipped overnight to arrive at my door on Saturday. My only question: Is it the core system or the "real" system? There isn't anything in the game rules about which one I'm getting. The other bummer is that there won't be any 360 hardware (e.g. different av cables, extra controllers) available until Tuesday, when the console officially launches, so all I can do is play Madden 2K6 with a single control until then.

Re:everytenminutes.com

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like you don't want it, I'll gladly take the $400 console you got for free off your hands...

Re:everytenminutes.com

[MikeyTheK]

Thanks, but I think I'll test it extensively, just to make sure that the platform is worthy before the official launch next Tuesday...

Re:everytenminutes.com

[Anonymous Coward]

The accessories are already available.

Re:everytenminutes.com

[MikeyTheK]

Really?! Cool! Toys 'R' Us told me I couldn't get games or accessories until Tuesday. Maybe I'll have to call Wal-Mart. Thanks for the update.

ALTQ + Anandtech

[SpinJaunt]

Coincidence, I am not sure if Anantech is /.ed or my ALTQ config is up the duff..

Slashdottings and mirrors...

[lpangelrob]

Hmm. I know /.ings occur with regular frequency, but usually not to AnandTech. The force is unusually strong today.

Mirror of the first page for people who can't access port 8090. Additional pages not guaranteed as Mirrordot doesn't work that way.

Re:Slashdottings and mirrors...

[mldkfa]

IT was the top news item in my google sidebar. I think the whole internet knows about it now;-)

Re:Slashdottings and mirrors...

[EvilTwinSkippy]

There is a great disturbance in the force, as if a million browsers cried out in frustration and recieved dead air.

Re:Slashdottings and mirrors...

[cK-Gunslinger]

The Anandtech site (and forums) have been experiencing lots of network issues as of late, ranging from DDOS attacks to up-stream ISP problems. The sudden onslaught of /. viewers may have caused someone to panic and hit the 'choke' button, or it may simple be that this is the first real exercise the network has received since its recovery and updates.

Re:Mod parent down!

[tgrimley]

He posted it before the link was corrected..

Does anyone remember ...

[Anonymous Coward]

When Anandtech did this for the original XBox and (after months of XBox fanboys saying 'it's a Pentium 3 processor, not a Celeron') they removed the heat sink to display 'Celeron' on the top of the processor.

The moral of the story is that Fanboys are dumb and uninformend.

Re:Does anyone remember ...

[petermgreen]

i'm sure it was some comprimise between a p3 and a celeron or at least thats what ms said it was at the time.

Re:Does anyone remember ...

[Anonymous Coward]

At the time that the XBox was released the main (I would say only, but I can't back that up) difference between the Pentium 3 and Celeron was the ammount of Level 2 Cache; 256KB for Celeron and 512KB for Pentium 3 if I remember correctly (it's been a long time since I even thought about a Pentium 3). The reason why Microsoft said that it was a hybrid chip design was because the Celeron was looked down upon by anyone who knew anything about PC game performance, Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 performed really badly on a Celeron of that era; the other alternative would be to tell the truth (that without a bloated Windows 98/Me/NT4/2000 core you don't need that much cache to play a game well) but the truth would make Microsoft look bad.

Re:Does anyone remember ...

[up2ng]

It was a Celeron core with 256k of cache (the garden variety Celeron only had 128k, and the P3 had 512k) kinda in between the Celery & the P3

Re:Does anyone remember ...

[PhilHibbs]

From TFA (page 6):

The original Xbox used a hybrid mobile Pentium III/Celeron processor

Re:Does anyone remember ...

[Toraz Chryx]

Not quite

It was a Celeron with 128KB of L2, on a 133Mhz FSB (retail Celerons at the time were on a 66Mhz FSB, the 133Mhz bus being reserved for P3's)

Coppermine P3's had 256KB of L2

Huge Power Supply

[raygundan]

No kidding. I realize they wanted to make the console smaller, since people griped about the size of the original-- but this is like making my car smaller by putting the back seat and the trunk in a trailer I have to pull around all the time.

Re:Huge Power Supply

[Prophet of Nixon]

Actually, I really like the externalized power supply. Putting those awful things internal in devices which don't have much cooling is just asking for heat problems.

Re:Huge Power Supply

[Yahweh Doesn't Exist]

I agree it should be external, but the size is ridiculous. I don't like the plug->wire->brick->wire->device design as the lengths of the wires inevitably makes brick placement awkward. I prefer the brick to be integrated into the plug but this clearly isn't possible here.

I don't know anything about power supply design. is increase in size inevitable or can we see smaller, better supplies in the future? how many console generations until the power supply is bigger than the actual console?

Re:Huge Power Supply

[Anonymous Coward]

Every now and then some improvement is made to the design, but generally, heavier = better. I used to have 2 electric shavers, identical look except for the colour, the cheap one weighted less than half of the expensive (and good) one. It also depends on the requirements, my cellphone has a tiny and lightweight 'brick', it's actually smaller and lighter than the phone (ok, the phone is not the latest, but still damn light).

Re:Huge Power Supply

[Prophet of Nixon]

Well, the one nice thing about not having the brick at the end of the wire is not having the brick block other plugs on your outlet/line filter/etc, or fall off the wall. This also allows multiple bricks to not be concentrated in one place (making another potential heat problem).

Agreed that the device-wire-brick-wire-plug is sometimes bad for placement (and I haven't looked at the wire lengths on the 360), but as long as the device-brick wire is long it usually works out OK.

Re:Huge Power Supply

[ivan256]

Having it external is much preferable to having the console be huge... You can hide the power brick behind your gear, but the console has to be out in the open so you can insert disks, connect accessories, etc...

An added bonus is that console power supplies are the cheapest retail multi-amp DC switching power supplies available. If you need 45 watts at 12 volts for some project you're building, a suitable switching supply from your favorite electronics components dealer would cost you $50-$100. A Gamecube brick can be had for $10.

Re:Huge Power Supply

[KylePflug]

I prefer the brick to be integrated into the plug

You know, I think I'd put down extra just to have the 360's brick integrated with the plug, just so I could threaten people with it / watch it rip the power sockets out of my wall.

Re:Huge Power Supply

[jtriska]

The power supply is also external for temperature reasons. Even without the PSU inside the 360, it still generates quite a bit of heat from the processors and GPU alone, enough to make it feel like a space heater if you put your hand behind it. The PSU gets just as hot if you you touch it.

This explains it

[casualsax3]

I was wondering why AnandTech's forums were going so slow. Curse you /.!

It's just boring

[pubjames]

Well, I think it all looks pretty boring - just new versions of old games with prettier graphics. It's not the massive leap in performance I was hoping for.

I'm waiting for the PS3 to come out, then I'll decide.

Re:It's just boring

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does everybody seem to ignore the Nintendo Revolution? People talk about how the XBox 360 and PS3 only offer performance and graphics enhancements, but no new gameplay styles. Machine power no longer equals new styles of gameplay (although it used to). The Nintendo Revolution is THE system to have if you're looking for something new, something that truly makes console gaming a unique experience (rather than just playing on a PC with a controller).

Re:It's just boring

[Anonymous Coward]

name some of the new and exciting games .. ohh yea mario and zelda maybe luigi will show up for the fun

Re:It's just boring

[Pulzar]

It's not the massive leap in performance I was hoping for.

What kind of a "performance" were you looking for? Faster image processing in Photoshop, quicker unraring, faster loading of Firefox? Seriously, if the console has better graphics and highest resolution available on TVs, that's all the "performance" you need. I haven't seen any serious game developers complaining that the Xbox 360 is not able to handle the game they were trying to design, so they had to dumb it down, have you?

Re:It's just boring

[h4ck7h3p14n37]

The Nintendo Revolution is THE system to have if you're looking for something new, something that truly makes console gaming a unique experience (rather than just playing on a PC with a controller).

That's true. I'm ecstatic about the possibilty of using a television remote control to play my video games! Seriously, as someone who has been playing games since the Atari 2600 came out and who eventually purchases every video game console in a given generation, it's the games that make a system, not the hardware specifications or user interfaces.

As a rule I wait about two years before buying into the latest generation; that's plenty of time to size up the game library available on different systems, read reviews, and have a nice pool of cheap, used games to draw from.

Re:It's just boring

[Anonymous Coward]

why the fucking hell would I want a machine I just payed $Au700 for to spend half it's time rendering frames I'm not even going to see?

If the TV refreshes at 30FPS - or 24 for PAL, then that's what the framerate should be. Any more is just pissing your money away.

Website running on an Xbox 360

[Anonymous Coward]

Must be, right? I can smell the plastic melting from here!

Know what you mean

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not interested in games but as soon as the facist TCPA crud is defeated and the 360 is booting linux, I may just purchase one. Then again the PS3 hardware is even more interesting and if Sony learn anything from their DRM rootkit, we may be able to boot whatever from the get-go.

please type the word in this image: satanic
For fear of the lord, no 360 for me. Slashdot knows everything.

lemme guess

[Smallest]

there are a bunch of black plastic rectangles, a couple of fans, some ribbon cable, a hard drive and a few stray capacitors all soldered to a green circuit board.

Re:lemme guess

[hedley]

Snazzy Black&Gold capacitors I might add....

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/ 11/001211&tid=126&tid=137

Hedley

Re:lemme guess

[algae]

Nope, no ribbon cable. Looks like SATA has trickled down to consumer electronics. No hard drive either -- it snaps onto the side. And a couple of those rectangles are made of silicon and ceramic, not plastic.

Re:lemme guess

[Chris Brewer]

Almost. There's no ribbon cable as both the HD and DVD drives are SATA...

Re:In Other News

[Prophet of Nixon]

Eh, so did the original... try putting the first Hunter: The Reckoning game in, get a second player, then go find one of the permanent stat increase glyphs. If you hit it at the same time, it doesn't deactivate, and you can run your stat bars well off the screen. Then go shoot/hit a zombie (depending upon the glyph having been dex/str). BSOD! Only game I've been able to cause something like that in, probably some sort of unexpected math exception involving the off-screen stats.

ATI GPU not dual core

[Anonymous Coward]

The ATI GPU is not dual core, but dual die. A single core GPU and a 10MB die of edram. The new GPU features a unified shader arch with 48 shaders.

No disassemble

[eXoXe]

Number 5 alive!

The real question is

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it run Linux?

A more pressing question:

[Thud457]

More like,

"Yeah, but does it run MAME?
Yet?"

Re:A more pressing question:

[raventh1]

I plays Joust, we don't need no stinkin MAME. (Legally too)

Article Text

[SirLestat]

Inside Microsoft's Xbox 360
Date: Nov 16, 2005
Type: System
Manufacturer: Microsoft
Author: Anand Lal Shimpi, Kristopher Kubicki & Tuan Nguyen
Page 1
Microsoft's first try at a gaming console amounted to essentially a very affordable PC. It used standard PC components, including a mobile Intel processor (a hybrid Pentium 3/Celeron), a desktop NVIDIA chipset, a Western Digital hard drive and relatively standard PC DVD-ROM. The original Xbox was such a PC in fact that there were quite a few users that wanted to mod it simply to have a cheap PC, not even for gaming - including ourselves.

Before the Xbox was launched, Microsoft was very concerned with users thinking of the Xbox as nothing more than a PC branded as a gaming console, so it went to great lengths to reduce the association. For example, the strict ban on keyboard and mouse support, despite the fact that the console implemented the standard USB interface.

With the Xbox 360, Microsoft gained some benefits of the original Xbox success. Xbox didn't win the sales battle against Sony's PlayStation 2, but the first Xbox was strong enough to cement Microsoft's name in the world of console gaming manufacturers. For their second time around, there is less worry of the Xbox 360 being viewed as a just a PC, so Microsoft took a bolder approach.

Honestly, with the Xbox 360, Microsoft could have put forth another PC in a black box and it probably would have done fine. But with their second gaming console, the target was growth -- and Sony. With an established name and fanbase, it was time to take the market seriously and start to exert some dominance and thus the Xbox went from being a clunky black box of a PC, to a stylish consumer electronics device.

The Xbox 360 is smaller than the original Xbox, and its wireless nature makes it a natural fit in the living room - marking a thankful change from standard gaming consoles of the past. Despite looking like the offspring of an iPod and a DVD player, the Xbox 360 is still very much a PC on the inside. As such, it's got all of the components we're used to.

With less than a week to go before the retail availability of Xbox 360 consoles, we got our hands on one to give it the usual AnandTech once-over. And take it apart of course.

What's in the Box?
Our Xbox 360 system was the $399 unit, which comes with the following:

- Xbox 360 console
- 20GB Removable Hard Drive
- Wireless Controller
- Headset
- DVD Remote
- Ethernet Cable
- Component AV Cables
- External Power Supply

The $299 core system gives you the same console (with a white DVD tray cover), a wired controller, and standard composite AV cables; there's no hard drive, headset or remote.

By now you have undoubtedly heard about the massive external power supply that comes with the Xbox 360 and you can see it in the lower left hand corner of the picture above. Remember that in the original Xbox, the power supply was internal. But with the power requirements of the Xbox 360 being significantly higher than its predecessor, while featuring a noticeably smaller case, the only solution was to take the power supply out of the Xbox 360.

Page 2
What's in the Box, in the Box? (Taking it Apart)
Microsoft has shown the world that it's very swift when it comes to recovering from errors that it has made. With the original Xbox design, Microsoft was definitely testing new ground and thus had little experience when it came to protecting its intellectual property and hardware. The original Xbox was largely easy to open by most people with the most common of tools and was quickly adopted by the modding community as the ultimate "utility" console.

In an attempt to circumvent those with modified Xboxes, Microsoft added security and authentication features to its Xbox Live service that would detect whether an Xbox was in its original form or not. But the mod community did not sit idle and not long after, mod chips were introduced that were able to switch on and of

Re:Article Text

[Anonymous Coward]

you know I think it's against the law to copy content in this manner? correct me if i'm wrong.

Re:Article Text

[faragon]

Wrong.

On most world countries you are allowed to quote freely.

Re:Article Text

[nsayer]

Wrong.

You are allowed to excerpt small sections from a copyrighted work for criticism, parody, education and the like. The grandparent merely reproduced the entire article text, which is not allowed.

Re:Article Text

[faragon]

You're right, but please note that the use of the word "quote"/"quotation" has implicit semantics about to be "small sections", and related to criticism -in all of its flavours-. The use of the words implies some context, provided by its etymology (aka built-in meaning).

Re:Article Text

[nsayer]

Fine, but look at the context provided by the conversation that was taking place...

you know I think it's against the law to copy content in this manner? correct me if i'm wrong.
---
Wrong.

On most world countries you are allowed to quote freely.

The implication of the post to which I replied was that it was wrong to suggest that copying content was not a violation of copyright law because "you are allowed to quote freely."

Re:Article Text

[faragon]

Well, as a propositional logic fan (mainly due to Bertrand Russell, et al), I have to agree with your argumentation ;-)

It does what Nintendon't! Erm, 15 years ago.

[Heffenfeffer]

Man, I wish I could upgrade to the Master System. Adventure used to be my favorite game until I went over to my friend's house and he showed me Alex Kidd in Miracle World. It was the coolest RPG I've ever seen!

No wonder the 360 is smaller than the original

[PhotoBoy]

Just look at the big external brick used to power it in the Anandtech article! Take something that big out of the casing and it's bound to be smaller. It would have ended up the same size as the Xbox 1 otherwise.

Re:No wonder the 360 is smaller than the original

[djdavetrouble]

Yet another idea stolen from apple (outboard power supplies on the cube, flat panel monitor, the mini..)

**ducks**

Re:No wonder the 360 is smaller than the original

[sidb]

. It would have ended up the same size as the Xbox 1 otherwise.

Yet I was still disappointed by how big it is. In fact, the only recent console it's smaller than is the original XBox. See the first picture on this page for a good comparison. With the power supply, it might have been bigger than XBox 1. I thought they were trying to sell in Japan by being small, but they don't seem to have achieved that.

Re:No wonder the 360 is smaller than the original

[mblase]

Just look at the big external brick used to power it in the Anandtech article! Take something that big out of the casing and it's bound to be smaller.

Yep. What's your point? Apple did the same thing with the Mac mini, and it was a good idea then, too.

Re:No wonder the 360 is smaller than the original

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple was certainly not the originator of external power bricks for computer equipment. (In fact, you could probably claim Apple was an early defender of the idea that the power supply should be inside the computer chassis. For example, the Apple II had a built in power supply. A switch mode supply at that! Very ahead of the times those guys.)

Anyway, 20 years ago I owned a Commodore 64 with an external power brick with a somewhat similar appearance to that of the Xbox 360...

http://www.vintagecomputer.co.uk/vcshop/ProdImages /LK1667_LG.jpg

The C64 power bricks were big, heavy, encapsulated in epoxy (non-repairable) and notorious for failing. I actually still have a 64C in a closet somewhere. The power supply might still work being as I designed my own replacement (project in highschool electronics class) after going through several of the OEM power bricks.

Who knows, maybe someone on the Xbox 360 design team had a C64 nostalgia moment and came up with that huge power brick! Something like the game loader/decruncher intro of GTA Vice City.

Understanding Why The 360 Performs So Poorly

[Anonymous Coward]

The 360 hardware clearly is the product of a lack of experience and time.

About the only Microsoft managed to do right with the 360 hardware was dump the x86 CPUs for the vastly more powerful PPC chips. However, unlike the new Cell chips and Nintendo's Revolution PPC chip, IBM clearly just didn't give a shit about the 360 cpu.

Bolting on a third core just isn't the work of a company serious about performance. Microsoft was clearly impressed with the sound of a triple core chip, but obviously had no idea that its real world performance would be vastly lower than the raw specs on paper. Somewhat understandable since really no one at Microsoft has any practical knowledge in chip design.

Everything on modern cpus is cache. Nothing runs fast until you have your working set of data in your local cache. The 360 is like a textbook example of how to not to design a modern cpu. You will hear more and more from developers in one way or another talking about the 360 and 'bottlenecks' or some other way of describing the poor memory system of the 360 cpu. For any developer who wants to get performance anywhere above today's current desktop cpus it is a nightmare of having to carefully managed multiple threads so their data access patterns don't clobber each other's working sets of data. Nothing but pity for someone having to do that everyday at work.

Ignoring the graphics side of things in the 360, this is one of the major reasons why the 360 games looks so underwhelming and not any different that current gen pc games. The system is very much a one step forward one step back piece of technology.

And if you think that sounds bad, we haven't even got to the too small amount of EDRAM on the graphics side of system and why all 360 games have horrendous jaggies all over the screen...

Re:Understanding Why The 360 Performs So Poorly

[Anonymous Coward]

I have heard various people talk about the 360 and performance bottlenecks - on beyond3d and some developers interviews they didn't outright state it but they strongly hinted at it being a problem with the system.

But what is the problem with the EDRAM? I have heard lots of talk of why there is no AA in 360 games, but no one has been able to explain why something so simple can be missing in a brand new piece of hardware.

Re:Understanding Why The 360 Performs So Poorly

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting point with no backing - how do you know how badly the 360 performs? Speak in fact and not vaporware. ;)

Re:Understanding Why The 360 Performs So Poorly

[Anonymous Coward]

The EDRAM problem on the 360 is easy to understand.

Microsoft for some reason, obviously most likely due to trying to cut costs, only included 10Megs of EDRAM in the 360. That means that developers can't fit an entire 780p framebuffer in there without breaking it up into tiles.

The problem is that rendering in tiles has a potentially large overhead cost in performance. Mostly due to having to re-render everything that crosses a tile boundry.

The fact that no 360 developers have implemented tile renderers is a clear indication that the performance hit is too large or that graphic detail will have to be lowered to a point where you probably aren't getting game that look much better than on the first xbox.

Developers have had more than enough time with real hardware to support tile rendering. They have had access to underclocked 360 GPUs for at least six months. A tile renderer isn't that complicated that it requires months of work. The main graphics engineer could get a first pass version running in a day or two - unless he sucks of course.

This is going to be a huge problem down the road for the 360. The couple million people they manage to sell 360s to before the PS3 ships in March/April next year are going to be meaningless compared to the huge performance difference between the 360 and the massively more powerful PS3 and Revolution machines next year.

1up and Live

[earnest murderer]

1up has an in-depth review of the new Live setup http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3145585&did=1 along with a video of two guys talking about the thing. Not exactly like stripping her naked and poking around inside the box, but it is informative (the article, the video is pretty light weight).

Re:1up and Live

[earnest murderer]

Last time the words "stripped her naked" and "poking around inside the box" were used, I got in a lot of trouble :(

Next time you'll remember the roofies and chloroform.

XBOX 360 Power supply

[Anonymous Coward]

I have one already and its a dud. There are 3 others who are having the same problem as me.

The problem is believed to be the power supply. I'm thinking there is going to be a mass recall on the power supplies come Nov. 22.

Just thought I would share

Well this explains

[CmdrTacoBell]

Why their forums have been crap slow this morning. Anandtech /.'ed LOL

Re:In Other News

[NanoGator]

"/That was offtopic, but reading about BSOD's got my creative juices flowing."

You creatively changed the color of the screen, creatively quoted the chair throwing comment that we've heard a jillion times, and you even went as far as to creatively phrase it as an 'in other news' style post. Yeah, your well of creativity is just bubbling today.

Why was I modded "troll"?

[TheReckoning]

I was making a point: There's no "Coral Cache FAQ" to read, because there's no Coral Cache. The Coral CDN would work much better if the multitudes of us that cannot use nyud.net links knew there was a FAQ with a solution in it. I didn't know what the heck it was until I made a much more determined effort.

That's trolling?

Re:Why was I modded "troll"?

[casualsax3]

Whoever was looking over the comments for this story was in a bad mood - I got a -1 offtopic for mentioning I was browsing Anandtech's forums when all of a sudden they ground to a halt, I came here and discovered the source. Some mod is just being a prick.

Re:Why was I modded "troll"?

[Wolfrider]

The first rule of Coral Cache is, you do not talk about Coral Cache.
The second rule of Coral Cache is, you *DO NOT* talk about Coral Cache. There is no Coral Cache.

There is only zuul.

:b

the xbox360 UK tour

[dave sapien]

Hi guys, i posted this on the last xbox story but just in case you missed it: 'I've just posted my vlog of the glasgow visit of the UK xbox360 tour: http://www.davesapien.com/vlog/xbox360hour.html [davesapien.com] Its abit tenghty but its my first vlog. If your in the UK the tour is still running; here are the dates; 18th-20th November The Light Leeds 25th-28th November Mercer Street Studios WC2 London' Thanks. Dave.

Re:Yawn

[Anonymous Coward]

A PowerPC CPU and a NVIDIA GPU ? Yawn...it's been done before. Wake me up when the revolution is out.

Of course there aren't

[sterno]

With companies packing in a ton of hardware wizzbang, they are selling these devices below cost, planning to make up the difference on licensing. It would be impossible to release an open platform with similar power at a similar price. Furthermore, there's little incentive for commercial developers to develop titles for an open console because of market share issues. Sure they have to pay fees to the manufacturers of the closed system but they just pass that cost on to the customer with little effect on their bottom line.

Re:In Other News

[VeXocide]

I have mirrored the site @ www.stack.nl/~vexocide/xbox360.html, there are no pics there, but working on that

Re:Yawn

[Anonymous Coward]

A custom built CPU with ATI GPU? Yawn.. it's been done before. Wake me up when Infinium Labs Phantom is out.

Re:Yawn

[Anonymous Coward]

The Microsoft Astroturfers are out in force.

What is pathetic and sad about all their efforts is they end up just highlighting just how desperate Microsoft is in trying to salvage something from the 360 fiasco.

This is no moon

[eldimo]

It's a power supply!
Seriously, what was Microsft thinking when they build this thing?

Re:This is no moon

[spy4hire]

I'd have to say Microsoft was very smart in what they did. They took a look at the original XBOX and pulled out the components that were the most prone to failure and made them user servicable. By putting the entire power supply outside, that can easily be replaced by the customer. The hard drive can also be replaced. This will save Microsoft quite a bit of money in having to replace components and allow the console to be used for long periods of time without as many failures as the original XBOX had.

Re:This is no moon

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is everyone bitching so much about the external power supply?

I've always thought that external power supplies would make a lot of more sense for PCs. They are more easy to cool passively (avoiding a noisy fan), the heat they generate doesn't get trapped in the case (reducing the need for case fans), and they take up space under your desk (as opposed to on it).

I think this was a smart move by the designers and anyone who disagrees with me has the right to... lick my sweaty scrotum.

USB?

[vertinox]

Since the Xbox360 has USB ports do you think the FPS games would support a USB keyboard and mouse?

Re:USB?

[tnhtnh]

No - I dont think you'll FPS using a keyboard. I suspect however MS will release a keyboard / mouse along with Windows Media Ed for Xbox 360. Makes sense and fits in MS strategy for unified communication between all devices.

Re:USB?

[spxero]

As this person states, the xbox 360 will be able to handle the devices. Whether the games can hande it (or the system recognize them for game use) is a different story.

I have to admit, this thing seems pretty cool. I've been a PS2 guy since they came out, but the geekability of this system might change things.

less than excited...

[joerdie]

I was more than a little interested in the 360 (i never owned the x-box) until i was talking to a friend at a local best buy who said that they have had two units break. im sure that the customers has something to do with this. these units where also demo units. i am currently thinking that ill wait to see what happens a few months after launch before buying one. sorry to go OT.

Re:less than excited...

[JhohannaVH]

Hey there Joerdie -

This is the exact reason that we are waiting out launch day. I got burned by the bad Thompson DVD drives they used in the Xbox 1, AFTER waiting almost a year. Heh. I'm definitely waiting until they work out the bugs this time. Which is going to be hard after seeing a Quake 4 demo for it last night! *Swooooooooon*

The other reason is that we are going to wait for the patches to be developed for our favorite games that are supported on the 360. Only 2 of them that we have ARE supported. My new XBox isn't even a full year old yet... I can wait a few months!

The other other reason is that Microsoft is going to be ramping up delivery of the boxes, rather than shipping all they have. It may be pretty tough to get one the first few weeks. Give them the time to flush out all the bugs in the process... probably save some money in the process... and you'll be a whole lot happier when you DO buy it. :)

Jho

Congrats to AnandTech

[geomon]

Not an easy disassembly.

The comment early in the article about Microsoft wanting to lock down their console just amazes me. The company has done a good job of placing themselves into an already competative market and securing themselves a place somewhere just ahead of Nintendo. But the idea that they could engineer themselves a completely tight console just shows the trouble they have with their customers. They are not exclusive in their anal-retentiveness, but the position that they have staked out is confusing. They are, after all, the company who gained the most from an open computer architecture.

Despite the fact that the 360 has a robust design and integrated hardware, it is still a PC. The GPU will probably have the greatest impact, but since the technology is shared between Microsoft and ATI, it will be exclusive. The Balkanization of game code will ratchet up one more level with this release.

I hope that the folks who have invested serious cash in game titles for the older console are ready for emulation. Or should I say, I hope the 360 can run them effectively. With a more powerful processor and amped up GPU, that shouldn't be a problem. Alas, things don't always sort themselves out so cleanly.

I personally don't believe that HD gaming is coming in a big way to the game market yet, but it is good to see Microsoft positioning itself to take advantage of the market when it comes. I guess we will have to see how the DVD wars sort themselves out, but having an HD-capable system now means at least on less add-on to convince consumers to buy later.

It would have been nice if Microsoft had provided some path for modification. I know they are not alone in controlling their equipment, but that added 'configurability' may have tipped the scales in Microsoft's favor. I know their are die hard fans of Sony and Nintendo who will never want (or, at least, admit to wanting) to move over to 360, but that nod to the modding community could have been a galvanizing moment for users.

Despite my gripe, it is a nice looking machine. I'd love to load an alternative OS on it.

Re:Congrats to AnandTech

[JhohannaVH]

I personally don't believe that HD gaming is coming in a big way to the game market yet, but it is good to see Microsoft positioning itself to take advantage of the market when it comes. I guess we will have to see how the DVD wars sort themselves out, but having an HD-capable system now means at least on less add-on to convince consumers to buy later.

I don't know man... have you tried gaming in true high-definition? That was the whole reason I plunked down the money for an HD box, was so that I could better play games (I have eyesight issues). Not to mention, it's great for football. The first time I got my Xbox hooked up and popped in a true HD Game - MechAssault, Unreal Championship, Pariah, Metal Arms, all of these are in 1080i resolution - I about shat myself. And I've been gaming since I was 7 - Pong was my best friend! :P

Nothing could ever have prepared me for those first fire fights. High-Def gives you an extreme advantage over your non-HD players, because you can see things well enough to dodge, take out, hide, whatever. I can manipulate my characters between hails of machine gun fire and stay alive, and sneak up and kill the bastard, because I could see his muzzle flash. You can see the bits of metal and parts that go flying when you blow up your opponent/atmosphere, whatever. The Xbox graphics look good, but they are uncompared when viewed in 1080i. I think that's one of the reasons that Unreal remains a staple in our home, because it looks awesome, responds well, and has such great HD support. I don't know if this is true of all High-definition games. That's generally all we buy... it's gotta have 1080i support (at LEAST 720p), multi-player, and playable against each other.

I don't think HD gaming has taken off as well yet, because the Xbox has been the only supporter. Competition will be good in this arena! As for adding it on as an additional support mechanism.... I'm fairly sure it's part of the GPU that enables it, so it probably couldn't be an add-on.... just something that was either enabled or disabled. But I don't know.... With $500.00 Plasma HD TVs on the market this fall, this is poised to jump through the ceiling.

Jho

Re:Congrats to AnandTech

[geomon]

I don't know man... have you tried gaming in true high-definition?

No, can't say as I have. But my point was that the market for HD capable systems is small at the present time.

With $500.00 Plasma HD TVs on the market this fall, this is poised to jump through the ceiling.

Well then I hope Microsoft all the best. The add-on I was speaking of is cabling. From what the article says:

There is no out of box DVI or HDMI support, nor is there any Microsoft support for either of those video interface standards at this time, although Microsoft has indicated that they may offer HDMI support when it makes sense to. There is, however, an optical output, but the cable is not included.

If you don't have a HDTV but you have a VGA monitor that you'd like to use, Microsoft does offer a VGA cable that will allow you to connect your Xbox 360 to a VGA monitor. If you don't have a HDTV or a monitor but still want a higher quality output, Microsoft also offers a S-Video AV cable.

So are there cabling add-ons that are required to drive HD gaming? The way I read this passage, the only thing 360 supports "out of the box" is NTSC.

Re:Congrats to AnandTech

[JhohannaVH]

Well then I hope Microsoft all the best. The add-on I was speaking of is cabling.

That'll teach me to RTFA, except I already have all this in last months' EGM. :P Um.... yeah, this is probably a true statement. The original XBox didn't offer it either. At first, I got extra cables from my Cable company to hook in the HD XBox.... but they weren't performing very well, so I did switch up to the Monster HD cables for it, which were like $40. I think that the reason that they don't provide this is because it would be prohibitively expensive just to add the HD cables. I had to hunt all over town to find them under $75. Most places charge an even $100 bucks for a set of High-def cables. This is a known issue with HDTVs, but they don't provide them with the purchase of the tele, either. So, it's basically been accepted that, like with stereo equipment, you gotta choose your own cables.

This is a good thing too, because there are ranges that you can choose from.... size, strength, combinations, etc. To include or not to include SVideo or fiber audio.... etc. It's just too hard to include the right cables for each individual set up. Though... I really wish they would make that clearer. :) We were lucky... even though I went in at opening on the day after Thanksgiving two years ago to plunk down my $1000 for a 52" HDTV... the salesperson took their time with me and explained *everything* that I needed to do. At Best Buy no less. They even set up our cable install right in the store. And they told us right then that cables were going to be our biggest expenditure. But Cox has been very generous and helped us get everything set up. :)

Jho

Re:Congrats to AnandTech

[geomon]

So, it's basically been accepted that, like with stereo equipment, you gotta choose your own cables.

This doesn't sound like too great an impediment for the die-hard gamer. After all, it didn't stop you (of course you have had excellent service from your providers - that helps).

Crap.... Now my son is going to want a HDTV in addition to the 360 for Christmas.

I guess he will just have to work harder raking gravel for that after-Christmas add-on. ;)

Re:Congrats to AnandTech

[JhohannaVH]

Crap.... Now my son is going to want a HDTV in addition to the 360 for Christmas.

*GIGGLE* Gawd, I remember those days. Now it's work work work work 60 hours a week for 3 months to save. :) Things never do really change, do they?

I must admit that we do have great service from Cox. I hear it's one of the few places that does have really good support and service from them.... everywhere else I hear, it just blows. But they've done all kinds of stuff for me, including re-running all of my cable because it was so old, it wouldn't support the load I draw into my house. :P And I'm calling to bump up my bandwidth speeds!

For your son's gaming TV... I did see 27" plasma HD monitors for sale for $500.00. I think this was at Costco, actually. But I know they are coming down through the floor, and quick. I'm starting to save for our replacement, because mine is 2 years old, and it's burned in. (it's rear projection) We watch so much news, it's got the MSNBC logo burned in. I really want to get a DLP monitor, and I don't want it to be plasma, either. :) Give me the behemoths please!

Jho

Re:Congrats to AnandTech

[tepples]

To include or not to include SVideo or fiber audio.... etc. It's just too hard to include the right cables for each individual set up.

Why not include a voucher for free cables with the console?

Re:Congrats to AnandTech

[JhohannaVH]

Why not include a voucher for free cables with the console?

That's not a bad idea... but again, that drives up your production costs. Most cables start at $50. And if you don't know who does and who doesn't have HD capability, you wouldn't want to provide that if your users don't need it... at that price anyways. :)

Jho

Re:Congrats to AnandTech

[tepples]

And if you don't know who does and who doesn't have HD capability, you wouldn't want to provide that if your users don't need it

Almost every early-adopter household has a VGA compatible monitor capable of doing 720p, even if only in 4:3 ratio. In my case, it's called an LG LCD panel.

Re:Congrats to AnandTech

[Ziviyr]

I know their are die hard fans of Sony and Nintendo who will never want (or, at least, admit to wanting) to move over to 360

I'm not die hard about Nintendo, I just abhor the chronic disregardfulness of Microsoft and the "consumer are cattle" vibe dripping off of Sony.

I'm simply choosing not to feed the monsters.

Fancy graphics have become easy to achieve as of last generation, if anyone can fail hard enough to disappoint in this next round, then they wern't really trying at all.

Xbox360 hardware disassemblered...

[snowman75]

This guy got his Xbox360 Delivered days ago on Monday, and started taking picsures and taking things apart.... check it out: http://softlife.blogspot.com/ He's also listed some usefull info about the new TSOP that MS is using to store the software. snow

MS Owns the IP because their name is on the chips?

[nigel_q]

Why is it that Anand thinks that the 'Soft owns the intellectual property to all the chips, just because their name is on them? Companies implement a product to a specification for a customer, that specification might include chip package branding. It doesn't follow that the customer owns the intellectual property or even knows what is inside! Just look at any outsourced piece of software!

Re:MS Owns the IP because their name is on the chi

[snowman75]

Because MS DOES own the rights to most of the chips. That is a fact that has been published. Do you bother doing any reading besides what is posted on Slashdot?

Right, and Wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

Games cannot be certified by Microsoft if they use Mouse/Keyboard for game control. They are supposedly supported (barely) for Chat.

They will not be porting Media Center edition to the XBox 360, since it already functions as a Media Center Extender to your already existing Media Center PC, and with only a 20GB Optional Harddrive, and no TV Tuner, it doesn't do the important parts of Media Center Edition.

Microsoft's Media Hub Strategy is for a Media Center PC hooked up in the living room to do the recording of television shows, playing media, and storing photos, music and movies, with your XBox 360 plugged into the TV in the rec room or bedrooms, streaming any of the content from the Media Center PC. They don't want the XBox as the hub, because it lacks storage and media input capabilities, and would be hellacious trying to play a game while the machine was recording your TV Shows.

You left one out.

[earnest murderer]

Your old XBox games will run in HD. Not just stretched, but render at 720p and 1080i. That alone makes an early purchase for myself a given.

Re:You left one out.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, so you get the option of:

1) Orignal resolution with jaggies

or

2) Higher rez with blurred out textures and smaller jaggies

And no, it ain't HD. HD is 1080p.

Re:You left one out.

[wolrahnaes]

No, HD is 720p. 1080i is just wierd, and 1080p, while supported by a few large-screen displays, is still the realm of PC monitors for the most part.

Re:You left one out.

[NeMon'ess]

Ya know how rendering at higher res makes things in the distance easier to see because they're made of more pixels? Yeah, that's why it's cool to render xbox games at 720, because there's 50% more lines of detail. Meaning those blurred textures only look like that up close, but farther away in the scene they look good, while on the original xbox they'd be losing detail at that point.

Re:Yawn

[Chubby_C]

Who are you? Rip Van Winkle?

looking for a 40 year nap?

more images

[coredump-0x00001]

are available here

DRM and Palladium

[Anonymous Coward]

I imagine MSFT owns the rights to all the hardware so they can make whatever changes they need to, without anyone else's consent, to thwart the modders. Fritz Chips or DVD-ROM drive encryption decoding. It took a small act of God (meaning a chair-threat from Ballmer) to move from v1.03 to 1.03 on the original Xbox. Now it's just going to take a campus guy trolling Slashdot, and seeing the new mod chip available.

At some point, I would imagine they're planning on making an internet connection mandatory to play new games. All the "old" ones will play ok, but if you want anything new, you'll have to phone home.

Their strategy is probably:

1. Dominate the market.
2. Have a few large-budget games held in reserve. Stuff where you dog-fight actual model airplanes from remote, and the company films the whole thing.
3. Introduce a Fritz Chip and Phone-Home requirement.
4. Release large-budget games.
5. Profit!
6. Buy out Sony's American division.
7. Buy out Orin Hatch.
8. Purchase the continent of Europe.
9. Profit some more!

After 90 days, who cares about warranty.

[Lectoid]

I am guessing that, like most electronics, the warranty for this console is only 90 days. After that, what's it matter if you rip the stickers off.

Re:After 90 days, who cares about warranty.

[thesman]

We have 2 years warranty in Portugal.

Can't say about the rest of europe, but my guess is 1 year minimum.

What's Next?!

[KrackHouse]

Jeeeze that's a big power supply. I can see it now... the next Xbox will be a white external DVD drive connected to a 3x3' cabinet equipped with a diesel generator and painted black to make it seem inconspicuous. This is really not a big deal but I imagine it's going to be expensive if they have to do another power supply recall.

So what are we up to?

[Associate]

Two 360 articles a day? Is there not enough real Nerd News being submitted?

Swift to Recover?

[Anonymous Coward]

From the article:

Microsoft has shown the world that it's very swift when it comes to recovering from errors that it has made.[sic]

1 word: MAME

[teknickle]

MAME is open, and there _are_ opensauce and free games (like some that were built to load into ROMs or through MAME emu, SNES emulators, 2600 emu, etc). ;)

360 CPU Design

[Anonymous Coward]

"The 360 hardware clearly is the product of a lack of experience and time.

About the only Microsoft managed to do right with the 360 hardware was dump the x86 CPUs for the vastly more powerful PPC chips. However, unlike the new Cell chips and Nintendo's Revolution PPC chip, IBM clearly just didn't give a shit about the 360 cpu.

Bolting on a third core just isn't the work of a company serious about performance. Microsoft was clearly impressed with the sound of a triple core chip, but obviously had no idea that its real world performance would be vastly lower than the raw specs on paper. Somewhat understandable since really no one at Microsoft has any practical knowledge in chip design.

Everything on modern cpus is cache. Nothing runs fast until you have your working set of data in your local cache. The 360 is like a textbook example of how to not to design a modern cpu. You will hear more and more from developers in one way or another talking about the 360 and 'bottlenecks' or some other way of describing the poor memory system of the 360 cpu. For any developer who wants to get performance anywhere above today's current desktop cpus it is a nightmare of having to carefully managed multiple threads so their data access patterns don't clobber each other's working sets of data. Nothing but pity for someone having to do that everyday at work.

Ignoring the graphics side of things in the 360, this is one of the major reasons why the 360 games looks so underwhelming and not any different that current gen pc games. The system is very much a one step forward one step back piece of technology.

And if you think that sounds bad, we haven't even got to the too small amount of EDRAM on the graphics side of system and why all 360 games have horrendous jaggies all over the screen..."

I think it is too early to pass such a harsh judgement on the design of the 360 hardware. I agree there are some very poor choices that I certainly would never make if I was laying out the chip design. But realistically I don't think Microsoft really had any other choices.

Intel and AMD really have nothing competitive with PPC. Maybe four or five years down the line they might. But right now they aren't relevant in terms of performance.

Microsoft clearly had no access to Cell technology. Sony and Toshiba clearly have no desire to bail Microsoft out for their complete lack of hardware design experience.

Any of the other bit players in the chip market just aren't realistic options.

Adding a third core seems quite reasonable given the limited number of options Microsoft had. Will the 360 CPU get destroyed by the Broadband Engine? Yes. It really isn't close in either theoretical power or real world power across the board - scalar,floating point, or just memory/bandwith.

Getting the 360 out the door as quickly as possible will somewhat help with the huge performance difference between the PS3 and 360. I think the real problem for Microsoft is that the Revolution CPU is going to be significantly more powerful than the 360, but still not up in Broadband Engine range. To have your system be beaten out in power by a company who has already made it clear that they don't even care that much about raw performance is going to be bad news for the 360 this time next year.

Re:360 CPU Design

[aduzik]

Something that troubles me about the Xbox 360 CPU is that it doesn't provide out of order execution. While the value of OOE varies depending on a number of factors including the type of program running and the quality of the compiler used, it seems that it would be better to scale back the number of cores and include OOE. Presently, most games don't execute more than one or two threads. As the article says, any additional threads generally do "housekeeping" type tasks, like caching additional game data. The system certainly doesn't need the ability to run four more high performance threads to do that; a couple of extra threads and a good scheduling algorithm would be more than enough, I'd think. Plus, I don't know much about the internals of the particular PowerPC processor they're using, but if the pipeline is very long at all, I think you're going to see reduced performance due to pipeline bubbles.

Another thing that I thought was really strange is that the north bridge is integrated into the GPU. That just seems like such a weird place to put it. My best guess for this is that since the GPU/north bridge will have direct access to the system's main memory it will be able to use that memory in lieu of a larger memory dedicated to the GPU. I think they would have been much better off, at least in terms of performance but probably not price, if they'd integrated an on-die memory controller in the CPU (like the IBM/Apple PowerPC G5 does) and given the GPU a nice healthy dedicated memory.

Now, of course, you have to take all of this with a grain of salt; I've never designed a game console before, and I have no idea what kind of costs these things would incur -- probably not inconsequential. But I do think that Microsoft made some very bizarre design choices for the Xbox 360 that may negatively impact performance down the road. From what I've read, both the Playstation 3 and Nintendo Revolution seem to have somewhat more sensible designs. But Microsoft does deserve props for ridding themselves of the x86 architecture.

Re:360 CPU Design

[griffster]

An Xbox 360 essentially has 4 cores which need access to memory (3 cpu cores and one GPU) - that setup is no accident since it lends itself very nicely to a 4 way "crossbar" type memory controller.
The 360's GPU needs high memory bandwidth and low *latency* access in order to reach its full potential (typical high-end PC cards have over twice the memory bandwidth in comparison to the 360's GPU) - the 10meg of embedded dram and 20gig/s DDR3 accessed through an onboard memory controller make for a well balanced system ... (IMO)

Number Cruncher

[jimktrains]

Is it just me or does the XBox 360 (and ps2 and xbox...) look like a cheap, fast number cruncher? TFA said soemhting about not executing conditionals well, for numbers there are few conditionals, that's 6 threads oif numbers plus the very good matrix processing at the GPU...

Hell, I don't game but if I would buy an XBox 360 jsut as a math coprocessor:-p

Mod up

[bogie]

While I was slightly hesitant to open that link (any link by a uid above 900000 gives me pause) the page loads quickly and you can actually see closeups of the inside of the Xbox 360.

Unlike the Anand article there isn't really much useful writeup information but its still interesting.

Now. When does Xbox 1 drop to $99?

Disassembled? Good.

[Trogre]

Now, for the love of God, don't put it back together!

But...

[Trogre]

... what we really want to know on /. is:
How does Linux run on it?

I'm still holding out for the PS3

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Retail availability? Originality?

[tepples]

[GP2X] launched earlier this month, I believe

Where can I pick up a GP32 in Fort Wayne, Indiana, if I don't have a credit card or debit card? A lot of the target market for handhelds is in the same situation: children of parents who are afraid to buy something online.

with no commercial games, but apparently has a pretty strong homebrew scene.

Isn't most console homebrew (full disclosure: including my own projects) just clones of commercial games and emulators that primarily play questionably legal copies of games for other platforms?

MAME has only three games

[tepples]

MAME is open

In this case, MAME counts as only three games, and their names are Gridlee, Robby Roto, and Poly-Play (which is the closest thing to DDR that you'll ever get on MAME). NES emulators count as one game: Elite, which is the only NES compatible commercial game to have been released as freeware. The rest is homebrew, and most of the files on PDROMS.de are tech demos, not full games. Which other notable freeware games were you talking about for any widely emulated platform?

Re:MAME has only three games

[teknickle]

No..MAME doesn't have only 3 games.
(and I am not talking about the 1,600+ illegal ROM images for MAME out there).

Mostly it is the home brew stuff**. Yeah, I know it does not rivel the latest consoles..but the number of available games WASN'T the point of the post I directly responded to. The point is that there ARE opensource alternatives. If quantity of games counts, then that means that SNES or PS1 are the best consoles on the market.

  **(Homebrew admittedly are often times rehashes of other games---but then again, Ms PacMan was an illegal hack of PacMan by GCC programmers that then ended up getting signed over to Namco).

Games for Windows exist.

[tepples]

Furthermore, there's little incentive for commercial developers to develop titles for an open console because of market share issues.

Doesn't stop companies from developing and publishing games for Windows OS, even though the Windows environment has the additional handicap of highly variable hardware capabilities and interactions.

Finishing games?

[tepples]

I'm finding it hard to believe you've finished all the games you own on your current system

I own a copy of In The Groove, a rhythm game for Sony PlayStation 2 computer entertainment system. I don't think I'll "finish" it within my lifetime, as the final level ("Pandemonium" expert) is essentially a two-minute run of taking 11 steps per second, and some claim that the second-last level ("Euphoria" expert) is even trickier, involving complex rhythms and turning patterns. Say I try the level three times a day for over 6 months and still can't beat it. If I go 0 for 573* on a given level in a given game, should that prevent me from ever buying another video game again?

Prudence would dictate that you take the time to expierience the top quality titles of the current generation, before moving onto the next.

Until the top quality titles of the current generation become next to impossible to find. For instance, Rez for PS2 costs 100 USD for just a used disc, without a manual, box, or rumble accessory.

* People who have played the predecessors to In The Groove should recognize the significance of the number 573.

Even in the face of Revolution exclusives?

[tepples]

Games cannot be certified by Microsoft if they use Mouse/Keyboard for game control.

Microsoft will probably change this policy as developers discover good ways to use the Revolution controller and the number of Revolution exclusive titles grows.

Huh?

[sterno]

There are millions of Windows desktops. Why woudn't they develop for them? Furthermore some types of games naturally play better on a desktop. FPS games have never translated well to a console because a mouse and keyboard is a far better mechanism to control them. Even if you can hook up those peripherals you run into the minor issue of how to sit in a way that you can use them for an extended period of time in your living room.

Re:Huh?

[tricorn]

After Apple introduced the world to the mouse, PC gamers claimed it would never catch on because a mouse was so much more difficult to use than a joystick when playing games. Trackballs were "ok" for some games (or brilliant in some, see Missile Command), but the mouse was doomed to failure.

Games work best using the controls that they were designed for, and using the controls that you're most used to. A force-feedback control stick is quite clearly superior for flying, for instance, leaving the mouse free to click or drag controls. A keyboard or a control pad with lots of buttons are equivalent, assuming a good variety of button layouts. There's nothing natural or obvious about several rows of parallel buttons, or limiting yourself to two or three controls on your pointing device. Being able to use both hands at once, along with adding in foot controls (with two degrees of freedom for each foot) gives the most flexibility, of course. It would be interesting to add in a real 6-degrees-of-freedom hand control, and even more interesting to see whether having two of them with a few buttons for each hand is better than one control with the other hand having a pad of buttons.

But claiming that PCs are better than consoles because they have mice is foolish (especially since consoles can now have mice and keyboards).

Star Ocean: Till the End of Time...

[7Prime]

Well, currently I'm trying my hand at Star Ocean: Till the End of Time, which is a sort of an action RPG, and it's really giving my ass a pounding. It's been a long time since I died in a game, as well, and even longer since I died in a dungeon (with RPGs/Adventures/FPSs these days, dungeons seem to be mostly just time consuming obsticles which don't really pose any real threat). It's not a perfect game, the storyline is not for everyone (kinda "meh", IMO), but it has it's charm, and the gameplay is very engaging and difficult. Probably the hardest RPG I've played since FFIV (hard type). From what I've read online, it's been giving pretty much everyone a thrashing. And it's not a game you can rape by munchkining; leveling does practically nothing, you have to rely on your own skill to progress through it. Very satisfying.

PS3 vs. XBox360—running OS X

[7Prime]

Let them duke it out Mortal Kombat style! Which one will rip out the other's cpu and smash it in their disc drive?

Seriously, let's give the ESRB some REAL console violence!

It's okay to like good products

[ImaLamer]

You are exactly right. The plans for a bridge are open to review where the plans to a bank's vault lock may not be. Even the biggest zealots don't want everything to be open. We expect important or public projects to be open to review - if you said the bridge just won't fall, forgive us if we don't take your word for it.

The Xbox certainly isn't a bridge. It's a consumer device for playing games, for Microsoft (Sony, Nintendo and once upon a time Sega) it's nothing more than a revenue stream. We aren't talking mission critical devices. If you want the plans to the Xbox to modify it be my guest, but don't cry because they made it hard for you.

With proprietary and open solutions you've got two choices, take it or leave it. I'm thinking about buying an Xbox, but I'm not rushing out to get a copy of Windows with it.

HD cables are standard on $399 system

[Namarrgon]

So are there cabling add-ons that are required to drive HD gaming? The way I read this passage, the only thing 360 supports "out of the box" is NTSC.

360 comes with component cables designed for HD, out of the box. 360 Core only comes with NTSC-capable composite; you have to pay extra for HD output. S-Video & VGA cables are also available for both.

At least this time all the cables support optical Dolby 5.1 out.

Replace the mouse with...

[tepples]

There are millions of Windows desktops. Why woudn't they develop for them?

There are millions of PS1 consoles in existence, but nobody seems to develop even casual games for PS1 anymore.

FPS games have never translated well to a console because a mouse and keyboard is a far better mechanism to control them ... you run into the minor issue of how to sit

What about a trackball and keypad (as seen on the arcade version of Quake )? What about a touchpad and keypad (as seen on Metroid Prime Hunters and its prequel)?

Re:Replace the mouse with...

[sterno]

There are millions of PS1 consoles in existence, but nobody seems to develop even casual games for PS1 anymore.

In existence... Connected to a TV and actively used though, not many. Ultimately the people who routinely buy games have long upgraded to a PS/2 or XBox.

What about a trackball and keypad (as seen on the arcade version of Quake )? What about a touchpad and keypad (as seen on Metroid Prime Hunters and its prequel)?

Trackball is a good theory, but keep in mind that the physical setup you have to have. Where are you going to put a track ball such that it's comfortable to use while sitting on your couch? Also I don't think you get quite the precision movement out of a trackball that you get out of a mouse.

As for a touchpad I don't think that'd be much better. I used to use one a while back but it never worked quite as well as a mouse and it was just plain awful for gaming.

Re:Replace the mouse with...

[tepples]

In existence... Connected to a TV and actively used though, not many. Ultimately the people who routinely buy games have long upgraded to a PS/2 or XBox.

Then why can't a PS1 game be made to reach both those who have a PS2 and those who still have a PS1? Or do you think the upgrade treadmill is a good thing?

Where are you going to put a track ball such that it's comfortable to use while sitting on your couch?

Grab a Dual Shock controller, an Xbox controller S, or a GameCube controller. Remove four buttons where one is X. Place a trackball there. Then use the left analog stick for moving.

Also I don't think you get quite the precision movement out of a trackball that you get out of a mouse.

Some people who swear by a trackball claim that switching from a mouse to a trackball is a matter of practicing, just as it took Goldeneye veterans a while to learn to play PC shooters.

As for a touchpad I don't think that'd be much better.

A properly calibrated touchpad (that is, one that uses a customized acceleration curve instead of the default curve built into most laptop touchpads) is probably a lot better for shooters than an analog stick, and it even fits inside a handheld game system such as Palm or Nintendo DS.

Or get a Revolution controller and just point and shoot.

None of those games are HiDef

[Namarrgon]

Not one. They don't even support 720p, let alone 1080i. Unless you consider 480p to be a HiDef format.

Look here. And here. There are only five 1080i games released for the Xbox, and all of them are simplistic.

What you're seeing is simply 480p upscaled. A little better than NTSC, agreed, but a far cry from "true high-definition". The extra detail you're seeing is likely just the larger screen making it easier on your eyes.

In the future...

[aurifex]

The Xbox 1080 will feature a robust GPU capable of pumping out 6 petabyes per second, and will require roughly three and half fusion reactors to power it.

Wrong Title

[svvampy]

Should be '..Dissembled and Analyzed'.

Georgie Dubya makes kinda the same mistake.

Re:Wrong Title

[Anonymous Coward]

Should be '..Dissembled and Analyzed'.

No it shouldn't...

Homebrew on MAME?

[tepples]

No..MAME doesn't have only 3 games ... Mostly it is the home brew stuff**.

How, specifically, would I go about developing or even just using a homebrew ROM with a compiled copy of MAME? Doesn't MAME recognize games by their hashes? Would I need to get my game added into MAME's official list for it to become usable by people who don't know how to work a compiler?

Or were you talking about console homebrew?

Here's a link to that actual page from 2001

[Anonymous Coward]

Hardware Behind the Consoles - Part I: Microsoft's Xbox (Page 2)

It was a Celeron with 128KB of L2, on a 133Mhz FSB (retail Celerons at the time were on a 66Mhz FSB, the 133Mhz bus being reserved for P3's)

Coppermine P3's had 256KB of L2

You made the "most correct" comment in this thread of grossly incorrect comments. The only part you left out was that the XBox Coppermine's L2 cache was 8-way set associative (like the P3), not 4-way like the retail Celerons at the time. Anandtech estimated that this 8-way set associativity gave an additional 10% performance over the 4-way.

In summary:

• Coppermine-based Pentium III: 133MHz bus, 256K L2 cache (8-way set associative)
• Coppermine-based Celeron: 66MHz bus, 128K L2 cache (4-way set associative)
• Coppermine-based XBox CPU: 133MHz bus, 128K L2 cache (8-way set associative)

The original comment in this tread (modded 5) incorrectly claimed the CPU displayed the word "Celeron" was displayed on top of the processor. That AC is dumb. The ones that modded hir up are uninformed.

Re:Yawn

[PhoenixOne]

If our legal systems worked, the Infinium Labs owners would be out in 5 to 10 years.

Mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is this on 0? Its probably the most insightful comment posted!

Be careful of the PS3 it might just attack you

[cheesemp]

I was looking forward to the PS3 but after the rootkit on audio cd's I'm kinda expecting the ps3 to bite my arm off if I put a CD-R in the drive so I think I'll be ignoring the PS3 now.

Re:In Other News

[VeXocide]

Now fully mirrored:
http://www.stack.nl/~vexocide/xbox360.html
Incl. all the pics

Wait!

[hplasm]

I'm waiting for Bunnies' report on the hardware ;)

God Damn!

[thelonestranger]

Jesus monkey humping christ! Look at the size of that power supply, Its nearly as big as the original Xbox. Thats the real reason for the X360 shortage, Microsoft were worried that to many of these things being plugged in at once would shut down the national power grid.

no insult intended

[TubeSteak]

I didn't mean to insult you, I just hadn't seen that before & when I googled for it, I came up with the CoralCDN FAQ.

I guess if I had actually read the faq, instead of just seeing "http.l2.l1.l0.nyucd.net" and moving along, my comment wouldn't have been as ignorant. /Just as an FYI, a search for 'Coral Cache' takes you straight to www.coralcdn.org so its understandable.

yea

[TubeSteak]

I didn't read the FAQ closely, I just eyeballed it and moved along.

In his defense, doing the dns lookup is something of a geeky way to find an answer.

Ok, so I took the box apart

[d1rty_d0gg_]

what the %@#$! where's the directions for putting it back together??

copy protection BS

[Anonymous Coward]

if you're gonna buy one of these things, pick up a gp32, *NOT* the gp2x, as it has some bullshit copy protection scheme attatched to it.