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Xbox 360 Hardware Disassembled and Analyzed

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the right-down-to-it's-creamy-caramel-center dept.

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."

4 of 285 comments (clear)

  1. Re:It's just cool by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    You sound JUST like a grass roots marketer!

  2. Re:It's just cool by Junior+J.+Junior+III · · Score: 0, Troll

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

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    You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
  3. Re:It's just cool by |/|/||| · · Score: 0, Troll
    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.

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    [javac] 100 errors
  4. Understanding Why The 360 Performs So Poorly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    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...