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How The 360 Works
The always informative How Stuff Works site has an article today entitled How the Xbox 360 Works. From the piece: "The other interesting thing to note about the Xbox 360 CPU is that each core is capable of processing two threads simultaneously. Think of a thread as a set of instructions for a program's job. The core processes these instructions and does the heavy lifting to get the job done. A conventional processor is traditionally capable of running a single execution thread. Because the Xbox 360 cores can each handle two threads at a time, the 360 CPU is the equivalent of having six conventional processors in one machine."
"Because the Xbox 360 cores can each handle two threads at a time, the 360 CPU is the equivalent of having six conventional processors in one machine."
No it isn't.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
After reading the how the XBox 360 works, I checked out a couple other systems.
.999 teraflops?
None of them had any details about how any of the systems actually worked; it was just a list of marketing bullet-points and features published by the manufacturers.
How does knowing the system's launch lineup help me know how it works, anyway?
As for things that were flat out wrong about the 360...
9 billion dot products per second? Are they claiming that each core can compute a dot product at nearly every cycle? And if so, how is that number helpful? You still have a ton of other stuff to do in a game engine besides just computing dot products.
1 teraflop? Each thread on each core can calculate 166 billion FLOPS? Oh wait, you mean that you're also counting GPU performance in that number, which accounts for probably
500 million triangles per second... With how many textures applied? How many light sources? Oh, zero textures, using flat shading, with no light sources? And all 500 million triangles are part of a single triangle strip and are each 1 pixel in size? And that's just the theoretical maximum anyway?
What a worthless site. I feel dumber for having read it.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
It's like a reflex action to bash Microsoft here. First off, quality is always shaky on the first batch of any gaming console. It's a business where the hardware launches are historically tight. The only company that releases solid, well built, well tested consoles at launch is Nintendo, and look where their share of the market has gone. Second, based on everything I've read about the XBOX 360 it has a solid, almost textbook design, for the best technology of the next 5 years (multi core processor, unified pipeline shader/vertex on the graphics card, etc). I see alot more to question about the PS3's cell (limitations of SPE's etc) & the late addition of NVidia, since Sony only pulled them into the PS3 when they realized the Cell wouldn't be able to do the GPU work. Need I remind everyone that you are bashing a 3-GHZ G5 w/ 3 Core's paired with ATI's finest and all for $400? Yes, the marketing BS is just that, but if this was anyone else's product it would get treated alot better.
Its news for nerds, but nerds come in all shapes, sizes, and types.... There are you videogame nerds... Your computer nerds... Your astology nerds... Your biology nerds... there are all kindsa nerds, remember that.
Yay, I have a sig.