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How The 360 Works

Posted by Zonk on from the whiirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr dept.

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."

2 of 40 comments (clear)

  1. sigh, what is this, TV ? by DrSkwid · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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
  2. Worthless site by scot4875 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    After reading the how the XBox 360 works, I checked out a couple other systems.

    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 .999 teraflops?

    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