Slashdot Mirror
Under the Hood of the Xbox 360
An anonymous reader writes "IBM DeveloperWorks is running a behind the design story for the making of the Xbox 360. The 360 has but a single chip with 165 million transistors for it's CPU " From the article: "This chip is in fact a three-way symmetric multiprocessor design. The three PowerPC cores are identical, except that they are physically reflected through the X and Y axis. Each of the CPU cores is a specialized PowerPC chip with a VMX128 extension related to (and partially compatible with) the VMX instructions in the G4 and G5 CPUs. The three CPU cores share a 1MB Level2 cache. Each processor has 32KB each of data and instruction Level1 cache. The chip's front-side bus/physical interface has a 21.6GB/second bandwidth, and runs at 5.4GHz."
With all the power they could have come up with a nicer crash screen :)
Visit my site @ http://www.madtorrent.com
Yes, I'd prefer this be filtered through at least a couple of blogs.
A year ago this article would have been fascinating. Now it hardly seems to contribute anything new -- unless you've been sleeping for a year.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The PlayStation 3 will be made by Sony, a company which distributes software that renders a personal computer quite unstable and open to attack by malfeasant users from across the Internet.
The Xbox 360, on the other hand, is made by Microsoft.
The choice is yours.
For more information, click here.
My George Foreman grill gave out the other night, so I popped out the 360 so I could fry up an egg! So, I guess the tri-core PPC would explain why it cooked so fast. :D
A beowulf Heater of these... :)
so wait... we've got a Microsoft operating system (whatever the Xbox 360 OS is) running on what is commonly considered Apple-type processors *and* we'll soon have an Apple OS running on top of what is commonly considered Microsoft-type processors?
What's next, dogs and cats living together?
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
Must be this "reversible computing" I keep hearing about...
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
Little endian, or Big endian?
Long answer; yes with an if...
Not true. The little shield means Windows is protected. Mine is green. I bet yours is yellow or red.
For more information, click here.
Where's the mod DUMBASS option when you need it?
"The choice is yours."
Nintendo, I choose you!
</pokemon reference>
Am I open minded towards open source, or closed minded towards closed source?
Yes, it's good to [instruction cache miss...] step through [instruction cache miss...] every part of [instruction cache miss...] your code [instruction cache miss...] on every timestep. [instruction cache miss...] you'd never [instruction cache miss...] want to have [instruction cache miss...] different logi[instruction cache miss...]c in different [instruction cache miss...] instruction caches [instruction cache miss...], nor would you [instruction cache miss...] want different tasks [instruction cache miss...] to have different timestep [instruction cache miss...] granularity.
Because nothing quite compares to playing Nethack in High Definition.