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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."
Actually, no.
A big cache is good when you are dealing with programs that could access ANY data at ANY time (or you're running multiple programs). With games, that doesn't really happen. Game code is sort of "linear", and you're only running one at a time.. So the cache can be filled with what needs to be there, and nothing else.
Anyone who thinks it crashes regularly or that more than 1% of units are overheating is simply a moron. A lot of people here seem to have a fixated fantasy that they are so desperate to believe that they ignore the facts. The fantasy basically consists of that MS has rolled out an overheating worthless machine that when not overheating 95% of the time is crashing. Get real, I'd imagine the failure rates for units are about the same for any piece of consumer electronics.
You forgot the most interesting option...
- The Nintendo Revolution
I don't want to sound like too much of a fanboy, but what can these consoles really give me that my PC can't? I'd rather have a console thats sole focus isn't trying to outpace my PC in terms of graphics... but to push the limits with new controllers, unique games and not costing me my 1st born child or my left arm to acquire.