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."

Comments

Re:Flaimbait

[delicious]

"Flame"bait eh? Reminds me of a few houses victim to the xbox 1 ;)

Oooh, shiny!

[zeitgeist_chaser]

So, the XBox 360 has 3 hyper-threaded, in-order-execution cores to run games which are primarily single-threaded and would benefit greatly from out-of-order execution. It's almost as if the hardware designers asked themselves, "how can we screw the game developers?"

For all the Sony fanboys out there, the PS3 hardware is just as bad, maybe worse.