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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."
Apparently its rather empty under this hood.
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
With all the power they could have come up with a nicer crash screen :)
Visit my site @ http://www.madtorrent.com
Hrm... I thought this title was held for the Phantom Console and Nuke Dukem Forever?
abc
I guess I just dont see anything too interesting about the design of the 360. Its a bunch of off the shelf parts put into a box.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
What is up with all the posts that link to IBM.com?
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
does it run Linux???
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
I haven't been doing microelectronics since my university days (over 10 years ago) and the block named "testing/debug" intrigued me quite a bit: exactly what test/debug functions do you put on CPUs nowadays? do they contain burned in test cases? some sort of programmable logic to get access to internal CPU states? I'd definitely be interested in learning more about this.
-- the cake is a lie
I thought Power PC was the mac? Why did Microsoft pick apple CPU's for their Xbox? Is Intel falling out of favor?
Now, if MS is running linux in their new game machine, that will be news. It reminds me of when Windows NT was being sold as the OS for buisness, but a story leaded that Microsoft used Unix for their servers.
Too bad it has problem playing older game.
The Revolution might be less powerfull than that, but being able to play older game will be much more cooler
I didn't found something funny to put here.
What's the deal with the tiny cache? My ten year old HyperSparc has more cache than that... You'd think that when dealing with high throughput graphics applications, a larger cache would make far more of a difference than a few hundred MHz either way.
So let me get this straight: MS is using the Mac processors in their console? I wonder how sweetly it would run Mac OS X...
Where's the 3 core Mac G5 at that speed holy sizzle!
Are there any reasons to get an Xbox 360 over PS3? Seriously. Are there any reasons to get an Xbox 360 over the original Xbox aside from graphical performance?
The answer to both questions is "no".
PS3 will have better graphical performance, up to 2x. High definition. Blu-ray. Up to 7 wireless controllers - those actually mean something. Xbox 360, will just have improved graphics over the original Xbox.
From Top 10 Reasons to Buy an Xbox 360: (ign.com)
10. First-Party Exclusive Games
9. Wireless Controllers
8. The Xbox 360 Launch Lineup
7. Backward Compatibility
6. Xbox Live Arcade
5. Impressive Graphic Power at Good Prices
4. Multimedia Hub
3. Xbox Live Marketplace
2. GamerCards
1. The Next Generation Now
10, 8: Subjective. PS3 will come out with games that are just as good, perhaps better.
9: Already have them in the current generation of consoles. PS3 will have 7 of them.
7: PS3 will be fully backwards compatible with PS2 and PS1, Xbox 360 is compatible with only *some* Xbox games.
6, 3, 2: Who gives a ****.
5: PS3 will have better graphics in high definition. Maybe during it's lifetime, High Definition prices will drop sharply, just like LCDs have.
4: Sony, being the #1 home entertainment company, will have that as well obviously.
1: Yeah you can get it now, but you're basically just getting a graphical upgrade to your existing Xbox. The PS3 is more "next generation" than XBox 360 is. Microsoft is trying to shorten the time between releases of new consoles, and that is bad for consumers overall. 4 years is a short time for the lifespan of a console.
Microsoft also has a history of buying out top software companies and pushing the rest out of business through anti-competitive practices. Sony at least keeps their competition afloat.
All in all, the "Top 10 reasons for a PS3" are better than the "Top 10 for Xbox 360". However, I would wait for both PS3 and Revolution to come out before buying. Nintendo Revolution has some intriguing technology that could enhance gameplay dramatically. The new input mechanism has alot of potential. Not to mention being able to download all of Nintendo's games for the past 20 years.
If you desperately need to buy something now, I'd buy a GameCube. It's dirt cheap, less than $100, and you can always pass it off to your kids, or younger siblings, cousins after you're done with it and decide what you want to buy next year when all 3 next-gen consoles are out.
It's made of Bankruptcy! It's made -- of -- Bank^coughBankrupty! Soon they'll be making them in factories! And then they'll be reproducing the chips in smaller fabrication labs in China by people smaller than US(A) but on a bigger scale! Somthing needs to be done! Buy them in the stores and smash them on the streets!
(*holds up bloody hand in a "Y" shape)
I am the nightmare of nightmares.
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."
I must stop being a fanboy... I must stop...
DOES IT HAVE A CONTROLLER AS COOL AS THE REVOLUTION ONE?
muahaha... hahahahaha... his own sperm flying into his face... his chin... everywhere..
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
I expected gnomes.
Obviously very testy gnomes
Bury me in mashed potatoes.
A beowulf Heater of these... :)
Oh come on. We had the exact same link posted before...
Dupe!
(I can't find the link now because the search page doesn't load on this IE 6.0 P.o.S. computer!)
The hip way to get your IP. No ads, ever.
But that microsoft and IBM can develop such a beast as part of a console with a $300.00 pricepoint.
I'm not sure any of the AC's or MS haters in here have ever seen a 360 or played one yet. It's a miracle of a machine for the price you pay.
Must be this "reversible computing" I keep hearing about...
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
It's fast.
Little endian, or Big endian?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
When will we see a motherboard for this processor? I would love to be aboe to build a system around the Xbox 360s processor. It should be a wonderful Linux box!!!
It wouldn't, it's not designed to run the kind of tasks you run on a regular computer.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
The PS2 Emotion Engine has the same design philosophy: choosing to do small memory/cache in favor for very wide bandwidth. It makes for some interesting programming juggling and kung-fu since the data comes straight from memory dumped to the graphics so nothing is cached. The results speak for themselves since the PS2 is the oldest and the most dated performance the fact that the performance is extremely dynamic and probably *still not maxed*. People are still pulling tricks that no one could predict the PS2 to do. I suspect we wouldn't have games on the PS2 like GT4 or the beautiful Shadow of the Collosius if it had been made with more cache yet small bandwidth.
The graphics for each system are amazing, no question.
The difference will be the 360's online abilities. With friend lists, friend finders, instant messaging, competitive smaller 'arcadelike' games, free trailors/demos, etc Sony is in a world of trouble.
When will IBM be pimping these out in blade format? They already have JS20's, which are dual PPC 970 based systems running at 2.2GHz. These new chips are running 3 3.2GHZ cores on the same CPU. That means that with the JS20 form factor, you could get 6 cores altogether (assuming you don't melt the thing first). A rack of 14 of these would mean that you would have a 84 CPU cluster in single Chassis, and IBM puts 6 chassis on a rack, so that would be 504 CPUs on a single rack.
It makes their current PPC blade option look kind of weak...
.....Does it run LINUX?
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Of this architecture. First of all, the chip has 3 cores, and each core can handle 2 instructions, and each instruction can get to 5 processing branches.
Also it can handle 2 threads for its vmx engine and fpu engine, this is a LOT of data crunching power...
They have setup special instruction for matrix operations...
I wonder, what would be the processing power of this chip, used for sciences data crunching?
This chip is awsome...
What could be hope for the 7 core chip for ps3, but, I think the 7core ps3 chips is rather different. At xbox 360 you have 3 general purpose power cores, and at the 7 core ps3 architecure, each core is for different tasks? Rigth? Worng?
Â_Â
Swifts satire involved a controversy over which end of the egg you consumed it from.
Myself, I've always been and SHALL always be, a Little Endian!
AFAIK the processor isn't owned by IBM (IIRC in the photos you can see "Microsoft" on the chip) and not all processors are created equal. I suspect a 970MP would be faster for almost all applications.
Love the rocky horror reference ;-)
As someone pointed out, this article really doesn't give anything new.
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. As oppossed to Microsoft maker of windows? Geez, sure sure xp and 2k3 are nowadays a lot more stable then the crash fest that the 9x series and ME well lets just not go there. Yet it is still Windows that is THE zombie paradise. Oh and on wich OS did the sony rootkit install anyway? I wonder wich company distributes software that allows just anyone to install a rootkit? Frankly if you are talking evil empires then this is like choosing between the nazi's and the japs. With nintendo perhaps being the italians. Perhaps the dreamcast relaunch mentioned earlier is d-day? Oh and the 360 stability. I seen it in 3 stores. 2x it was in a crashed state. Wonderfull.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Seriously, though, these are fascinating little beasts. It looks as if the concept has its roots in the Transputer, which also relied on fast and narrow point to point external links. When I first read the blurb I guessed from the description that there were 4 cores per chip and the bad ones were disabled to get the yield up, but clearly the yield is much much better than that. However, anybody silly enough to think about overclocking will need to note that the working CPU voltage is hard coded; it looks like, to get the yield at the clock speed, each device has to be individually tuned. Which suggests that the tolerances for reliable functioning are tight. Perhaps the overall error rate is not good enough for a truly general purpose computer which needs to be able to tolerate a range of operating conditions without significant error. Which doesn't suggest a range of motherboards and retail boxed processors any time soon. Just like Apple, in fact. This reminds me of good old ECL based computers (whose CPU voltage had to be adjusted on the fly for reliable operation rather than set up once for all, but I'm sure you take the point).
It's perhaps a pity that the design teams for the Mac Mini and the XBox couldn't be locked up in a development lab with a progressively increasing caffeine level in the coffee until they create the hybrid that would really be the future of home computing. Apple's thermal management and sound level control, IBMs obvious chip development capability, and Microsoft's willingness to spend some of its cash pile would be a formidable combination. The trouble is, you'd probably end up with Apple's's ability to design chips, IBMs willingness to lose money, and Microsoft's thermal management and general aesthetics.
Pining for the fjords
Games often have far smaller cache requirements than many other applications, and as a result, it is preferable to go with a higher speed cache and higher CPU speed than a slower but larger cache/CPU.
:)
The Celeron in the 300A era are one of the best examples of this. They had half the cache of their Pentium III counterparts, BUT the P3 cache ran at half the CPU speed while the Celeron cache ran at full speed. The Celeron's performance was crap despite the faster cache for many applications (including server machines and most office applications) due to its smaller cache, but gamers discovered that for games, the situation was exactly the opposite - clock for clock the Celeron was significantly faster than the P3 due to the fact that most games in that era could fit almost all of their rendering pipeline within even the Celeron's small cache. Rare cache misses and twice the cache speed = much better performance. It also happened that that on-die cache allowed the Celerons to be overclocked like crazy, a significant added bonus.
The Xbox 360's CPU takes the whole idea much farther. While most desktop CPUs are designed to perform well over the widest range of situations (with some tradeoffs always being evident - note that Athlons eat P4s for lunch in many cases such as games, while Athlons do actually lose most of their advantages in performance per clock cycle when performing video compression and decompression because most video codecs don't have significant amounts of branching resulting in pipeline stalls from branch mispredictions.) The Xbox 360 CPU goes a step further by optimizing for one thing and one thing only - gaming. Instruction reordering which is critical in most desktop CPUs turns out to be not as necessary for gaming (specifically graphics rendering), and as a result the 360 drops instruction reordering capability completely in favor of having multiple cores at a low cost. (Instruction scheduling takes a LOT of die space in modern CPUs compared to the size of the rest of the CPU core.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
That's about as interesting as watching paint dry on a house, in the summer, with a very healthy and green grassy yard.
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.
While thinking philosophically, we see problems in places where there are none. -Wittgenstein
I'm wondering, how much work is required to hack into the box, not necessarily to run illegally copied games, but to run Linux or something else? I know there was a lot of talk about hacking into the original Xbox, mostly because the internal guts were primarily OTS PC components. The 360 sounds like a lot more custom work. However, being able to run a triple-core Power box would be pretty interesting, even if it was tweaked out for gaming rather than general purpose programming.
Your Servant, B. Baggins
for us to have any interest in the hardware we need to be able to use it. DRM just plain sucks. I think I'd prefer to eat my own testicles rather than purchase TCPA enabled anything, really hope Sony see the light after their rootkit fiasco.
There are so much things you can thread at a game.
You can thread path dicovery, A.I., NPC, genetic algorithms, environmental conditions, data storage, sound controlling, Preloading, randomness...
Each user can be its own thread...
Threading at games, can deliver a new hole experience to the gamer... Real Time Strategy games require multithreading...
Â_Â
Thank you! For your edification:
its = possessive
it's = contraction of "it is"
But mentioning live as the deciding factor is ignoring history. The x-box had it and it didn't sell. Nobody has ever in my opinion come up with a satisfactory reason for the failure of the x-box. The gamecube is easy. It just didn't have the right image. While I thought about 1 or 2 games as worth playing that was it. The rest I considered to cutsey and consoly for my tastes. I don't mind this on my handhelds where it actually helps (don't want to scream like a girl playing fear in public) but not at home.
Another one that amazed me is that one post said the x-box had signed the big names. Bungie and EA. Wtf? Bungie IS NOT a big name. They got 1 game and that is it. EA is big but EA signs on to anything. Getting EA to endorse your new console is like getting a hooker to go out with you for money. Even /.ers should be able to manage that.
The only real advantage that MS has over both Sony and Nintendo that MS doesn't have to win the money race. They can afford to loose money on this generation and the next and the next.
As for the graphics being amazing. Oh please. I already play at higher resolutions on my now 2yr old PC. Richer friends won't accept anything less then 1600x1200 while sony's own games like eq2 can already make use of 512mb video cards despite the fact they were not even out. Other recent games to can make use of hardware features that even top of the range pc's don't have let alone these weak consoles.
I still remember console fans being excited over star fox while I was playing x-wing.
No saying that anyone is going to win the current battle is insanity. The 360 is lacking launch titles and has not got the mindshare with the general public. The PS3 is an unknown quantity and Sony's reputation might be damaged (but this should equally have counted against MS with the X-box) and Nintendo seems to try another gamecube wich didn't work well the first time. The PC (often not counted) has such titles as WoW wich simply cannot run on any of the consoles yet is a huge earner for its parent company. Oh and has all that live crap except at no-charge.
Frankly I find these discussions very amusing but only as an outsider. I remember people defending their console in each of the battles and use the same arguments regardless of the wether they made sense before.
Console fans are like generals. Always willing to fight the last war again regardless of the outcome.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Hate to burst alot of bubbles, BUT:
0 -2.ars/2
The Xenon CPU IS NOT the same as 3 G5's all on one chip! Read the arstechnica article here:
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/xbox36
Basically it says: "The basic idea behind both Cell and Xenon is to make the execution core less complex by stripping out hardware that's intended to optimize instruction scheduling at runtime. Neither the Xenon nor the Cell have an instruction window, which means that these two processor designs largely forget about instruction-level parallelism. Instead, instructions pass through the processor in the order in which they're fetched, with the twist that two adjacent, non-dependent instructions are executed in parallel where possible."
This means that standard PPC code (OS X, etc) WILL NOT RUN on this. This is also the reason that IBM is selling these things at only $106 a pop to M$. Have you checked the prices for SINGLE CORE G5s for Apple? Their like $600-700 a piece! So, I am guessing that stripping these down makes them much easier and therefore faster and cheaper to mass produce, and therefore the price difference.
Anyway, there are reports that only one core is availble to intitial game developers, and one of the cores is strictly for M$ bullshit content protection TC such as the hypervisor, etc.
Not to mention from the article:
Microsoft and IBM engineers worked together during the definition phase of the project to specify a design to satisfy the constraints of a mass-produced consumer device
Sounds like a shitload of TC shit build right into the chip, so I am NOT holding my breath for linux to be ported to this (not that I wouldn't be thrilled to see this). Cetainly not when the port to STI Cell architecture has been under dev for what, over a year? Damn, can't wait for PS3 release.
You're still comparing apples to oranges.
This is about the CPU. You can't find a quad core CPU at 3.5ghz for 300 bucks yet alone a console with 512 megs ram, the worlds fastest GPU and a quad core 3.5ghz CPU with a backplane and interconnect speed to boot for 300 bucks. I could care less if ms is loosing 100+ per console that still makes it cheaper then i can get a dual core cpu today.
Comparing that to the NES is like saying console should always be 8 but cartridge based machies. The nintendo found a niche and created a market that they have long since been able to succeed in. However that market has never been defigned until today and if you would rather preach proprietary hardware as being cool and a console built from somewhat reliable and existing technology as a pc in a smaller case then that is your own misconception to deal with. Even the NES is just a "pc" dedicated to gaming.
Show me where i can get a quad (or even dual) 3.5 PC with 512 megs ram an ATI 1800 video card, USB, 20 gig hard drive for 300 bucks.
Hype? the 360 is out, check out the graphics yourself. Try and pick one up before you hypothetically compare things the way you think they are because of whatever bias you have.
What do you mean it isn't designed for that? It already exists on a motherboard in an Xbox. Also, I suspect in the very near future, we will see Linux running on the Xbox 360. The only thing wrong with that platform is its proprietary nature and its lack of expandability. Otherwise I think it very nicely contridicts your post.
Perhaps because of the huge number of patents and other new technological work IBM does.
coz, like, the other day, a girl smiled at me!
yes!, without pointing her finger!
Damn, I was going to answer the question of what is under the 360's hood by saying:
A cooking burrito!
Get your Unix fortune now!
"and discounts are applied to PC games much sooner than to console games."
Given that the physical manufacture of disks and packaging is $1, it sure would be nice if all the old PS1, and now XBox games would be sold for ~$2. We know this will never happen though because the shaving razor business model guarantees that prices stay high.
So the big difference is that the 360 is more like current multicore PC's while the PS3 seems to lean more towards a cluster setup like openmosix.
As to wich is better? Well look at recent PS2 games. They show such graphical improvement that it might be true that PS2 still has untapped capabilties. The X-box on the other hand is pretty much at its limit. This was clear by developers complaining the PS2 was hard to develop for and the x-box was easy. Same with the next generation.
Given that the cores have the same basic design (64bit power) and Sony claims the same or even higher clockspeeds it would be easy to assume that 7+1 core > then 3 cores. I also seen larger cache sizes being claimed and even faster bus speeds. Is it all true? And even if it is will game developers succeed in tapping those resources? And even if they do, will that result in fun games?
Remember that currently the fast majority of games do not take advantage of dual core PC's even hyperthreading is rarely supported worse having it on can sometimes degrade performance. Now imagine having to write your code in such a way that it can be split across 7 processors. OR is that central core in te Cell processor capable of splitting up non- threaded applications? (Just random quesswork). After all it is supposed to be become more then the current PS3 chip it is supposed to be included in the next generation of TV's and other entertainment products.
That would be a huge advancement. The holy grail of grid computing (the cell is supposed to be like that) were you no longer have to worry about the specifics of your enviroment but can just run your code and the system will take care of it.
What I find a far more intresting proposition that with the PS3 supposedly so powerfull yet also so similar to the 360 is that it might just be possible to run 360 games on the PS3.
As for using consoles for number work. Already being done with both systems. They are so cheap yet so powerfull that all you have to do is wait for someone to break them open. Same as PC GPU's are being used for number crunching work. However GPU's is no problem wereas circumventing the PS3 or 360's protections might be in more repressive goverments (such as found in the west).
All off the above is just random speculation based on hilarious press reports. Any resemblance to the facts is unlikely.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Seriously, why defend a piece of hardware and a company that equally wants as much money as the other that you think is bad?
Use whatever suits you. Regardless, I have to add a few things.
WHO NEEDS SEVEN CONTROLLERS ON ONE BOX!?
WHo needs more than 640K of RAM? My point exactly. Although I agree that more doesn't necessarly mean better, you can't say that nobody needs seven controllers as they could somehow make use of that. Instead of 7 controllers, it might be like a few controllers, a remote like you can get for the PS2 for the dvd player and other various devices all plugged at the same time.
3) Developer backing. Bungie and Rare...and that's only naming two big name developers....EA is also signed on.
No I'm sorry but EA Games? What have they seriously fucking done well? Their games are always what they previously released with added trivial modifications like change the color of a hero's pubic hair. Yes, Rare and Bungie are big names in consoles but EA Games is doing exactly what we agreed that is bad, Quantity over Quality. Just thought I'd add that...
This is a fully PowerPC compliant chip. Make no mistake. It WILL run standard PowerPC code, as will Cell BE. From where did you get that the singe core G5 costs 5-600 dollars? An iMac G5 (singe core PowerPC 970FX costs $1300 and that's a complete computer with a GPU, harddrive, DVD-burner, webcam, 512 MB RAM, an 17" TFT, package, shipping, advetising and about 30% margin.
The cost of a processor is directly related to the die size and since the size of the Xenon is larger than the dual core G5 (about 130 million transisotrs compared to 165 million in the Xenon) there's a good chance that Xenon is actually more expensive than the PowerPC 970MP to manufacture.
Linux will run just fine on an Xbox 360 if one would fins a way around the DRM stuff. OSX too if Apple would want to. Same goes with the PS3. Hell.. Sony's boss even said so!
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
Three identical cores, each with its own embedded vector and fpu units along with 128 registers - the chip sure looks like it's the fastest cpu out there. Wouldn't it be ironic if Apple ends up running on crufty old x86 and Vista ends up running on PowerPc - a proprietary PowerPc to boot?
Xenon is weaker than the G5 in almost every aspect and IBM will be putting the dual core PowerPC 970MP into their JS-class blades next year. Tehy will probably be called JS40 since they will have 4 cores each. the thermal caracteristics of the 970MP is similar to the original single core 970 so they could probably put two 970MPs in a singe slot blade unit.
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
You are clearly not a developper. If one is in the middleware business, that is making software libraries for specific hardware or entire engines, the raw performance is very good indicator of the life time of that system. Longer life time means sustained profits.
Quality SDKs are made by the likes of iD, Havok, Epic,
Because the best games, are rushed games? You mean backwards compatibility, right?
Waiting for the competition to show its product is just good sense. No need to spend money on something you might regret later. At least wait until there is a choice.
The point is that this isn't something particular to the X360. The original PS2 had many defects early on. The problem rate was reported as being within or less than the industry average for manufacturering defects. If it was a design problem, the incident percent would be much higher.
We're not talking about middleware business here, we're talking about game consoles. Game consoles work by generations, and even if your gen 2 console is really gen 2.5 because it far outperforms regular gen 2, you still have to release a gen 3 console when you competitors release theirs (within 12-18 months at worst, and use craploads of PR to prevent people from switching to the available alternatives).
Excuse me? iD, Havok or Epic make GAMES, they don't make console Software Development Kits. The one who makes and releases a SDK for a console is the manufacturer of the console, and from the echos I got Sony's SDK for the PS3 is a piece of crap, MS' SDK for the 360 is a really good piece of software and Nintendo's Revolution SDK is average.
No, because good tools make you more likely to get the same quality of games with a less dev and debugging, and because good tools are enjoyed by devs who -- in turn -- are much more interrested in devving for your plateform.
No I don't, backward compatibility is an extremely defensive feature, its main goal is to lock your current customers into your product lines in order to prevent them from fleeing to the opponent's product. It may convert *some* people, but backward compatibility doesn't generate user base growth, at best a transfert of your user base from your old generation to your new generation product. It's a Good Thing, but it's far from enough. And even your old customers ain't going to be interrested in your product if the only thing they can do with it is play previous generation's game. Because they already have a system that can do that.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
It has been done before.
Stop it.
> Atleast Sony only puts root kits on their customers computers, which can cause
> them to be infested with spyware and who-knows-what-else.
Do not confuse Sony Computer Entertainment with Sony BMG Music Entertainment (which, by the way, is only 50% owned by Sony).
This will be even more ludicrous than blaming Microsoft Research for the latest IE exploit.
The fact that the processor executes in-order only affects performance, and not the compatibility. For example, most x86 code runs on in-order cores (such as the 486, Pentium I), out-of-order cores (most modern x86 processors) and even VLIW cores with a translation layer (Transmeta)
The Raven
Because nothing quite compares to playing Nethack in High Definition.
Are there any reasons to get an Xbox 360 over PS3?"
Uh you can buy an Xbox 360 now and you can't buy a PS3.
Some people would like a nice HD outputting console to use with their nice HD screens now.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
The CPU cores do not support out of order execution. This means that the processor will be more likely to blow extra cycles when used in an unoptimized environment (as on a desktop PC). Whether that would negate the overall benefit of having 3 fast cores, I have no idea.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
No, 1.21 Niggawatts to send yo' white ass black to the futa'.
But seriously, "jigga" was closer to the original pronunciation of giga-.
Now imagine having to write your code in such a way that it can be split across 7 processors.
If you first structure your game loop as a dataflow diagram, you'll see more opportunities for parallelizing your code. Figure out what depends on what, and if two things don't depend on one another early in the computation of a given frame, you can run them in separate threads on separate cores with little or no penalty. Many tasks in a game program are in fact embarrassingly parallel. For instance, if you have twenty different procedural meshes to generate, such as a tree or a character's draped clothing, generate one on each core until they're all generated.
Microsoft will never do anything that goes against their cash cow, Windows.
Microsoft's other cash cow is Office, right?
but as an HDTV owner I'd like to buy a console that's actually capable of high definition graphics.
Many GameCube games already run in 480p (EDTV, better than DVD). All Revolution games can run in at least 480p; some will run in 720p.
I'm sure space even on DVD-9s will become tight as higher res textures and models are packed into games.
O rly? If this first-person shooter fits in 96 KB thanks to procedural meshes and textures, imagine what you can fit in 8,000,000 KB.
[The G5 and the Xbox CPU] at the very least share the PowerPC instruction set.
So do an Intel Pentium 4 CPU and an Intel Pentium M CPU. So do a P4 and an AMD Athlon CPU. So do a P4 and a Transmeta Efficeon CPU. What does that prove?
That's more than enough to, say, get Linux running on it since PPC GCC works just fine.
GCC may support it, but Binutils definitely doesn't. Cracking a game console is more a matter of getting Binutils to work than getting GCC to work.
The CPU cores do not support out of order execution. This means that the processor will be more likely to blow extra cycles when used in an unoptimized environment (as on a desktop PC).
Out of order execution is useful primarily when running code that's optimized for a different microarchitecture that has a different pipeline structure (such as running P1, P2, or P3 code on a P4 or Athlon). Given that all games will be compiled specifically for the Xbox 360, the compiler will have little or no trouble reordering instructions to fill both pipes of an given inorder CPU. And if they do manage to crack the Xbox 360 and install a Linux distro, then Linux, glibc, X, and Free apps will be recompiled specifically for this CPU.
I think that it will be a rare game that is able to accommodate 7 simultaneous players with a single display.
The 7-controller system is the PS2, and rare doesn't make PS2 or PS3 games. Apart from Nintendo handheld systems, rare develops only for Xbox and Xbox 360, which have 4 controllers, and most of rare's recent multiplayer titles have been split-screen (Goldeneye 007; Diddy Kong Racing; Perfect Dark), not shared-view. As far as I know, you have to go back to Battletoads + Double Dragon to find a rare game that could be made to work with more than 2 players in a single view.
It's uncommon for that many people to be able to get together in one place to play
You've never seen my family's Christmas reunions, or even my little cousins' play-dates.
I predict that the use of this feature will be limited to a handful of "party" games.
Except well-done party games are going to be big, big sellers. Look at how fast Super Smash Bros. Melee sold its first million copies. And then look at some X-Men arcade machines with six joysticks. Or see if you can bring in the ultra-casual gamers with a Jeopardy! style trivia game. (But didn't rare develop the Jeopardy! games for NES?) And isn't Mario Party up to 7th edition?
I know the 360 CPU has limitations. Lack of OOO execution makes it useless for use in a family of machines or any machine that would have to run code that was compiled for another chip. That means they aren't good laptop or desktop processors, heck they're bad for Windows in general.
But if you wanted to set up a large compute cluster, and compile code specifically for it (which you would anyway to take advantage of the distributed processing), then these would be great. You'd get great performance at a low cost and with reasonably low power usage.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
This box needs to be a HTPC, i wish this box could be hacked, it's a fast cheap computer, that would fit well and work great as a HTPC... it allready has HD / oprical output built in and a small enough form factor!
Holding my breath...
The question is why NOT buy an Xbox 360?
;-)
I'm not a gamer at all (I use a Mac after all), and I don't have any particular preference for any one console or system, but purely from an consumer perspective I would think it would make sense to wait with one's purchase of a gaming console until all three new consoles are released so that one can compare them for price and features. I don't don't think that throwing around money for three different consoles is good money management (but then again, I suppose one could say that about me and my Mac as well
OK, not a very good joke....but I would have thought obvious enough.
Pining for the fjords
This is the Xbox360 launch coverage in Japan, for those who still think MS will win the consoles war. http://www.lik-sang.com/news.php?artc=3759&lsaid=1 98235