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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."
With all the power they could have come up with a nicer crash screen :)
Visit my site @ http://www.madtorrent.com
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
Yes, I'd prefer this be filtered through at least a couple of blogs.
No, it really isn't. The original XBox was. The 360 has quite a lot of custom technology inside it.
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
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.
PowerPC's mainly an IBM-designed and promoted architecture, borne from the Apple-IBM-Motorola alliance.
Apple are simply one of IBM and Motorola's (now Freescale) customers.
What's the frequency, Kenneth?
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."
But for the custom motherboard, custom CPU, custom GPU i guess
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Didn't RTFA, about the design of the custom processor, did you?
I thought Power PC was the mac? Why did Microsoft pick apple CPU's for their Xbox? Is Intel falling out of favor?
The Power architecture is an IBM design intended for use in their large server machines. About the time that Motorola was struggling with producing better/faster 68000 chips, IBM designed a cut-down version of the Power chip called "PowerPC". Apple adopted PowerPC from IBM, thus leaving Motorola behind. However, Motorola realized that they were losing big business and licensed the PowerPC architecture for manufacture. Eventually, Motorola couldn't keep up and Apple started using IBM for the higher end chips. Thus Apple now uses a combination of manufacturers to get their PowerPC chips from.
The chip itself has nothing to do with Apple other than being their preferred platform.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Microsoft went to ATI and IBM in order to "own" the designs for the graphics/processor chips. This way MS is able to get the parts fabbed out without having to get approval from ATI/IBM. (This is from memory of what I've read in the past). The CPU and graphics/bridge design in the XBox are owned and by Intel/Nvidia (respectively). MS had to buy the parts from them, which costs them more in the long run than being able to get their own produced.
Correct me if I'm wrong...
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.
Good point. Atleast Sony only puts root kits on their customers computers, which can cause them to be infested with spyware and who-knows-what-else.
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.
A beowulf Heater of these... :)
Which is about as interresting as hyping Intel's 4GHz pentiums.
No one gives a flying fuck about the raw performances of the machine, high definition is not for consoles anyway (hint: my computer yields above twice "HD"), blu-ray blows (not the least because it uses Java as a "mandatory part of the standard).
Three things really matter for consoles:
Now please take your PS-fanboyism back to the Sony board, the numbers will speak when the PS3 is released, until PS3 is live it's mere FUD and vapor wall.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
So from that I can conclude that the only reason to buy a PS3 is that it's a graphical upgrade over a PS2 and can support 7 controllers? Whoop-de-doo.
I'll ignore the fact that most of your points are (a) unconfirmed or (b) simply false, because I have better things to do than argue with some kid who, by the time the PS3 actually comes out in the US might have saved up enough pocket money to buy one.
Oh and you forgot the number one reason to own a PS3 - comes with a free rootkit!
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
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
"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."
Who says the PS3 will have two times the graphical performace? Speculation does, perhaps.
The Xbox 360 is high definition out of the box.
The Xbox 360 does NOT use proprietary disc formats that can, at the vendor or manufacturers will, brick your box.
WHO NEEDS SEVEN CONTROLLERS ON ONE BOX!? Jesus. What average Joe with a TV is going to be able to support seven players? Maybe the rare Super Smash Bros. style game, but nothing big.
The Xbox 360 has several things the PS3 does NOT have:
1) Xbox Live. The Playstation 3 has no unified online service at all and has no plans to. Xbox Live is an awesome way to play your video games online. One fee. No ten bucks a month here, five bucks a month there... $50 a year.
2) Time. Xbox 360 is here now whereas the PS3 is going to offer comparable hardware and games in a year.
3) Developer backing. Bungie and Rare are both developing for the Xbox 360, and that's only naming two big name developers. Also Final Fantasy will be coming to Xbox 360 too. EA is also signed on.
The question is why NOT buy an Xbox 360? Would you rather wait and get less for the same, or maybe more, amount of money?
-Eric Smith
Must be this "reversible computing" I keep hearing about...
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
Much like Duffman, Sony promises lots of things. There were a lot of features that were supposed to be available on the PS2 that just never ended up in the final system. Not wanting a 360 because it's not that much an improvement over the current XBox is good reasoning. Not wanting a 360 because you just bought a new console a couple of years ago is good reasoning. Not wanting a 360 because of all the things Sony claims will be on the PS3 is just silly. We don't know the "Top 10 reasons for a PS3" because we don't know exactly what the PS3 is yet.
Also, while the Revolution's controller does pose some unique possibilities for gameplay, it's only a controller. Any of the modern gaming consoles could implement such a controller. If it's that big a deal, expect MS and Sony to have their own versions by the end of 2006.
Give it a few more weeks, it will.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Little endian, or Big endian?
Long answer; yes with an if...
Neither of those points should have any impact whatsoever on whether to buy an xbox360 or a PS3. If you like playing console games, both systems are sweet. If you have to choose one, it's probably because of a game avaliable on one system and not the other.
*sigh*
People, think a little. Sony is a mega corp, and has its fingers in a shit load of businesses. The music business is separate from the Playstation business, and in fact, the Playstation business is supposed to be the biggest breadwinner.
The music division screwed up.
If the Playstation division continues to be successful, which division's vision will win out?
The division that got the world steamed at them, or the division that brought you Linux to the PS2?!
In other words, you want to *support* the Playstation division, while giving the music division the (figuratively) bird.
-B0fh
How is it a miracle when this is exactly what's been happening with consoles for many years?
NES looked better than nearly any computer of its day. Ditto Genesis and SNES. Playstation and N64 packed an incredible amount of power into a cheap bundle. Remember the hype about PS2's Emotion Engine? There were rumors that exporting it would be restricted because it was going to be classified as a super computer. People were saying Iraq was going to use it to guide missiles. Xbox literally was a cheap PC, but gave more bang for the buck than your average beige box.
Consoles do this by taking the right shortcuts. They have a very focused performance target for very specific tasks. No need to add anything more than the minimum. Plus, they sell more than nearly any OEM PC maker so they get good prices on the parts.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
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.
Agreeing with you... minor thing to further support your argument:
Xbox360 supports HD out of the box. Today. In stores.
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
Not true. The little shield means Windows is protected. Mine is green. I bet yours is yellow or red.
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Unless of course you don't care about any of that stuff. I own both a PS2 and an Xbox, and the Xbox gathers dust simply because the PS2 delivers a lot more quality single-player games than the Xbox does. I had a Live subscription for a while and didn't use it that much. I guess the appeal of having 12 year olds tell me how teh ghey you are is lost on some people.
I ain't evil, I'm just good looking.
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 is until you realize that the features that IBM and MS removed from the 360's CPU because they weren't needed for gaming cripple the CPU for most other applications.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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.
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
"The choice is yours."
Nintendo, I choose you!
</pokemon reference>
Am I open minded towards open source, or closed minded towards closed source?
Thank you! For your edification:
its = possessive
it's = contraction of "it is"
Are there any reasons to get an Xbox 360 over PS3?
The XBox360 is (sort of) available now. The PS3 currently is nothing more than a haze of promises.
Are there any reasons to get an Xbox 360 over the original Xbox aside from graphical performance?
No, and probably not for PS3 over PS2, either. Don't expect a quantum leap in game design, just prettier graphics and more "stuff" on the screen at once.
PS3 will have better graphical performance, up to 2x.
According to Sony, whose advance claims for every previous console have turned out to be widely exaggerated.
High definition.
Also on the XBox360. HD is OK, but I'm actually more interested in the fact that widescreen will now be standard.
Blu-ray.
Every new Sony console seems to have some new, fancy drive design. And they always break down a lot. Be sure to get the extended warranty.
Up to 7 wireless controllers - those actually mean something.
If you can actually get 7 people around your TV. Maybe good for people with big-screen media rooms.
PS3 will come out with games that are just as good, perhaps better.
Perhaps. But the XBox360 games are coming out now. The PS3 won't be competing with XBox360 launch games, but with XBox360 2nd generation games. And the PS3 looks to be more of a programming challenge, so even if the hardware has the potential to match or surpass the XBox360, it may take years for that to happen.
5: PS3 will have better graphics in high definition. Maybe during it's lifetime, High Definition prices will drop sharply, just like LCDs have.
This has already happened. Walmart has rows of HD TVs in the $500-600 range. Many of them even have built-in tuners. If you don't demand a huge screen, HD is only a bit more expensive than SD, with a much better picture.
Yeah you can get it now, but you're basically just getting a graphical upgrade to your existing Xbox.
This is a bit silly. The XBox360 has a completely different processor and architecture than the XBox I, as well as a different graphics system. The PS3 is closer to the PS2 than the XBox360 is to the XBox I--that's why Microsoft has been unable to provide full backward-compatibility.
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.
Just-launched systems are for enthusiasts. The launch games typically barely scratch the surface of what the system is capable of. If you don't already have a game system, I'd recommend a PS2. Lots of games, fairly cheap used (but be sure to get an extended warranty). And promised backwards compatibility of PS3 means developers aren't going to be in a big hurry to switch to PS3 development. GameCube is more for people who appreciate Nintendo's unique game design strengths (I'm actually looking forward to Nintendo Revolution more than PS3).
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.
It's actually because I have friends that I don't play online games. I much rather have everyone over for gaming that meeting on line. I should clarify, it is because I have friends in the same region as me that I don't play online games.
Agreed, the price is a big stopper for some people and, I also agree, there are not a ton of must-have games on the Xbox 360.
:)
However, it does have Perfect Dark: Zero, Project Gotham 3, Kameo (don't knock it 'till you try it) and soon, DOA4 and Battlefield.
Battlefield + Xbox Live = Heaven.
Granted, I don't know a whole lot about what games are coming soon to the Xbox 360 for lack of time, but by the time the Playstation 3 comes out, Xbox 360 will have a lot more games by great developers and I'm going to venture a guess and say the premium system won't cost as much as the PS3 will.
That was my point, was that waiting for a PS3 was stupid. You get less (no unified online service, which is a BIG, BIG portion of why you should get an Xbox 360 over PS3, no titles from Rare or Bungie) and get some things that are somewhat unpleasant (blu-ray: Who really wants a disc format that can brick your system of the manufacturer tells it to? How long before it's cracked and a virus is written? Who really would be angry about getting up every few hours to change a disc? Big deal. None of us had problems with it in the PSX days.)
Just forget for one second that Microsoft makes the Xbox. It's one of the products of theirs I really, really like and is well put-together by a great team.
Go Microsoft?
-Eric Smith
On one episode of "The Simpsons" (4F07), Ned Flanders asked Rev. Lovejoy a question of faith. That was his reply.
Ned: Rev. Lovejoy, with all that's happened to us today, I kinda
feel like Job.
Lovejoy: Well, aren't you being a tad melodramatic, uh, Ned? Also, I
believe Job was right-handed.
Ned: But Reverend, I need to know, is God punishing me?
Lovejoy: Shooh, short answer: "Yes" with an "If," long answer: "No" --
with a "But." Uh, if you need additional solace, by the way,
I've got a copy of something or other by Art Linkletter in my
office.
God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
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.
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.
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 -
I doubt I should even try to put out the good games list of ps2 titles (that will also be ps3 titles when it releases, no questions asked[1]) Needless to say it puts the 360 launch list to shame.
Granted, I don't know a whole lot about what games are coming soon to the Xbox 360 for lack of time, but by the time the Playstation 3 comes out, Xbox 360 will have a lot more games by great developers and I'm going to venture a guess and say the premium system won't cost as much as the PS3 will.
Probably will, as all systems seem to launch at a high price with a mostly crap lineup. However backwards compatability out of the box means that I won't have to switch any plugs around to play games I bought a few months before the system released.
That was my point, was that waiting for a PS3 was stupid. You get less (no unified online service, which is a BIG, BIG portion of why you should get an Xbox 360 over PS3, no titles from Rare or Bungie)
I can get better online service from my pc, and it is free. Rare and Bungie have yet to do anything terribly impressive that is not also available on pc. Name a few games aside from an fps where online service really matters? It just is not the big deal you think it is, unless you are into fps's, where (imo) keyboard+mouse is a better setup anyways.
and get some things that are somewhat unpleasant (blu-ray: Who really wants a disc format that can brick your system of the manufacturer tells it to? How long before it's cracked and a virus is written?
So you think someone will release a program that actually does brick a system?[2] As for "viruses being written" there is the slight problem that you have to PUT THE FREAKIN DISK IN THE DRIVE. Unless you have ninjas slipping into your house while you sleep to brick your ps3 this is a non-issue, and if that is happening you have bigger things to worry about than your consoles.
Who really would be angry about getting up every few hours to change a disc? Big deal. None of us had problems with it in the PSX days.)
I would. People had no problems with traveling for days on end when hitching up to a horse was the only way to go, but society moves past these sort of things. Multiple disks means I have to keep track of more than on disk, and run the risk of renting a game that I can play for two days THEN find out some idiot scratched one of the other disks. It is hard enough to get my roommates to put a single disk back in the case when all the necessary parts are sitting right there, several of them just compounds the problem.
[1] Unlike the xbox, where support for the previous system depends on them figuring out a way to make that specific title work. [2] Not to say that I agree with the concept either, but the backlash against it being used is going to be enough of an inhibitor to keep that from happening.
Slashdot: Where anecdotes and generalizations can be freely substituted for facts, logic, or intelligence
Because nothing quite compares to playing Nethack in High Definition.
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.
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.