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Inside the XBOX360 - Anandtech (1 Viewer)

Collin

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http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=2610&p=1

If you wanna know a bit more about the performance hardware capabilities of the new XBOX, have a read.

But for anyone wanting to know in a nutshell:

CPU: boasts three IBM designed PowerPC cores, with Microsoft's paradigm based upon efficiency. Manufacture-wise, it's currently based on a 90nm process, but Microsoft intends to scale down to 65nm in a years time. All cores are actually identical.. so unlike the PS3 where it has one PowerPC core with 7 specialised SPEs (special 'satellite' cores) within it, the 360's 3 cores are all equivalent and multipurpose, where each core can also execute two threads at the same time makes it very suitable for multi-thread titles (up to 6 threads). I should mention one issue however (not in article), the CPU has 1MB of cache.. so worst comes to worst we have 6 threads sharing off one 1MB cache, doesn't sound too accommodating.

GPU: ATi designed 'Xenos', boasts a unified shader architecture with 48 shader units. The 332 million transister GPU is also dual-die, where the bigger die acts like a more conventional GPU and the small one (daughter die) accommodates a 10MB block of embedded DRAM w/ with the hardware necessary for z & stencil, colour and Alpha processing aswell as AA. The daughter die's 10MB block is quite useful in the fact that allows the 360 to offer 'free' AA (i.e the enabling of it doesn't prove any ramifications for performance (either IQ or frame rate))..... very very nifty.
 

darksbane

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I like the sound of that GPU, its a pretty cool idea really. The CPU doesnt sound as impressive as I was expecting, a very nice piece of equipment though.
 

darksbane

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Ya, I like the idea of the daughter die, I think that could prove to be useful in a PC as well should it ever be implemented as such.
 

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Ya, but theoretically it should be possible to use the same idea on PC video cards.
 

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The daughter die system I think is quite ingenius. A gaming system which can offer free AA sampling with no performance costs? YES, please.

I think the CPU is quite nice (except for the 1MB cache lol). The main advantage of it over the PS3 is that all three PowerPC cores are identical.. plus each can execute 2 threads. The PS3 only has 1 PowerPC core.. and each of those 7 SPEs are very specialised, so in terms of overall flexibility, the XBOX's CPU seems a bit better.. for this reason too PS3 titles are harder to program. So effectively we have a 6 thread CPU which are all equivalent and versatile vs. a 7 specialised SPE system. Once multithread titles come out en masse, the XBOX could really give some nice performances over Cell.

As for the whole discussion of transferring mathematical calculations to the CPU, you guys heard of the Ageia physics card? Forgot who was developing it.. but decades ago the video card was developed.. then we had a sound card, and now there's a physics card in development. Basically it allows physics processing to be completely unloaded from the GPU/CPU to a dedicated card, allowing better performances from those cards and offers totally immersive physics details within a supported title. It sounds very promising on paper, but recently I read an article saying how the R580 was gonna implement something like that on their actual video card.. lol.
 

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I read some stuff about those physics cards not that long ago, it was my understanding that there were already some that were in use in some engineering workstations but were fairly uncommon. Though it's quite likely I misred. If ATI have implemented something like that in the R580 then it shall be interesting to see what sort of difference it makes with it on or off (assuming it would be possible to switch it on or off)
 

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Collin

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*scratches head*, yes I know the subsidiary Ageia is developing it.. but that's just the thing, I swear they are only a subsidiary branch of a larger company.. I just can't recall it right now. It would be pretty awesome to have one of those cards a system along with a juicy video and sound card too. Erm, assuming R580 doesn't make it redundant.

ATi would be smart integrating that into their cards though, because they obviously realise such a move would take off some load on the usually bottlenecking CPU which can boost performance to the overall system by quite a bit. When I first heard about that, I was scratching my head thinking why the hell ATi would R&D into this.. hehe.
 

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