It's about a month away until the release to retail of Microsoft's Xbox 360, but IBM have traveled to the Fall Processor Forum in San Jose, California, to discuss the processor they developed for the new gaming platform. Information is already coming out and it is rather interesting. It's
being reported that the Xbox IBM processor will come with 3 customized PowerPC "engines" each engine can handle two simultaneous tasks at clock speeds greater than 3 gigahertz. Not only that, but they developed a special bus that gives the ATI graphics a hotline to the processor, which sounds kind of exciting due to the claimed data bandwidth possible with this configuration.
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IBM also worked with Microsoft to create a custom bus for the chip, allowing for a highway of data to flow directly between the CPU and the graphics chip. The proprietary bus can move data at a rate of 21.6 gigabytes per second, compared to 4 gigabytes a second in a PC. The graphics chip itself could fetch data from the cache, or a small amount of memory that serves as a holding place for data, and begin working on that data immediately rather than waiting for slower main memory to fetch it. "It's not just a new variant of the PowerPC," Spillinger said. "It's a change in the instruction set. Our willingness to play around with the core of the chip shows what we would do for the customer. It's truly a custom microprocessor." |
Well, this is some pretty impressive figures at least for the graphics. So far it's just a lot of talk, but it sure sounds better than a 733Mhz P3! However, maybe there is something to the hype, let's hope so. No matter what, this machine is a lot of hardware for 400 bucks it seems and only $300 without a hard drive. We have to wonder if Microsoft has lined up a lot of games that are going to take advantage of the IBM chip and this bandwidth advantage with the graphics system. But more important is if the games like Kameo, King Kong and Call of Duty 2 are going to be good enough in entertainent value to move this box and make it profitable for Microsoft.
Source: Mercury News
