Nato King
10-25-2005, 07:37 PM
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IBM has revealed some new details of the microprocessor that powers the Xbox 360. The IBM-built chip features three customized PowerPC computing engines that can each handle two simultaneous tasks at clock speeds greater than three gigahertz.
The chip was customized for Microsoft in less than 24 months from the original contract.
"Working with IBM gave us the flexibility to design a processor to give game developers the kind of targeted power they need to make great games," said Todd Holmdahl, Microsoft vice- president of Xbox hardware.
The original Xbox, released in 2001, used an Intel Corp. 733-megahertz Pentium III microprocessor. The new wonder chip from IBM features a customized version of IBM's 64-bit PowerPC core. The chip includes three of these cores, each with two simultaneous threads and clock speeds greater than 3GHz. This makes the Xbox 360 around 20 times more powerful than the original Xbox. The chip features 165 million transistors and is fabricated using IBM's 90-nanometer technology to reduce heat and improve performance. It can handle 9 billion dot product operations per second, can crunch 128 VMX-128 registers per hardware thread, and has 1MB of L2 cache.
IBM also incorporated high-speed connection between the microprocessor and the Xbox's graphics processor developed by ATI. The graphics hardware can read directly from what's stored on the primary processor's onboard memory.
IBM is also working on the Cell processor for the PlayStation 3, in conjunction with Sony and Toshiba.
IBM has revealed some new details of the microprocessor that powers the Xbox 360. The IBM-built chip features three customized PowerPC computing engines that can each handle two simultaneous tasks at clock speeds greater than three gigahertz.
The chip was customized for Microsoft in less than 24 months from the original contract.
"Working with IBM gave us the flexibility to design a processor to give game developers the kind of targeted power they need to make great games," said Todd Holmdahl, Microsoft vice- president of Xbox hardware.
The original Xbox, released in 2001, used an Intel Corp. 733-megahertz Pentium III microprocessor. The new wonder chip from IBM features a customized version of IBM's 64-bit PowerPC core. The chip includes three of these cores, each with two simultaneous threads and clock speeds greater than 3GHz. This makes the Xbox 360 around 20 times more powerful than the original Xbox. The chip features 165 million transistors and is fabricated using IBM's 90-nanometer technology to reduce heat and improve performance. It can handle 9 billion dot product operations per second, can crunch 128 VMX-128 registers per hardware thread, and has 1MB of L2 cache.
IBM also incorporated high-speed connection between the microprocessor and the Xbox's graphics processor developed by ATI. The graphics hardware can read directly from what's stored on the primary processor's onboard memory.
IBM is also working on the Cell processor for the PlayStation 3, in conjunction with Sony and Toshiba.