NEWS - Tuesday, February 10, 2004
ATI Glad That Xbox 2 Got PowerPC Chip
A READER HAS DROPPED us – and AMD Zone a line – about why Microsoft decided to go with the PowerPC microprocessor for the Xbox 2 rather than an X86 based processor. It seems that ATI which will be supplying the graphics chip to the Xbox 2, and desiring the chip to be much faster than the upcoming R400 chip, has tapped Intrinsity’s Fast14 dynamic logic process in the construction of this new chip. Intrinsity as you may know is an Austin, TX based firm that has in its employ quite a few engineers from another Austin based firm known formerly as Exponential Technology. Those guys, back in the mid 90s, were trying to design the next generation PowerPC chip known as the X704 which would have leapfrogged all other processors both X-86 and PowerPC by coming in clocked at the then unheard of speed of 533 MHz, effectively more than double other processors of that time. They were trying to do this by employing a technique of chip making from the mainframe and supercomputing world known as bi-polar logic, a form of dynamic logic. This form of chip making produces a much higher performance chip than the standard CMOS chip.Source: http://www.theinquirer.net/
