As rosy as the Xbox 360 sounds, there are obviously some unknowns that
could dampen the party. The two main unknowns are cost and backward
compatibility. Price has been and will always be one of the great
sticking points for any new piece of hardware. The challenge for
hardware manufacturers is to find the sweet spot between what consumers
will comfortably pay for the latest, greatest console and what price
won't cause the manufacturer to go bankrupt. Historically, hardware
manufacturers have always sold their consoles at a loss, while making
money on software. The trick has always been balance, and we think
that's going to hold true for the 360. All the console's components and
features don't come cheaply, due to their customized nature, so it's
going to be interesting to see how much it retails for.
Microsoft learned from the Xbox that if you want to control the price and performance "destiny" of the console, you have to "own the silicon." As you may remember, Intel and Nvidia provided the silicon for the first Xbox, and Microsoft found that it's much more difficult to achieve cost reductions year after year when your suppliers have prices locked in under contract. Even though a console may offer the same functionality over time, manufacturers reduce production costs over time by incorporating new technology, improving integration, and introducing other cost-cutting measures that help make the hardware more affordable to produce.
When design work started up on the 360, Microsoft decided it needed to own the actual chip designs instead of simply buying chips from suppliers. Microsoft worked with IBM and ATI to architect the CPU and graphics chip for the next Xbox. Since Microsoft owns the chip designs, it can place its own chip orders with the third-party semiconductor foundries that produce the silicon. Microsoft also decides when it's appropriate to move to a smaller manufacturing process, like going from 90nm to 65nm, to reduce costs.
The Xbox 360 will have a custom-designed IBM processor that has three processing cores, each capable of handling two threads, or two separate applications. Six total threads provides a lot of processing power, but it adds to the software complexity, because you now have to manage resources between all the processes. Microsoft has a lot of experience with multithreaded applications, and the company is confident that developing on the processor won't be a problem. It might take developers a while to figure out the most efficient way to use all the threads, but the large number of threads will give programmers a lot of flexibility. The 165-million transistor chip will run at 3.2GHz, and it'll have a vacuum-sealed, water-cooled heat sink to handle heat dissipation.
Microsoft will pair the IBM processor with an advanced 500MHz ATI graphics chip. The ATI chip will have "48-way parallel floating-point dynamically-scheduled shader pipelines." Today's PC desktop video cards max out at 16 pipelines, but the technologies aren't quite the same. The new ATI graphics chip will be based on a new unified shader model that processes vertex and pixels through the same multipurpose pipelines. Current PC video cards have pipelines dedicated to pixel processing or vertex processing. ATI's current top-of-the-line Radeon X850 XT PE graphics chip, for example, has 16-pixel pipelines and 6-vertex pipelines. We don't know how these new hybrid pipelines will perform compared to the older, dedicated pipeline designs, but with 48 of 'em, we're betting that the next-gen ATI chip will live up to expectations.
This advanced technology has allowed Microsoft to substantially raise the bar on visual requirements for Xbox 360 games. Next-generation games must support at least 720p HDTV resolution, 5.1 multichannel sound, and full 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio (no letterboxing). Games must also have at least 2x antialiasing to improve image quality. According to Microsoft's Peter Moore, "Jaggies need to be a thing of the past," and there's no doubt the Xbox 360 hardware will be powerful enough to make them so. The graphics chip will also have 10MB of superfast embedded DRAM, which is just large enough to fit in an HD resolution frame buffer with antialiasing.
The Xbox 360 will have 512MB of system memory, which is shared between the CPU and the GPU. However, the graphics will take up much of the space since the HD video requirements mean developers will have to use larger high-resolution textures to give games extra detail. The extra memory also allows for larger game levels for improved gameplay. Sound will be 5.1 out of the box, but since the all the audio is done in software, the Xbox 360 can easily support additional sound channels if games wanted to move up to 6.1 or 7.1-channel output. Check out our Xbox 360 hardware page for a full list of specifications.
Microsoft learned from the Xbox that if you want to control the price and performance "destiny" of the console, you have to "own the silicon." As you may remember, Intel and Nvidia provided the silicon for the first Xbox, and Microsoft found that it's much more difficult to achieve cost reductions year after year when your suppliers have prices locked in under contract. Even though a console may offer the same functionality over time, manufacturers reduce production costs over time by incorporating new technology, improving integration, and introducing other cost-cutting measures that help make the hardware more affordable to produce.
When design work started up on the 360, Microsoft decided it needed to own the actual chip designs instead of simply buying chips from suppliers. Microsoft worked with IBM and ATI to architect the CPU and graphics chip for the next Xbox. Since Microsoft owns the chip designs, it can place its own chip orders with the third-party semiconductor foundries that produce the silicon. Microsoft also decides when it's appropriate to move to a smaller manufacturing process, like going from 90nm to 65nm, to reduce costs.
Avoiding Bottlenecks
As we've seen on the PC side, it's very important to make sure the CPU and GPU are well matched to make sure the system functions at maximum efficiency. If you pair an underpowered CPU with a powerful GPU, the CPU will bottleneck system performance, and all that extra GPU power will go to waste. Microsoft decided early on to go with a multicore CPU design after deciding that a superfast single-core CPU wouldn't be a viable option, since the processor would be difficult to shrink down when the time would come to reduce costs. This shift from single-core to multicore processing is happening right now in the desktop market, as Intel and AMD are just starting to ship dual-core processors this year.The Xbox 360 will have a custom-designed IBM processor that has three processing cores, each capable of handling two threads, or two separate applications. Six total threads provides a lot of processing power, but it adds to the software complexity, because you now have to manage resources between all the processes. Microsoft has a lot of experience with multithreaded applications, and the company is confident that developing on the processor won't be a problem. It might take developers a while to figure out the most efficient way to use all the threads, but the large number of threads will give programmers a lot of flexibility. The 165-million transistor chip will run at 3.2GHz, and it'll have a vacuum-sealed, water-cooled heat sink to handle heat dissipation.
The Graphics Processor
Microsoft will pair the IBM processor with an advanced 500MHz ATI graphics chip. The ATI chip will have "48-way parallel floating-point dynamically-scheduled shader pipelines." Today's PC desktop video cards max out at 16 pipelines, but the technologies aren't quite the same. The new ATI graphics chip will be based on a new unified shader model that processes vertex and pixels through the same multipurpose pipelines. Current PC video cards have pipelines dedicated to pixel processing or vertex processing. ATI's current top-of-the-line Radeon X850 XT PE graphics chip, for example, has 16-pixel pipelines and 6-vertex pipelines. We don't know how these new hybrid pipelines will perform compared to the older, dedicated pipeline designs, but with 48 of 'em, we're betting that the next-gen ATI chip will live up to expectations.
This advanced technology has allowed Microsoft to substantially raise the bar on visual requirements for Xbox 360 games. Next-generation games must support at least 720p HDTV resolution, 5.1 multichannel sound, and full 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio (no letterboxing). Games must also have at least 2x antialiasing to improve image quality. According to Microsoft's Peter Moore, "Jaggies need to be a thing of the past," and there's no doubt the Xbox 360 hardware will be powerful enough to make them so. The graphics chip will also have 10MB of superfast embedded DRAM, which is just large enough to fit in an HD resolution frame buffer with antialiasing.
The Xbox 360 will have 512MB of system memory, which is shared between the CPU and the GPU. However, the graphics will take up much of the space since the HD video requirements mean developers will have to use larger high-resolution textures to give games extra detail. The extra memory also allows for larger game levels for improved gameplay. Sound will be 5.1 out of the box, but since the all the audio is done in software, the Xbox 360 can easily support additional sound channels if games wanted to move up to 6.1 or 7.1-channel output. Check out our Xbox 360 hardware page for a full list of specifications.
No comments:
Post a Comment