Xbox2 architecture revealed

[D.D.]

according to this : http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/mmedia/...426094105.html

Wow, if this is true, then xbox2 will indeed be a pretty powerful machine.

Microsoft will use IBM’s POWER 64-bit processors in the Xbox 2....What may seem a pretty hard to believe is that Microsoft wants more than 1 such chip to power its forthcoming console, according to the scheme published there are three of such chips.

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The PS3 Cell Processor Explained Page, IBM Research's Introduction to Cell Multiprocessor and Cell Processor Programming Guide

[Raziel]

IMO, this is pretty unrealistic, 3 cores on the CPU ? ah, IBM's working on a dual core at 65nm, not tri-core, besides, 3.5GHZ tri-core CPUs, k, get some serious water cooling.
Just the CPU would cost twice the price of the Xbox 1

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[Chrono Archangel]

hmmmm 3 CPU's?? how are they going to sell that thing....fabrication costs are gonna be way too high.....1000$?
there nuts...
thats not a console anymore....

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[Katsuya]

Originally Posted by Chrono Archangel

hmmmm 3 CPU's?? how are they going to sell that thing....fabrication costs are gonna be way too high.....1000$?
there nuts...
thats not a console anymore....

What are talking about? PS2 has multiple CPUs

Anyway when everyone saw the specs for PS2 and Xbox it was said they would coast 108,550yen or more. but it only ended up being 32,500yen at launch (still kind of pricey)

I waited over a year to get mine. (Nothing good was on it at the time ) I got it for 18,900yen damn good price if you ask me. (about $175)

[Vahid]

3.5ghz x 3......pretty fast.......pretty hot as well... but i think this was just a concept design for it, no way it will have a 3.5ghz proc....and 3 of them at that

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[Raziel]

Katsuya : the problem is that it's a tri-core CPU, it should cost may more to produce than a single core CPU, not to mention the development costs

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[D.D.]

hahah well...whens the xbox2 supposed to come out? im thinking maybe sometime early 2006? neways, by then these parts may have dramatically decreased in price.

as for the tricore CPU...iirc from the time the opteron was released and a whole lot of hoopla was made about how it would support multicores, if a cpu is designed to be multicore neway (which i gather, from raziel's post, is what IBM is doing), it shudn't be a problem to simply add another core as the architecture shud be scalable. but then again i cud juss plain wrong lol.

either way, as vahid pointed out, this is may well be a completely wrong concept design.

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The PS3 Cell Processor Explained Page, IBM Research's Introduction to Cell Multiprocessor and Cell Processor Programming Guide

[Quark]

According to the website it's 3 seperate chips, each dual core. I see a few issues with this.

1) Parallel processing isn't well done yet. Programming methodology (do this, then this, then this) make it hard, and overhead is a pain. It'll be alot easier for a console since it's a set number of processors, where I assume the programmers would hardcode which processor they want to do what, but it still has drawbacks.
2) One shared L2 cache of 1MB. You're essentially splitting that into 3 smaller caches. And since this is a multi-chip implementation, it means the L2 cache will no longer be right next to the cores (current PC CPUs have L2 cache on the chip itself, right next to the core). That brings extra latency. This could be alot worse depending on which cache implementation they use. If they use the same as Intel (duplicate L1 cache, almost no overhead), then you're left with only 832KB of effective L2 cache. They can take the same approach as AMD, where nothing is duplicated, that just adds overhead because you're swapping back and forth.
3) There's only 64KB L1 cache per chip. Typical processors have 128KB L1 cache. With a dual core implementation, this makes it a potential killer of a bottleneck. All that extra MHz could show very little benefit, which brings me to my next point.
4) The MHz rating seems to be, well, optimistic. To put it mildly.
5) 65nm. Great in theory. However, I have two questions. One, as recently pointed out in an Ars Technica news topic, signal integrity is becoming a problem. You can't maximize the chip speed until you make sure there's no leaky signals. Also, what's the yield? Getting a few chips for samples is alot easier than mass producing.

So it all sounds great in theory, but how's it really going? I want the whole story.

[Raziel]

Quark, 65nm is for IBM's prototype, I didn't say it'd be for the Xbox2.

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[Quark]

That's what the webpage reported. It also had the line: "POWER 976 is expected to be a dual-core processor able to handle two threads at once. What may seem a pretty hard to believe is that Microsoft wants more than 1 such chip to power its forthcoming console, according to the scheme published there are three of such chips."

[Seta-San]

what could they possibly need that much computing power for? Halo? Nintendo's Next System will easily outsell because nintendo has already said that they weren't aiming for the most powerful system meaning much lower cost. not to mention they said they wanted a small system like gamecube which means lower development costs across the board.

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[INCA]

I guess specs for ps3 got microsoft making specs comparable or better that ps3. I think Microsoft wants to set itself as most powerfulest spec wise system. Just like when Xbox came out. Im just worried about the price for this system.

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[Kane]

Seta-san, if you are a Nintendo fan, you should know that it's not the price of the console, or the specs, but hte games that matter. Sure the specs reel in the early adopters, but when you think about buying a console, you look at the games on it.

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[RZetlin]

I would like to know how are the programmers going to utilize the three processors?

I heard the programmers had difficulties with the PS2 processor, will they run into more problems with the Xbox 2 processors.

I got this feeling the processors will be underused in game development.

3.5 GHz CPUs won't be considered powerful by the time the Xbox 2 comes out. The PC will probably be hitting 5-6 GHz CPUs by then.

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[Dark Watcher]

RZetlin..you make a good point. In the early going of the big 3, developers struggled with PS2's multi processors..the first gen games told that tale..hehe
Xbox? probably their fav since it is identical to a PC architecture..heck..even GC was designed to be developer friendly.
Game developers have hated multi-proc designs since Jaguar and Saturn. Sony is actually the first company to successfully drive a multi-proc console. We suppose Micro$oft is banking on this success. Unless the procs work as one similar to Turbografix 16..or split like Neo Geo

Check our article for more history on Multi-Processor consoles, and the effect on designers
http://darkwatcher.psxfanatics.com/c...oprocessor.htm

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[l3illyl3ob]

err, intel hopes that the pentium 4 prescott will reach 5ghz by 2005. By the time the xbox 2 gets into mass production, 3.5ghz processors will be less than 100 bucks, watch.

[JanusX]

Sales will influence developers to make games for a system, low priced system yeilds more owners which yeilds more games.

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[Clements]

Originally Posted by l3illyl3ob

err, intel hopes that the pentium 4 prescott will reach 5ghz by 2005. By the time the xbox 2 gets into mass production, 3.5ghz processors will be less than 100 bucks, watch.

But these aren't you average PC CPU. They are IBM multi-core 64-bit power processors. The manufacturing costs of this "console" will be astronomical, and judging from the games on the original XBox, this thing is hardly likely to sell many units when competition from rivals will probably have much better games and cheaper hardware, and due to what likes like a very different architectecture to PCs the modders might not be as happy as they were with the first XBox.

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[Katsuya]

I've said this before but...

Question, do you know how much money Sony and Microsoft make off of every PlayStation2 or XboX sold?

Answer, Nothing!!!!!!

Why? Because the systems cost much more then what we (the consumer) pays for them.

It took Sony's game division way over a year to get out of the red!

You can only make money from games and Licensing fees. That's the way the game industry works.

A game system will never cost more then 35,000yen (about $300usd) (or 250euro) (But then... inflation ultimately will go up but it should be comparable)

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Last edited by Katsuya; April 28th, 2004 at 22:28..

[l3illyl3ob]

yes, but this will rank into over 1000 dollars for production costs, that's more than twice as much as the initial ps2 production cost, they'd take YEARS getting out of the whole, and nobody would want to risk that.