Was surfing and came across this quote at Red Herring...
"IBM's power-based PC chip [which powers the Xbox 360] includes three cores, each with two simultaneous threads and clocking speeds greater than 3 GHz [actually 3.2Ghz], the company officials said at the Fall Processor Forum in San Jose, California. The chip includes 165 million transistors and was created using IBM's 90-nanometer 'Silicon on Insulator' technology."
Okay, so let me get this straight... Three cores in a single chip, each core the equivalent of a hyper-threaded core found in many Intel chips these days? So, basically six virtual processors? And they're cranking at roughly a teraflop. Wow!
And that got me to thinking about what else will be in there, so I googled my way to xbox.com, where I found out quite a few little tidbits about the hardware we will all be scrambling for in a month or so...
- Total of 512MB 700Mhz GDDR3 RAM (shared between main board and graphics). I imagined their being more, but it's the same as PS-3 (except that PS-3 splits out video and main memory), so we'll see. Also very interesting is the 21.6 GB/s front-side bus. Wow!
- For a graphics card... 9 billion dot product operations/second, 10MB embedded DRAM,
48-way parallel FLOPs, 500 million triangles per second, 16 gigasamples/second fill rate, 48 billion shader operations/second. To quote a classic movie, "Now, I don't know what any of that means, but it sounds pretty bad!"
- Speaking of graphics, games will now be publishable in HD. Interesting to say the least.
- 20GB HDD, which is no big deal. But it's rumored to "detachable and upgradeable", which is a HUGE deal. Wonder if there'll be a need / desire to drop in that 300GB SATA drive?
- Wireless controllers, though I am in wait-and-see mode as to whether or not the wireless part creates a noticeable lag as it does with the original xbox. I've seen people (who are far better than I am at Halo 2) fragged because of it.
- And it's interesting that the box is shipping with a headset that allows you to talk to other players in multiplayer environments. That will be quite interesting, I'm sure!
And there are probably a hundred more features / specs we could talk about (complete discussion of the specs), but those are the big ones. Are y'all planning on picking up one of these puppies? Microsoft has them at $400 for the premium bundle (and I can't imagine not going the extra mile here, though Matt Whitlock sees that differently in a related article he posted a month ago), so they're pricy. But is all this power / coolness worth the cash?
My question to the community: Are you in?
PS - Thought you might like to read the article that got me started: Link to Red Herring article
