ijimk said:Anyone have any idea the price of the xbox 360 on its release date? And game prices?
Dippo said:<snip>
IBM might not have the capacity to provide the chips for both the XBox and Apple. After the launch, hopefully Apple will be able to get some of these chips.
thanks for the link Symtex its very nice looking machine spec wise and case wise.Symtex said:Has anyone read the link I posted below ? It's freaking incredible. Those who doubt needs to read it. It very technical. Even GPL will agree with me on it. The console has potential. The ATI GPU is a beast.
ZildjianKX said:I'm a computer engineer, would you please tell me what the CPI is for the Xbox 360 PPC processor?
I didn't think so...
Don't spread crap about MHz myth and how much you know if you don't know the REAL specs of the hardware.
The PPC in the X360 is NOT a PPC970, nor a POWERx derivative (which have OOOE). In fact, as speculated = here it is the same CPU core as in the PS3, but without the vector units and there are three of them. You may argue against "speculation" but then your argueing that there is another chip exactly identical to the CPU core in PS3 that has never been seen or heard before. I find that exceedingly unlikely, especially considering that only this is the only CPU at IBM has the ability to reach 3Ghz+. In short, it is almost certainly the same, which makes a IOE processor.
EPIC doesn't count as while it is IOE it's also a 6-issue core (compared to 2 for the PPC and 3 for Pentiums) with a huge amount of cache (1.5-9MB L3, 256KB L2), and uses the IA-64 instruction set which was designed to lessen it's IOness, and it still loses to Pentiums and Athlons in integer ops. Integer performance is also the same weakness the much slimmer PPC has to face too. For more realistic CPUs, the 50% claim stands. If you dispute the 50% claim, then you dispute the guy who wrote that, not me. Floating point ops will be much better, which is the PPC's strength, but that's useless in emulation so backwards compatibility is still simply impossible.
HyperionX said:The much shorter pipelined out-of-order and wider P3 will likely have a similar if not superior IPC, and in some case will simple OWN the PPC because of it's out-of-order nature. Learn what out-of-order execution means, it's history, etc. It's a very important aspect of a CPU.
An in-order chip has approximately half the performance of an out-of-order CPU (reference) given equivalent technology. This would imply the IPC of the PPC is half that of the P3 assuming perfectly linear scaling to clockspeed. However, there's a lot more to it than that so I'm not making any guesses and it varies too much anyways. However, emulation is pretty straightforward; it all depends on it's ability to convert single-threaded x86 instructions into single-threaded PPC instructions and then process them. Unfortunately, the fact the the PPC is designed for great multithreading makes it terrible candidate for this (It's deeply pipelined and has SMT). Plus PowerPC just suck at the integer apps in most benchmarks I've seen, which are probably going to be the most difficult to emulate, so IMO it'll never work and you'll have to be slightly crazy to even try.
So what? You're trying to emulate a 3-way, out-of-order execution x86 chip with a (relatively) short pipeline (what the P3 in the Xbox is) with a 2-way in-order deeply pipelined PPC chip (what the CPU in the Xbox2 is). Let me explain. The CPU in the Xbox2 is a very simple design and is "skinny," meant for very high clockspeeds, but will have bad IPC (instructions per clock). The P3 on the other had is a much wider design and is more complex, slower in clockspeed (theoretically, since they're different generations of chips) but has good IPC. Somethings will be very suited to the first way but other things will be much more suited on the second CPU. In short they're fundamentally difference designs, and even though the PPC may be moving at 3Ghz and the P3 at 733Mhz, there should still be some cases where the P3 will win. Emulating this will be an ugly, buggy mess I seriously doubt they can do.
mandis said:HA! HA! HA! HA!
Chill out mate!!
You take these threads far too seriously...
Why don't you go and have a muffin or something?![]()
ijimk said:Anyone have any idea the price of the xbox 360 on its release date? And game prices?
shadowguy said:Nintendos Revolution is rumored to run on a custom 4 core G5 running at 2.5Ghz each.
Xbox 360 is supposed to run with the R500 video card, while the Revolution is supposed to be running an R520. The Revolution will be a lot better, power wise, than the Xbox 360.
hodgjy said:Ok, everyone needs to chill a little bit.
From what I've read here, and elsewhere on the rumor mills, this is what I've concluded:
1) The processor is not a G5.
2) The processor has similar characteristics to the power core, but that's it.
3) It has a very reduced instruction code--specific to the regular needs of the Xbox.
4) It only calculates in-order operations.
5) Because of #3 and #4, it is able to bump up the speeds.
6) High clock speeds does not mean more performance.
7) The cpu is designed for gaming graphics. It won't run spreadsheets or Pagemaker, or Filemaker as well as a real G5.
8) Apple and Steve Jobs did not get shafted by IBM. The cpu is "custom," designed for the Xbox, and it's highly stripped down. I'm sure IBM is hard at work making improved "true" G5s for Apple and others to use.
What does this mean for Mac users?
1) It's not a G5. The current G5 is a better processor--more versatile and powerful. I'm sure IBM has the next gen G5s in the works.
2) It won't run Linux or OS X worth a crap because it has such a reduced instruction set and no out-of-order instructions. To even run Linux or OS X, you'll probably have to use an elaborate emulator, which will butcher performance even more. Even if some savy programmer could port a native version of OS X to the XBox cpu, it still won't run anywhere as good as on a "true" G5.
3) The 3.2 Ghz speed doesn't necessarily mean overall performance. It's a stripped out chip designed for gaming.
alandail said:It doesn't matter - HD-DVD is the killer app. If MS can get the movie industry to support XBOX 360 instead of the long delayed HD-DVD formats, they will take over both the video game and the video industry.
An official spokesperson for XBOX 360 was on Cold Pizza this morning and he said that they don't expect to have supply or the XBOX 360 ready until November of next year. I think he was trying to pull the "promise less, deliver more" tactic, but whatever the case, no one could understand why they would put the XBOX 360 on MTV if it was still a year and a half away.
Frobozz said:Also, what is up with the 10 MB embedded DRAM in the graphics processor? Is that the VRAM? If so that's next to nothing.
hodgjy said:...
2) It won't run Linux or OS X worth a crap because it has such a reduced instruction set and no out-of-order instructions. To even run Linux or OS X, you'll probably have to use an elaborate emulator, which will butcher performance even more. Even if some savy programmer could port a native version of OS X to the XBox cpu, it still won't run anywhere as good as on a "true" G5.
3) The 3.2 Ghz speed doesn't necessarily mean overall performance. It's a stripped out chip designed for gaming.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050309-4686.htmlfry said:Everyone seems to be saying that the processor in the xbox has in-order execution? Where'd that tidbit come from?