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Xbox has always been the hard core gamer's console of choice.

Xbox-1 has HD compatibility already. (most games only did 480p though)
X360 has upped the ante with all games in HD resolution (1080i and the even higher 720p is awesome). The X360 will now play DVD's in progressive mode!

How many games did the other gonsoles have that were higher than 480i?

Xbox has something PS and Nintendo doesn't. An online community of loyal gamers. Now, with X360, Xbox live service is free for everyone. Free online gaming on an already proved live network.

The first gen games for X360 won't use all of it's power. These games never do. Just look at the first gen Xbox games compared to what's been released in the last year.

So what does Sony and Nintendo have going for them?

Specific game titles. Mario, Final Fantasy, Metroid, etc.

Will they make a move to get the hard core gamer? We will see at E3, but they do have a ways to go. They must have standard high def games, free online play on an intergraded online network, etc.
 
ijimk said:
Anyone have any idea the price of the xbox 360 on its release date? And game prices?

It hasn't been anounced but the speculation is between $299 - $400 . I also heard that premium game prices for all of the new systems is going to be between 60-70 bucks. We'll have to wait and see unless something is said at E3.
 
Wow my post made the front page....super sweet!

I am starting to wonder whether IBM has been selling ALL of it's high speed G5ish chips to Microsoft for the upcoming launch. I am sure they would need a few million chips...

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.
 
I'm skeptical of using phrases like "overall system floating-point performance." 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. Pixel fill rate, too-- 16 _gigasamples_ per second. How about 16 billion samples. :)

The memory specs are insane, though. They look good. Overall, I think the specs make this sound a lot better than it will actually be, though.

HDTV support. Check. Wireless. Check. Pretty evolutionary. Not much in the rest of the specs I wouldn't expect to see in PS3.

And let's not forget how undeniably UGLY this thing is. Just when I thought Microsoft couldn't make an uglier thing than the XBox, they take all the good branding elements away and replace them with horribly contrived elements. LOL. Microsoft never amazes me with their ability to bastardize good ideas in favor of bad ones.
 
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.

Yes but what doesn't make sense is that IBM and Apple agreed that Apple would get all chips first... :confused: :eek:

Or that's what I heard...
 
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.
 
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.
thanks for the link Symtex its very nice looking machine spec wise and case wise.
 
ipod and Xbox 360?

Interesting tidbit that I found on xbox.com (http://tinyurl.com/al4hk):

Steinglass: Nope. Xbox 360 gives you flexibility around where you store your music. You can still rip CDs to the console's hard drive. But you can also store music on your PC and stream it to Xbox 360, or you can stream it from any portable media player, a Rio Carbon, or an iPod.

TriXie: No way. I can plug my iPod into my Xbox 360?

Steinglass: Yep. We know that a lot of people have spent a lot of time organizing their music on their PC or portable player. We see the Xbox 360 as replacing your CD player in your entertainment center, but also as the best digital media amplifier available. Your PC is a great place to manage your music, but it's not always the best place to enjoy it. With Xbox 360 you've got one central place to listen to all your music on the best sound system in the house.


Fascinating...

w00master
 
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.



Wow, you sure gave me time to respond before you bashed me :mad:


Want the CPU? Here you go, some relevant quotes:


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? ;)


You laugh at me, proclaim I don't have knowledge I do have, treat me like an idiot, and when I post a rebuttal you say I take these threads too seriously?...

Make sure you're right before you bash someone in the future.
 
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.
 
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.


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.
 
IBM had problems supplying apple's demand when the G5 first came out. And dual core cpu's have just trickled into the PC market, I wonder how difficult it would be for them to supply a tri-core cpu for microsoft without any problems with manufacturing or defects? And for all the dumba#$%# that think this is a triple core G5. If MS is really using a G5 like chip inside the 360,don't you think Apple would have stuffed at least a dual core into a power mac by now if they could? The simple reason being it is a more complex chip and hot cpu, the G5 is just a name Apple gave to the chip design "Apple and IBM" created together. I dont think Bill Gates would like to pay royalties to Apple in every xbox 360 they sell. We'll just have to wait what Sony and Nintendo will announce to see how far or how behind Xbox 360 is in development. I can't see them have enough units for launch this christmas. My prediction shortages and lots of defects.
 
Relax, everyone

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.
 
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.


You're on the mark in every point. Thanks.
 
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.

Huh? The XBox uses standard DVD's. The movie industry already supports standard DVD's...

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.

Bill Gates also said it would ship in November.
 
One more thing:

I'm shocked to hear that so many people are upset that MS is using a "custom" IBM PPC processor. Custom cpus are everywhere:

ATMs
PDAs
Cell phones
GPS units
Printers
etc, etc

But no one gets upset when they here that! And even more, you don't often hear about people trying to mod an ATM to run OS X!
 
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.

The xbox 360 has a shared memory architecture. That basically means that, like the current xbox, the graphics processor shares the main memory; which sounds great (ie. 512MB in the 360's case), but this method is bottle-necked by the speed of the bus between the on board memory and the graphics processor. Which makes the 10MB of memory dedicated the the graphics processor interesting - the 360's graphics chip has 10MB of dedicated VRAM and access to the mainboard RAM through it's unified memory architecture.
 
Everyone seems to be saying that the processor in the xbox has in-order execution? Where'd that tidbit come from?
 
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.

If people can put Linux on a GBA and Nintendo DS, I'm sure it's possible to get Linux running fairly well on the Xbox360
 
fry said:
Everyone seems to be saying that the processor in the xbox has in-order execution? Where'd that tidbit come from?
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050309-4686.html

Arstechnica is almost certain this is the same PPC core thats in the Cell (being that that PPC core is the only IBM processor to run at >3 GHz), and all the specs fit. That processor is in-order, and by all likelyhood they are the same processor, except that Sony uses that PPC and a bunch of APU's while Microsoft just uses three of the PPC's.
 
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