IBM says it successfully delivered the chip to Microsoft in less than 24 months from signing the contract with Microsoft, and in time for the "massive worldwide product launch" of the Xbox 360 leading up to the 2005 year-end holiday season. Microsoft plans to formally launch Xbox 360 simultaneously in the US, Japan, and Europe later this year.
"The Xbox 360 chip set was designed from the ground up specifically for high-definition gaming and entertainment," said Todd Holmdahl, Microsoft's corporate vice president of Xbox hardware.
Interestingly, none of Microsoft's current Windows or Windows Embedded operating systems officially supports the PowerPC processor architecture (Windows hasn't supported PowerPC since Windows NT 4.0 SP3), giving rise to
considerable speculation as to what operating system runs inside the Xbox 360.
SpecsThe chip contains three identical, customized IBM 64-bit multi-threaded PowerPC-based CPU cores, each implementing two simultaneous instruction threads and featuring clock speeds in excess of 3 GHz. The cores are enhanced with specialized function VMX acceleration for gaming applications, as well as with a high speed 128-bit vector unit. Additionally, the processor includes a 1 MB Shared L2 Cache with custom logic for high-speed data streaming for graphics and system applications, and provides an aggregate front side bus (FSB) bandwidth of 21.6 GB/sec, IBM added.
The chip is highly configurable and programmable, based on IBM's eFUSE technology. It contains 165 million transistors, and is fabricated in IBM's 90 nanometer Silicon on Insulator (SOI) technology to reduce heat and improve performance, according to IBM.
The processor is being fabricated in two locations -- at IBM's East Fishkill, NY fab; and at Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing in Singapore.
Hardware specifications of the Xbox 360 are at the bottom of
this article.
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