Inside the Xbox 360, Part II: the Xenon CPU

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2005-06-02 10:49am

Link

Ars has another one of their lovely CPU articles up, so go read

Praxis · Post by **Praxis** » 2005-06-02 11:12am

A question I wanted to ask but didn't want to start a new thread for.

I was having a discussion about the Cell processor on another board. My stand was basicly that the Cell is designed for really good floating point performance and according to the official numbers, outperforms the XBox 360 by 2x in floating point, but when it comes down to integer the XBox 360 has 3 processors and PS3 has 1 so the X360 has around 3x better integer performance.

Someone made an interesting point; that for next gen games, developers will develop for the PowerPC processor, and essentially they'll end up designing games that use three processors on the X360 and only one on the PS3 because it takes a ton of extra work to get it to run on the Cell, and as a result, on ports, the X360 will end up getting much higher quality ports.

EDIT: Found the quote:

The rest of your argument was interesting - but again, I must reiterate the simple facts here.. In this generation, coders will be developing for PPC cores - because all 3 consoles use a G5 derived PPC core. They will *not* repeat *not* be developing for Cells SPE's, or MS's specific 3x2 layout. They will be developing threaded, portable code for PPC architecture. Given this, the 360 has already won - because it has 3 cores, which use relatively standard thread models. As I said before, 90% of games made will target this generalised X-Core PPC platform. So in effect, the PS3 has one processor, and the 360 has 3. End of story.

What do you guys think?

Vendetta · Post by **Vendetta** » 2005-06-02 12:29pm

Multiformat games are usually limited to something close to the performance of the least powerful format. Look at any current gen game that appears on PS2 and Xbox, the XBox version will have better textures and a little AA, but will ignore the shader architecture of the GPU completely.

Master of Ossus · Post by **Master of Ossus** » 2005-06-02 12:50pm

Factor 5 publicly disagrees with this assessment, for whatever good it will do.

BBC wrote:Factor 5, the team behind Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, is to concentrate on developing next-generation games for Sony's PS3, says Gamesindustry.biz.

The developers had previously worked only on Nintendo's GameCube titles, then turned its focus to Xbox games when it started next-gen development.

But Factor 5 chief, Julian Eggebrecht, said differences in processing power in the machines had changed their minds.

The PS3 uses the custom-built Cell chip while 360 uses multiple PowerPC chips.

Xon · Post by **Xon** » 2005-06-02 01:45pm

That Factor 5 article is a load of steaming bullshit.

The X360 also uses a highly customized CPU. It shares a large chuck of its internal design & implementation with the PS3 for fucks sake.

It has a god damn Dot product instruction, Microsoft has been tweaking every level of the system from the RAM, cache, CPU and instruction set!

The DVD drive should be purely off the shelf, with possibly OS drivers to read it in a different winding direction to normal DVDs like Xbox DVDs are. The network adaptor and harddrive itself are off the shelf components (custom connector on the harddrive however).

The beta developer kits for X360 are dual G4s(or was that G5s?) running a highly cutdown version of Windows XP/2k3 kernel for PPC. But they have developer hardware which is more than you can say for the PS3.

SPOOFE · Post by **SPOOFE** » 2005-06-02 02:01pm

Yeah, I'm getting sick of this "PS3 is custom, 360 is standard PPC" bullshit, too. The Ars article made a good point in this regard... if the Xenon were just standard PPC chips, why haven't we seen at least dual-cores in Macs by now?

And let's not forget the heavy customization of the graphics chip. ATI really went above and beyond the call of expectation on that one... nVidia, as usual, took the lazy man's way out.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2005-06-02 02:42pm

ggs wrote:The beta developer kits for X360 are dual G4s(or was that G5s?) running a highly cutdown version of Windows XP/2k3 kernel for PPC. But they have developer hardware which is more than you can say for the PS3.

They've been using Dual PowerMac G5s for dev workstations ... a Dual G4 would probably explode under the strain

Praxis · Post by **Praxis** » 2005-06-02 05:19pm

I'd better see Rogue Squadron on the Revolution though. Or they will pay.

Vendetta · Post by **Vendetta** » 2005-06-02 06:58pm

I Think Rebel Strike rather proved that that seam was mined out.

Surely though these new boxes can support TIE Fighter II.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2005-06-02 07:03pm

Vendetta wrote:I Think Rebel Strike rather proved that that seam was mined out.

Surely though these new boxes can support TIE Fighter II.

Going to need more buttons than are available on most controllers for proper control

Vendetta · Post by **Vendetta** » 2005-06-02 07:17pm

Not really. The X-Wing series has a hell of a lot of controls that are there for their own sake (did you ever feel like you needed an S-Foil control).

Once I got a decent throttle (Hello there, analog shoulder buttons), and didn't have to worry about that as a seperate set of buttons any more, it's plain sailing with far less buttons than the average joypad.

TLS settings might want a seperate control, but just hold down something out of the way like the Z button on the GC and map the main stick to the TLS directly, on either a triangular analogue basis like I-War or a diamond for ships with tractor beams. You could even auto-pause for the lepers in the audience.

Not hard. Joypads are far more versatile and intuitive than you think.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2005-06-02 07:35pm

Well, I'm just used to having flight combat sims with every key mapped to some use, I suppose :p

Vendetta · Post by **Vendetta** » 2005-06-02 07:45pm

Some flight combat games are never going to work without a monster joystick (you can get the Saitek X45 for the PS2 you know, 26 buttons, fully programmable to over 150 commands). X-Wing/TIE Fighter is not one of them. Most of the commands you're never going to consider using in combat, and you might as well pause the game to look at them (half of the useful ones do pause the game, like the map and goal displays)