X-Box 2 specs

[HyperionX]

XBox2 backwards compatible or no?

I think that there will be no backwards compatibility. No HD = no emulation of Xb1 games that uses it. On top of that they changed practically every single chip in the system (CPU, GPU, media chip, etc). Feels to me like they'll have one helluva time emulating Xbox1.

The 7GB DVDs is retardedly dumb. That's LESS than what they have now! And I'm sure they are aware of Bill Gates "640k ought to be enough for anybody" statement, even if it was false. Expect either low grade graphics, very short games, or multiple discs.

[JointStrikeFighter]

So is this officila or not?

It seems...dissapointing *sigh*

[Praxis]

So is this officila or not?

It seems...dissapointing *sigh*

Yup.

[DarkSilver]

I'm still waiting to hear on the NR, but I'm not exactly sure if Nintendo will be announcing it at the GDC.

I'm hoping like hell they do. My time and money, right now anyway, is focused on either the PS3 or the NR. With Nintendo realiezing thier mistakes, and actually getting some of thier third party developers back (capcom and quare are making some games again for Nintendo), they may be able to pull off the NR. If, that is, they can stay away from the kiddie games that had come on the N64 and a good bit no the GC.

HEre's to hoping within the nxt two days, Sony and Nintendo speak on what's going on in thier department.

If not, we'll have to wait another month or two for E3 (gods I wish I was going to that this year)

[wautd]

Bah, apart from my old NES 8-bit sytem 2 decades ago I never had a console. I'm planning to buy the NintendoDS that comes out tomorrow tough

edit: fuck now I have the Super Mario Bros tune stuck in my head again

[Xon]

I think that there will be no backwards compatibility. No HD = no emulation of Xb1 games that uses it.

Say it with me now: No harddrives does not mean no mass storage device.

Never mind the Windows OS(which it uses a version of), is biult from the ground up to be able to page stuff to offline storage.

On top of that they changed practically every single chip in the system (CPU, GPU, media chip, etc). Feels to me like they'll have one helluva time emulating Xbox1.

And?

The thing is still coded against some version of DirectX, most of the lowlevel Windows stuff is all the same.

Lets not let the minor fact that Microsoft produces some of the better virtual machine emulators around, and that they migh have had some ISA changes to help emulation(they are going to be ordering in bulk remember).

[Praxis]

I'm still waiting to hear on the NR, but I'm not exactly sure if Nintendo will be announcing it at the GDC.

I'm hoping like hell they do. My time and money, right now anyway, is focused on either the PS3 or the NR. With Nintendo realiezing thier mistakes, and actually getting some of thier third party developers back (capcom and quare are making some games again for Nintendo), they may be able to pull off the NR. If, that is, they can stay away from the kiddie games that had come on the N64 and a good bit no the GC.

HEre's to hoping within the nxt two days, Sony and Nintendo speak on what's going on in thier department.

If not, we'll have to wait another month or two for E3 (gods I wish I was going to that this year)

I doubt it, I believe they intend to announce everything at E3 from their statements.

I predict we will see Nintendo role out their DS online service during the keynote tomorrow, which will be carried over to the Revolution when it comes out.


BTW, speaking on the subject of the Revolution!

http://cube.ign.com/articles/594/594834p1.html

IGN interviewed Reggie (head of Nintendo marketting) at GDC yesterday.

And we're committed to wireless interactive play for DS. Mr. Iwata will have some information about that in his keynote speech. In terms of GameCube, I think in fairness we at Nintendo haven't done a great job of providing the Internet capability tools to our developers to create games for GameCube. We need to address that for all of our future systems and we're doing that. In terms of Revolution and its wireless capability, stay tuned -- more to come. We are absolutely committed to the sense of community and the worldwide sense of playing games against each other. We're going to be delivering that on every future system to the best of our ability.

It's confirmed! My prediction was right; the Nintendo Revolution has wireless! 802.11b!
I've suspected this ever since Reggie said that the Revolution could connect to the DS without any extra hardware but the GameCube would need extra hardware (a little slipup there). But now he's specificly hinted to the Revolution having wireless capability.

Whoohoo.

If I get it (which I probably will unless Nintendo completely screws it up somehow, in which case PS3 is my second choice), the Revolution will be my first online console. I never bothered to buy the broadband adapter + a wireless bridge to play one or two GC games online, but if it has built in wireless...yippeee!!!

[HyperionX]

Say it with me now: No harddrives does not mean no mass storage device.

The Xbox HD caches over 2GB of data. Any mass storage device will have to be huge to replace the HD. And this is just the beginning of your emulation troubles.

Never mind the Windows OS(which it uses a version of), is biult from the ground up to be able to page stuff to offline storage.

Huh? What difference does this make?

On top of that they changed practically every single chip in the system (CPU, GPU, media chip, etc). Feels to me like they'll have one helluva time emulating Xbox1.

And?

The thing is still coded against some version of DirectX, most of the lowlevel Windows stuff is all the same.[/quote]

No it is not. The media chip is not based on DirectX. The GPU had proprietary calls. It use to have an IMC which it appears not be the case now. The IO chips and related subsystems all seem to have been moved around.

Lets not let the minor fact that Microsoft produces some of the better virtual machine emulators around, and that they migh have had some ISA changes to help emulation(they are going to be ordering in bulk remember).

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.

[SPOOFE]

The Xbox HD caches over 2GB of data.

Cite?

[HyperionX]

The Xbox HD caches over 2GB of data.

Cite?

Dressed

Dress your links, lazy bum - Phong

[Xon]

The Xbox HD caches over 2GB of data. Any mass storage device will have to be huge to replace the HD. And this is just the beginning of your emulation troubles.

This is mostlikely a setting which controlls how much disk space it uses, and the Xbox2 can have a harddrive added to it.

Also flash drives are cheap when ordered in bulk, not that it matters much. Every console sells for under its actual value to make at launch.

Huh? What difference does this make?

It is an integral part of the design of Windows to have mass storage for it to dump ram pages to.

No it is not. The media chip is not based on DirectX. The GPU had proprietary calls. It use to have an IMC which it appears not be the case now. The IO chips and related subsystems all seem to have been moved around.

Most of the Graphics are still via DirectX, regardless of how the implementation is changed. And they do use drivers to abstract away hardware differences.

Still not a big hassel to emulate.

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.

Not even fucking close.

The original XBox chip is a single celeron 730mhz processor. The Xbox2 is a 3ghz 3 core PPC chip. PPC chips have a high IPC compared to the equivelent intel x86 chip, and the one in the xbox2 is so much better than the xbox it isnt funny.

Not that it damn well matters much. Microsoft already knows how to write a reasonable high proformance emulator for a PPC processer to emulate a x86 chip linky

[DarkSilver]

I doubt it, I believe they intend to announce everything at E3 from their statements.

I predict we will see Nintendo role out their DS online service during the keynote tomorrow, which will be carried over to the Revolution when it comes out.

BTW, speaking on the subject of the Revolution!

http://cube.ign.com/articles/594/594834p1.html

IGN interviewed Reggie (head of Nintendo marketting) at GDC yesterday.

And we're committed to wireless interactive play for DS. Mr. Iwata will have some information about that in his keynote speech. In terms of GameCube, I think in fairness we at Nintendo haven't done a great job of providing the Internet capability tools to our developers to create games for GameCube. We need to address that for all of our future systems and we're doing that. In terms of Revolution and its wireless capability, stay tuned -- more to come. We are absolutely committed to the sense of community and the worldwide sense of playing games against each other. We're going to be delivering that on every future system to the best of our ability.

It's confirmed! My prediction was right; the Nintendo Revolution has wireless! 802.11b!
I've suspected this ever since Reggie said that the Revolution could connect to the DS without any extra hardware but the GameCube would need extra hardware (a little slipup there). But now he's specificly hinted to the Revolution having wireless capability.

Whoohoo.

If I get it (which I probably will unless Nintendo completely screws it up somehow, in which case PS3 is my second choice), the Revolution will be my first online console. I never bothered to buy the broadband adapter + a wireless bridge to play one or two GC games online, but if it has built in wireless...yippeee!!!

Count me in on that bandwagon also then, short of Nintendo doing a complete fuckup, my money is gonna goto to the Revolution. I ust set up a 802.11 B/G nework in my house, I have the slim PS2, but I'm not going online with it (not yet anyway....)

I may still get the PS3, but not until after I'm solid with my Revolution.

If the NR's games look half as badassed as the new Zelda game, I forsee Xbox going quickly down the crapper.

[phongn]

The original XBox chip is a single celeron 730mhz processor. The Xbox2 is a 3ghz 3 core PPC chip. PPC chips have a high IPC compared to the equivelent intel x86 chip, and the one in the xbox2 is so much better than the xbox it isnt funny.

Minor point: Xbox has a halved-cache P3, not a Celeron. That said, even one 3GHz PPC should be able to emulate a P3/733, especially since much work is being offloaded to the GPU.

[Praxis]

The original XBox chip is a single celeron 730mhz processor. The Xbox2 is a 3ghz 3 core PPC chip. PPC chips have a high IPC compared to the equivelent intel x86 chip, and the one in the xbox2 is so much better than the xbox it isnt funny.

Minor point: Xbox has a halved-cache P3, not a Celeron. That said, even one 3GHz PPC should be able to emulate a P3/733, especially since much work is being offloaded to the GPU.

Even if the 3 GHz PPC only gets 2 calculations per clock cycle?
AND the GPU is ATi instead of NVidia?
AND there is only 256 MB of RAM?

[Stark]

Hmm, I'd like to laugh at 256MB of RAM, but the Xbox whores would eat me.

Arguably, they're making some poor decisions spec-wise. But given the 'pile of bullshit' marketing coming from Sony (just like last time, natch), and the virtual abandonment of GC by Nintendo (even though it's arguably the best graphics hardware out there) it ALL bodes poorly.

I'm interested to see how they'll hit the price points though. As pointed out, if the price hits $400-450 US, launch will fail. Gaming faggots like us will always buy it, of course, but its the mindless tools that make the market, and they won't. That's more than I paid for my car, for fucks sake

[Praxis]

Hmm, I'd like to laugh at 256MB of RAM, but the Xbox whores would eat me.

Arguably, they're making some poor decisions spec-wise. But given the 'pile of bullshit' marketing coming from Sony (just like last time, natch), and the virtual abandonment of GC by Nintendo (even though it's arguably the best graphics hardware out there) it ALL bodes poorly.

I'm interested to see how they'll hit the price points though. As pointed out, if the price hits $400-450 US, launch will fail. Gaming faggots like us will always buy it, of course, but its the mindless tools that make the market, and they won't. That's more than I paid for my car, for fucks sake

Actually I think Nintendo is pumping all the good stuff into the GC at the last minute.

We just got Metroid Prime Echoes and we're going to get the ultimate Zelda game at the end of this year. Plus Shadow the Hedgehog (a sonic game with a machine gun?) from Sega.

What do you mean by virtual abandonment? The Revolution is going to have full backwards compatability. How is that boding poorly?

[DarkSilver]

Nintendo isn't abandoning the GC at all, like Praxis stated, full backwards capabitlity for the GC comes with Revolution (which bodes fucking awesome considering some of the stellar games for the GC out there), plus the Revolution should one up the GC in the graphics and processing department.

As for the laughing at Xbox 2, go right ahead, I was when I saw the specs, makes me real glad I sold off my Xbox a few months ago.

[SPOOFE]

The Xbox HD caches over 2GB of data.

Aha, now I see your cite, and you're incorrect, at least as far as games are concerned. That 2 gigs of cache is for the Xbox operating system. One would think that the Xbox 2 would have its own operating system requirements taken care of.

Nevertheless, that 2 gigs of cache is NOT for games, and thus wouldn't be required if Xbox 2 emulated its predecessor.

[HyperionX]

The Xbox HD caches over 2GB of data. Any mass storage device will have to be huge to replace the HD. And this is just the beginning of your emulation troubles.

This is mostlikely a setting which controlls how much disk space it uses, and the Xbox2 can have a harddrive added to it.

Evidence of this (the former claim)? I'd like to see it. Anyways, there's little chance of BC out of the box.

Also flash drives are cheap when ordered in bulk, not that it matters much. Every console sells for under its actual value to make at launch.

A 3-4GB flash drive will run like $100. That's rather steep.

Huh? What difference does this make?

It is an integral part of the design of Windows to have mass storage for it to dump ram pages to.

So? How does it help you if you don't have mass storage?

No it is not. The media chip is not based on DirectX. The GPU had proprietary calls. It use to have an IMC which it appears not be the case now. The IO chips and related subsystems all seem to have been moved around.

Most of the Graphics are still via DirectX, regardless of how the implementation is changed. And they do use drivers to abstract away hardware differences.

Still not a big hassel to emulate.

IOW, you're saying "I'll just ignore everything you said and repeat my previous claim." The media is totally proprietary and patented technology, so are certain aspects of the GPU. Emulation will be acutely problematic.

Not even fucking close.

The original XBox chip is a single celeron 730mhz processor. The Xbox2 is a 3ghz 3 core PPC chip. PPC chips have a high IPC compared to the equivelent intel x86 chip, and the one in the xbox2 is so much better than the xbox it isnt funny.

Seeing how you know so little about CPU designs I'll let this go. But in short, you're wrong, period. You're not looking at a PPC 970 (the G5 in the Mac), not even a G4. No, you're looking at a very simplistic 2-way in-order CPU. The last "2-way in-order" intel chip was the original Pentium (the "586"), a 15 year old chip. All modern CPUs (like the P3) are all at least 3-wide and are out-of-order processors. Hard as it is to believe, the "celeron" in the Xbox1 is technologically more advanced that the PPC chip in the Xbox2 with the exception of much higher attainable clockspeeds and use of SMT for the PPC chip. Unfortunately, SMT is useless in emulated single-threaded processes, and so is the multi-core aspect of the X2-CPU.

IPC for the X2-CPU isn't much superior than the X-CPU if not in fact worse. If you had to pick a CPU to emulate a P3 the PPC chip in the Xbox2 is perhaps the worst choice you could possibly pick; They're totally different chips with totally difference design philosophies. The X2-CPU was really meant for great multi-thread apps whereas the P3 was meant for blazing fast single-threaded apps. The wide, out-of-order nature of the P3 means it is very good at integer computations, in fact in somes cases possibly better than the PPC, whereas the PPC was really meant for huge float point computing power with weak integer. It's one hell of a mismatch, then put an emulator on top of this. Can you say "ouch"?

Not that it damn well matters much. Microsoft already knows how to write a reasonable high proformance emulator for a PPC processer to emulate a x86 chip linky

Not even the greatest emulator could function well on such a mismatch.

[HyperionX]

The Xbox HD caches over 2GB of data.

Aha, now I see your cite, and you're incorrect, at least as far as games are concerned. That 2 gigs of cache is for the Xbox operating system. One would think that the Xbox 2 would have its own operating system requirements taken care of.

Nevertheless, that 2 gigs of cache is NOT for games, and thus wouldn't be required if Xbox 2 emulated its predecessor.

You've missed the 3 game caches, totally 2.25GB.

[Xon]

Even if the 3 GHz PPC only gets 2 calculations per clock cycle?

3ghz * 2 instructions per cycle = 6*10^9 instructions per second. With 3 cores, thats some 18*10^9 instructions per second, theoretical max.

Compared to the p3 733mhz processor which is considerable slower.

You would have to be terminally stupid not to be able to emulate a processor when you have 3 times the number of processors and probably close to 3 times the raw preformance.

Most of heavy lifing for Xbox games gets offloaded to the GPU anyway.

AND the GPU is ATi instead of NVidia?

The GPU is going to be at least 2-3 times faster/better than the Xbox version.

Almost all the features are exports via a version of DirectX.

AND there is only 256 MB of RAM?

Thats over 4 times the total ram of the Xbox.

[phongn]

Even if the 3 GHz PPC only gets 2 calculations per clock cycle?

3GHz @ 2 IPC versus 733MHz at n IPC? That should be more than doable, especially if you have three CPUs with one dedicated to JIT translation, for example.

AND the GPU is ATi instead of NVidia?

Software developers are writing DirectX, it doesn't matter -- especially not when an R500 part is being used instead of an NV22.

AND there is only 256 MB of RAM?

Depends on architecture; if the JIT translator is streaming instructions fast it isn't too important. Console architecture tends to be geared more towards fast streaming of instructions and data rather than storing a huge amount like on PC.

You would have to be terminally stupid not to be able to emulate a processor when you have 3 times the number of processors and probably close to 3 times the raw preformance.

For another example, Intel's newer IA64 processers fully emulate the IA32 instruction set whereas previously they actually shoved a full P5 core on it. They're getting better performance via emulation.

[Praxis]

Nintendo isn't abandoning the GC at all, like Praxis stated, full backwards capabitlity for the GC comes with Revolution (which bodes fucking awesome considering some of the stellar games for the GC out there), plus the Revolution should one up the GC in the graphics and processing department.

As for the laughing at Xbox 2, go right ahead, I was when I saw the specs, makes me real glad I sold off my Xbox a few months ago.

BTW one other thing is that when the GameCube was first announced, Nintendo hinted that eventually those minidisks might find their way into a handheld.

I suspect the GameCube is going to outlive everything. Because of backwards compatability, GC games will stay on the shelf a bit after the Rev comes out, and Nintendo will eventually release a GameCube Portable or GBA2 or SOMETHING that plays GameCube games and has better battery life than the PSP, to keep the GC going.

And every GC game that comes out will be playable both on the handheld AND the Revolution.

Thats just my prediction, and all IMO.

[Praxis]

Even if the 3 GHz PPC only gets 2 calculations per clock cycle?

3GHz @ 2 IPC versus 733MHz at n IPC? That should be more than doable, especially if you have three CPUs with one dedicated to JIT translation, for example.

AND the GPU is ATi instead of NVidia?

Software developers are writing DirectX, it doesn't matter -- especially not when an R500 part is being used instead of an NV22.

AND there is only 256 MB of RAM?

Depends on architecture; if the JIT translator is streaming instructions fast it isn't too important. Console architecture tends to be geared more towards fast streaming of instructions and data rather than storing a huge amount like on PC.

You would have to be terminally stupid not to be able to emulate a processor when you have 3 times the number of processors and probably close to 3 times the raw preformance.

For another example, Intel's newer IA64 processers fully emulate the IA32 instruction set whereas previously they actually shoved a full P5 core on it. They're getting better performance via emulation.

Does anyone know what the IPC on the P3 is?
Because from VPC performance, it would be a tough lineup. A 1 GHz G4 (3.5 GFlops, compared to 6 GFlops on one of those cores) can't get near a 733 MHz P3. At least it certainly doesn't feel like it :s My old 450 felt faster and more responsive running XP than VPC did running 98.

The extra cores won't give a huge boost because everything for XBox 1 is single threaded. Maybe a small boost handling some extra stuff on the sides, but its going to be mostly done on one processor.

For graphics cards, aren't games on the XBox specificly optimized towards the graphics card on it? I could be wrong there.

It just seems to me that it'd be VERY difficult to run XBox 1 games in a system where every single component is of a different architecture :s

[Xon]

Does anyone know what the IPC on the P3 is?

Nope. Tried doing some googling for it but no luck. But considering its a intel chip based on the netburst tech, then it cant be that great.

Because from VPC performance, it would be a tough lineup. A 1 GHz G4 (3.5 GFlops, compared to 6 GFlops on one of those cores) can't get near a 733 MHz P3. At least it certainly doesn't feel like it :s My old 450 felt faster and more responsive running XP than VPC did running 98.

You are also emulating a complete OS in addition to the application that is running.

Emulating an Xbox game would be closer to WINE when talking to the hardware(basicly a thunking layer between x86->PPC), and only needs to emulate the x86 code for the game itself.

JIT compilation of the x86 code into PPC is also doable too. As for JIT preformance, MS .NET has ~80% to 90% preformance of equivelent native code for the most part.

Even if the JITed x86->PPC code was 70% of the original, then the extra speed of the PPC core easily makes up for it.

Unlike the WINE developers, Microsoft has the complete documentation of both sides of the interfaces, plus access to the actual implementation.

The extra cores won't give a huge boost because everything for XBox 1 is single threaded. Maybe a small boost handling some extra stuff on the sides, but its going to be mostly done on one processor.

JIT compiler running in another thread could help. I've also read that sound processing (not to sure if sound decoding & mixing is included) is going to be software based. So you could offload all the sounds processing to another processor.

For graphics cards, aren't games on the XBox specificly optimized towards the graphics card on it? I could be wrong there.

Yup, but it is still against a NV22 core GPU, and a R500 is considerably better. This doesnt take into account hand-crafted shader replacements for the more popular games.