X-Box 2 specs

HyperionX · Post by **HyperionX** » 2005-03-11 01:55am

ggs wrote:
Praxis wrote: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.

You are utterly revelling in your ignorance. First of all, Multiple cores are absolutely useless in emulating a single CPU, period You can only use ONE of those 3 cores. Second of all, you are using the absolute maximum theoritical performance, something that simple will not happen. Realworld performance wise it won't come close. In fact you can be quite certain that the P3 will come closer to it's theoritical max than the X2-CPU will.

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.

You're being terminally retarded to talk of your ass. You have no idea what you are talking about. 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.

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

True, but you still need the CPU.

.....

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.

Now you really pulled this one out of your ass. the P3 is NOT a netburst architecture. Next time get a clue. Irregardlessly, a modern Netburst based CPU will, in fact, asskicked this PPC in IPC because the IPC of the PPC is just that bad.

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.

This is ridiculously over inflated. I'll love to see how they'll handle x86's custom 80-bit floats with a VMX unit that only supports 32-bit floats with anything near 70% efficiency. Emulating at these performance levels is ridiculous. The closest you can get is perhaps 50% loss of performance, and thats with a method of translating x86 instructions and then caching commonly used translated x86 instructions based an x86 emulator for Alpha chips, but this may not apply for PPC. A straight emulation will be much slower. Given the fact that the PPC is not that much faster than a P3, this is not looking up.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2005-03-11 02:06am

Praxis wrote: < snip >

The Revolution is going to have full backwards compatability. How is that boding poorly?

It is? Well then that rules. Echoes is the shit - even with the 'duh, I dropped my equipment... AGAIN!' thing

SPOOFE · Post by **SPOOFE** » 2005-03-11 02:48am

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

So I did. Consider the point conceded.

Praxis · Post by **Praxis** » 2005-03-11 10:31am

Stark wrote:
Praxis wrote: < snip >

The Revolution is going to have full backwards compatability. How is that boding poorly?
It is? Well then that rules. Echoes is the shit - even with the 'duh, I dropped my equipment... AGAIN!' thing

Yeah, during Iwata's keynote at GDC he:
A) Announced the Nintendo DS online service, which is like XBox Live but FREE
B) Stated that the Nintendo Revolution will have built in wireless
C) Stated that the Nintendo Revolution will have full backwards compatability with GameCube games.

Whoohoo.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2005-03-11 04:09pm

ggs wrote: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.

The Xbox-P3 uses the P6 core, not Netburst.

You're being terminally retarded to talk of your ass. You have no idea what you are talking about. 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.

OOE does not imply greater performance. IA64 isn't OOE, for example, and nobody ever called it slow.

HyperionX · Post by **HyperionX** » 2005-03-11 05:25pm

OOE does not imply greater performance. IA64 isn't OOE, for example, and nobody ever called it slow.

And it uses a massive L3 cache as it's crutch. Minus that and it's slow. Make it 1/3 as wide and you've got the PPC in the X2-CPU. And yes, a lot of people called it slow, at least until it got its massive cache. People still call it slow; it's performance in benchmarks are deceptively high (it uses somewhat questionable optimizations in them).

Praxis · Post by **Praxis** » 2005-03-12 01:56am

Woah!

http://xbox.ign.com/articles/595/595535p2.html

# Hard Drive: Xenon's hard drive is optional. It's not built in like the current Xbox. A total of 2 GB of the drive will be used as game cache. The final drive size is still being determined. The Hard Drive will be a 2.5" form factor and sold separately. Microsoft's current plan is to require you to buy the hard drive to enable backward compatibility with current Xbox games. This way, Microsoft recovers the cost of its hard drive, plus it is most likely to give hard drive buyers Xbox Live subscriptions.

So it WILL have backwards compatability provided one buys a HD.
Wonder how they pulled that off?

darthdavid · Post by **darthdavid** » 2005-03-12 01:59am

Praxis wrote:Woah!

http://xbox.ign.com/articles/595/595535p2.html

# Hard Drive: Xenon's hard drive is optional. It's not built in like the current Xbox. A total of 2 GB of the drive will be used as game cache. The final drive size is still being determined. The Hard Drive will be a 2.5" form factor and sold separately. Microsoft's current plan is to require you to buy the hard drive to enable backward compatibility with current Xbox games. This way, Microsoft recovers the cost of its hard drive, plus it is most likely to give hard drive buyers Xbox Live subscriptions.
So it WILL have backwards compatability provided one buys a HD.
Wonder how they pulled that off?

Have the system search for the harddrive and only allow it to play X-Box 1 games if you have one installed.

DarkSilver · Post by **DarkSilver** » 2005-03-12 02:05am

now....with this announcement allow me to give a great big HA HA to the Xbox lovers

HA!!! HA!!!

M$ just gave itself the big shaft come late 2005/ 2006

(sorry if it's trolling..but damn...I love hearing how much MS is screwing up with it's next gen console)

Praxis · Post by **Praxis** » 2005-03-12 02:07am

darthdavid wrote:
Praxis wrote:Woah!

http://xbox.ign.com/articles/595/595535p2.html

# Hard Drive: Xenon's hard drive is optional. It's not built in like the current Xbox. A total of 2 GB of the drive will be used as game cache. The final drive size is still being determined. The Hard Drive will be a 2.5" form factor and sold separately. Microsoft's current plan is to require you to buy the hard drive to enable backward compatibility with current Xbox games. This way, Microsoft recovers the cost of its hard drive, plus it is most likely to give hard drive buyers Xbox Live subscriptions.
So it WILL have backwards compatability provided one buys a HD.
Wonder how they pulled that off?
Have the system search for the harddrive and only allow it to play X-Box 1 games if you have one installed.

Not that, obviously, I mean the backwards compatability.

How are they going to emulate the XBox 1 when:
1) All XBox games are single threaded, so ONE of the 6 gflop cores will have to emulate a 733 MHz P3, which will be tough

2) The complete change of every peice of hardware, no sound card, different type of graphics card, different processor architecture HAS to be quite difficult to overcome when we're talking about consoles where the games are super-optimized to the exact hardware of the system.

They solved the lack of HD problem, but the rest is still iffy.

Praxis · Post by **Praxis** » 2005-03-12 02:13am

DarkSilver wrote:now....with this announcement allow me to give a great big HA HA to the Xbox lovers

HA!!! HA!!!

M$ just gave itself the big shaft come late 2005/ 2006

(sorry if it's trolling..but damn...I love hearing how much MS is screwing up with it's next gen console)

Except, sadly, they're going to hit Christmas launch, and probably going to get tons of people who, having played the XBox 1, assume its going to be the best and scream, "Mommy, mommy, I want an XBox 2 for Christmas!"

The console may suck horribly, but when Christmas comes and there is only ONE next gen console out (XBox 2), it'll be XBox 2 vs XBox 1 and PS2 and GameCube, meaning everyone is going to get XBox 2's for Christmas cause they'll BLOW AWAY the current generation.

Then the poor suckers will be disappointed when the NR and PS3 come out

But MS still gets a bunch of money

I'm not kidding, I've had a couple people tell me that "XBox 1 was the fastest and had the best hardware, so XBox 2 should too! So I'm buying the XBox 2!"

Durandal · Post by **Durandal** » 2005-03-12 03:02am

HyperionX wrote:You're being terminally retarded to talk of your ass. You have no idea what you are talking about. 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.

We don't even know the specifics of the chip in question. Whether or not a chip is OoOE or based on a certain architecture has no real bearing on its speed. You're acting like all PowerPC chips must suck by default and conveniently ignoring that the POWER5 obliterated Intel's best offerings in transaction processing. Until we know just what kind of chip is in the Xbox2, everyone is talking out of his ass.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2005-03-12 03:54am

Hang on - the X2 doesn't come with a HDD, but uses the HDD to cache? Ummm, doesn't that mean that it'll either be optimised to use the cache, and rubbish without it (with its laughable 256MB RAM), or it'll be optimised without it, and just use up space with ineffienct paging? Why NOT have a HDD? Memory card sales?

If the Nintendo has a HDD, I'm sold.

SPOOFE · Post by **SPOOFE** » 2005-03-12 04:43am

Hang on - the X2 doesn't come with a HDD, but uses the HDD to cache?

Unknown. The Xbox1 used HDD cache. We don't know what the Xbox2 will use.

M$ just gave itself the big shaft come late 2005/ 2006

Wank wank wank. I thought all the anti-Xbox losers thought that the console wasn't important, only the games.

DarkSilver · Post by **DarkSilver** » 2005-03-12 04:56am

SPOOFE wrote:
M$ just gave itself the big shaft come late 2005/ 2006
Wank wank wank. I thought all the anti-Xbox losers thought that the console wasn't important, only the games.

FYI:
I've owned a Xbox, and I couldn't find any games for it I *LIKED*.
Therefore I am justified in my Anti-Xboxism, cause I owned it, and I *STILL* Dislike it.

Dislike is a bit soft actually....hate it with a passion born of a thousand fiery hells would begin to approach it...

I now own both a GC and a PS2, and know something, I'm enjoying them both a hell of alot more for thier games than I do Xbox.

Aside from KOTOR and Fable, show me a good RPG that is on Xbox, you can't.

Show me a good shooter, I'm of the opinion Halo was't all that it was hyped to be. So Halo to me wasn't good.

Xbox falls EXTREMELY short on the list of good games, compared to GC and PS2, and I'm pretty damn sure the same will happen with the next gen of consoles.

Hamel · Post by **Hamel** » 2005-03-12 05:40am

Some have suggested that athlons or turions would have been a better choice for heat dissipation. Maybe for emulation, too. Hell if I know, I buy these things, I don't design them.

Xon · Post by **Xon** » 2005-03-12 06:28am

phongn wrote:The Xbox-P3 uses the P6 core, not Netburst.

Oops.

OOE does not imply greater performance. IA64 isn't OOE, for example, and nobody ever called it slow.

Never mind OOE is a hack to deal with the odd-ball size x86 instructions. And that PPC might even be able todo OOE.

Never mind we havent got a clue about what custom extensions Microsoft has had added. When you are ordering a run of at least several million, you get to have a few bits added to what ever processor you are having made for you.

Previous leaks have some ungoddly amount of vector processing registers chucked in there per hardwere thread. We dont even have solid numbers on the width of those either.

SirNitram · Post by **SirNitram** » 2005-03-12 02:06pm

This is lining up poorly for Microsoft. While 'First to market' is a shiny thing to say, the X-Box 1 is successful because it sold itself to developers by being the content machine. A superior grade of modelling clay, if you will, to create the product. All the developers I've seen interviewed with the question 'Why go with X-Box' have talked about how it could deliver a better game by it's hardware. And that's fair enough.

It's rather clear that they're abandoning this edge to be 'first to market', and this could cost them alot. Initial sales are nice, but these products have to last for years and provide solid content... So we'll see. That disc space is gonna be the killer. Sure, the first wave of games probably won't be where the breaking is there. But it'll come.

HyperionX · Post by **HyperionX** » 2005-03-12 02:30pm

ggs wrote:
OOE does not imply greater performance. IA64 isn't OOE, for example, and nobody ever called it slow.
Never mind OOE is a hack to deal with the odd-ball size x86 instructions. And that PPC might even be able todo OOE.

Once again you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. OoOE was designed in order to counter the "memory wall," the fact that processor clockspeeds greatly outgrew memory clockspeeds. Actually it comes closer to countering cache latency, since it now takes multiple cycles to even access the L1 and L2 cache. In short it was meant to prevent stalls in general and ignore instruction dependencies when it was not necessary, and can be consider a general performance optimization. Nearly ALL modern CPUs have OoOE, including the PPC970/G5 and POWER4 and 5,, all x86 processors, and the Sparc64. The Itanium is about only one that doesn't, and this CPU too. An IOE processor will take a much bigger hit from anything latency related, and at 3Ghz you're going to get a lot of latency, plus you're just generally less efficient. Don't even start with the non-OoOE CPU getting OoOE, that's like saying my car might just sprout wings and fly.

Never mind we havent got a clue about what custom extensions Microsoft has had added. When you are ordering a run of at least several million, you get to have a few bits added to what ever processor you are having made for you.

Yes we do. Almost certainly whatever custom extensions MS will put will relate to floating point computation, probably some sort of dot-product instruction or perhaps more registers. There's virtually no way that they'll extend the basic PPC ISA, and even if they did it's not going to help in emulating another processor.

Previous leaks have some ungoddly amount of vector processing registers chucked in there per hardwere thread. We dont even have solid numbers on the width of those either.

I'm hearing it'll still just be 32 registers like the original, though they might extend that to 128. Either way emulation is not helped one bit.

SPOOFE · Post by **SPOOFE** » 2005-03-12 02:54pm

I've owned a Xbox, and I couldn't find any games for it I *LIKED*.
Therefore I am justified in my Anti-Xboxism, cause I owned it, and I *STILL* Dislike it.

Dislike is a bit soft actually....hate it with a passion born of a thousand fiery hells would begin to approach it...

You haven't cum yet? Keep wanking, boy... then turn off your computer and go outside. You need it. Fresh air? Birds chirping in the trees? The last time you saw that was, what, six years ago? Seven?

"Oooh, I hate the Xbox! Oooh, it raped my sister and murdered my mother! Oooh, I'm justified in hating it!"

Don't be a drama queen, child.

SirNitram · Post by **SirNitram** » 2005-03-12 02:56pm

SPOOFE wrote:
I've owned a Xbox, and I couldn't find any games for it I *LIKED*.
Therefore I am justified in my Anti-Xboxism, cause I owned it, and I *STILL* Dislike it.

Dislike is a bit soft actually....hate it with a passion born of a thousand fiery hells would begin to approach it...
You haven't cum yet? Keep wanking, boy... then turn off your computer and go outside. You need it. Fresh air? Birds chirping in the trees? The last time you saw that was, what, six years ago? Seven?

"Oooh, I hate the Xbox! Oooh, it raped my sister and murdered my mother! Oooh, I'm justified in hating it!"

Don't be a drama queen, child.

Wow, someone has complaints about something and you just step in to troll like a three year old. Contribute something or fuck off. And before you start, yes, I am a Moderator, so I get to say this.

Praxis · Post by **Praxis** » 2005-03-12 03:23pm

SPOOFE wrote:
I've owned a Xbox, and I couldn't find any games for it I *LIKED*.
Therefore I am justified in my Anti-Xboxism, cause I owned it, and I *STILL* Dislike it.

Dislike is a bit soft actually....hate it with a passion born of a thousand fiery hells would begin to approach it...
You haven't cum yet? Keep wanking, boy... then turn off your computer and go outside. You need it. Fresh air? Birds chirping in the trees? The last time you saw that was, what, six years ago? Seven?

"Oooh, I hate the Xbox! Oooh, it raped my sister and murdered my mother! Oooh, I'm justified in hating it!"

Don't be a drama queen, child.

So the fiery hells thing was a bit exaggurated, but he OWNS AN XBOX. He gave his opinion on something.

It's not the same as me running out, "I'm a GameCube owner! XBox is the worst thing ever! It's evil! I've never actually used one, but I know they're evil!" He actually owns one.

He has a valid complaint. You don't have to be flaming him.

Hamel · Post by **Hamel** » 2005-03-12 04:06pm

About the whole thing with DarkSilver~

Riddick was the only Xlax fps to intrigue me, yet it was ported to the PC with better textures, etc. I heard Fable was a mild dissapointment (wtf is with the Molyneux worship anyways), and that is headed to the PC in the future. Street Fighter Anniversary Collection was the only fighter I'd care to get, and even has XBL support.

Despite the lack of super games, it's difficult to overlook the modibility of the console. If you don't care about XBL then you can do whatever you want to the thing~ cpu upgrade, hardrive, make a server/HTPC out of it, etc. It really is the console with the most bang for the buck in terms of technology.

DarkSilver · Post by **DarkSilver** » 2005-03-12 08:37pm

shit..where to start...

oh yeah, SPOOFE:

Fuck you.

Next time, read what the fuck your quoting, before making some half assd reply moron. I wrote that I owned - read: I purchased the game system and several games over a period of time) - the XBox, and I still didn't like the mother fucker.

That clear enough for you?

And here I thought most people on this board were fucking lucid, aside from a few abnormal psychosis.

Just because I haven't fallen in love with the system (ok, I'll admit the whole hate with a fiery passion born of a thousand hells thing was a bit dramatic, but it wasn't drama queen dramatic) doesn't mean my opinion is any less valid than those who love the system, or those who dislike the system and are not so vocal about it. So go back to whatever rock you crawled under, and have a nice night.

and FYI: the whole daylight, birds chirping thing? I'll have plenty of that when I start my vacation on the 25th, nightshift 7 days a week tends to cut down on the amount of sunshine I do get to see. So fuck you there to.

Praxis and SirNitram:
Thank you both for upholding my right to have a different opinion. Appreciate it, especially since I was sleeping.

Hamel:
Never played Riddick, I may have to check it out. Fable, I heard mix reviews on, but I kinda liked it. Considering it's one of the few RPG's for a Xbox, choices in that field are limited. I've found Xbox has more Sports and Racing games than anything on it's system, with a few shooters and action games. Not much else. Limited Genre selection.

Though I thank you for your opinion, I will give Riddick a try. More than likely I may just have some fun with modding the xbox later when I can be bothered with it.

SPOOFE · Post by **SPOOFE** » 2005-03-12 09:26pm

How does your having owned an Xbox have ANYTHING to do with your idiotic pronouncements about its successor?

Like I said... "Wank wank wank".

Wow, someone has complaints about something and you just step in to troll like a three year old.

Learn to read, you brainless troglodyte. He made a boneheaded comment about the fate of the Xbox2, NOT anything about the Xbox1. He tried to DEFEND his said boneheaded comment by pulling up some shit about how owning an Xbox makes him clairvoyant about how the Xbox2 is going to do in the market.

And WHO'S the troll, now? Go fuck yourself.