Microsoft Details SoC Design Behind New Xbox 360 Slim
Microsoft Details SoC Design Behind New Xbox 360 Slim
Posted 08/24/2010 at 8:13am
| by Paul Lilly
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Microsoft's newer, slimmer Xbox 360 250GB console is fast becoming old news, except that up until now, the software giant hasn't been particularly willing to detail the system-on-a-chip (SoC) that powers the device.
Details of the SoC were unveiled at the Hot Chips symposium yesterday, and it was there that Microsoft showed off the inner workings of the 45nm part produced by IBM and GlobalFoundries. Even if you're not a console gamer, you have to appreciate that this is essentially the first mass-market, desktop chip to squeeze a CPU, GPU, memory, and I/O logic onto a single unit.
Microsoft's new SoC boasts 372 million transistors, which would have been much more impressive five years ago when the Xbox 360 first debuted. The 45nm chip realizes a more than 60 percent power savings over the original 90nm chip from 2005 and measures 50 percent smaller.
One interesting thing about the new design is the inclusion of a "FSB Replacement" block. IBM/GlobalFoundries could have just connected the GPU and GPU with a low-latency internal connection, but doing so would have made the new Xbox 360 faster than previous versions. The FSB Replacement block actually adds latency to the mix and introduces a performance hit to keep the new model from outpacing older versions.
More details here.
Image Credit: Microsoft
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whathuhitwasntme
August 24, 2010 at 1:32pm
I cant help but wonder at the logic that the "games" would break on a faster system.
By that logic I should not be able to ever upgrade my pc and play ANY older game on a new pc that has a faster bus speed or better parts in it.
Come on really, whats the REAL reason? IF they made it BETTER you would have no reason to upgrade next Christmas when they come out with the NEW stuff.
chinomon
August 24, 2010 at 10:54am
Maybe its for the sake of making sure the new x box's wont overheat and get the ring of death or the new word the dot of death?
sniggler
August 24, 2010 at 8:30am
This doesn't make any sense. Why the hell would they slow down an already piggish system when it comes to loading times / menus... I can't stand it when I go to skip to the next song on my white console meanwhile I'm getting pwned in COD MW2 because I had to wait forever for the f'ing menu to finish closing after hitting the green button. When will they learn? Leave it to Microsoft to finally innovate something after 5 years (a long time for a console run) and then completely neuter the crap out of it. It's not like having a faster FSB is going to see increased framerates seeing as console games are limited to crap 30 fps anyways.
And did someone mention these black consoles are way overpriced? And their customer service sucks?
Screw you Microsoft. There's a reason my live subscription hasn't been re-activated yet and it's been over a month.
QUINTIX256
August 24, 2010 at 12:39pm
Loading times and menus are ENTIRELY bottlenecked by the throughput and seek times of the DVD drive. Likewise changing the song involves swaping things out to the hardrive. Unlike Sony's console OS, microsoft reserves a very small memory footprint to itself, leaving the rest to be used by games.
It also has very little to do with framerate. That is up to the throughput of the GPU, not how fast the CPU can send display lists to the GPU. It has everything to do with compatablility. Devs expect and code for a certain latancy over the "faux pci express bus" and pipeline their code accordingly. Changing the bus can break games.
Nimrod
August 24, 2010 at 1:36pm
The 360 has the same amount of ram dedicated to the OS as it does to games. That ammount is 512.
And yes its a dick move to limit the speed on this thing seeing as how most games dont even manage to maintain FPS at the cap all the time. The reason is was inhibited was for purely artifical marking reasons. Im 90% sure that the slight increase in speed would not have caused problems with the games.
jlh304
August 24, 2010 at 8:37am
Yeah I woundered why they slowed it down. My guess is they don't want game makers making new games that only run on the new system. Or it could be something similar to the old DOS gaming days where you had to slow down a cpu speed or the game would move to fast (but I doubt this is the problem since it hasn't been an issue for a really long time). Or they need to sell off the rest of the old units so they don't want you to wait around for the new ones.
baker269
August 27, 2010 at 1:23am
"My guess is they don't want game makers making new games that only run on the new system."
That's what I was thinking. Not really that they would only run on new systems, but that they would only run at a decent speed on new systems.
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