Xbox 360 launch… not quite full circle.
May 13th 2005
MTV held their over-hyped and overrated launch of the Xbox 360 this evening. Here’s a torrent if you really want to watch it. I’d reccomend reading the rest of this first…
First, the MTV special was not special at all. The best part was approximately 12 seconds (broken up into half-second segments) where you actually got to see the design of the console and controllers.
The design of the console can be summed up in one word: Apple. White, smooth, shiny plastic. It looks good, and has customizable faceplates, but minus five points for stealing the look. Second, the controllers are all wireless. Very nice. My roomate mentioned the problem of having two 360’s in the same room, but shame on them if they haven’t figured that out yet. The games look nice as well, and the special mentioned such titles as Perfect Dark Zero, Project Gotham Racing 3, a ghetto ganksta game, a new Tony Hawk game, and some others. Graphics looked good in the 2-second clips we saw of each. The show mainly showed fake-looking “pro gamers” playing, and the cameras forgot they were supposed to be filming the game when they were actually filming the people. We don’t care about the people. We don’t care if they actually are professional gamers. Point: they look stupid, the 360’s graphics do not.
According to an article at engadget, the (speculated) leaked specs were impressive. Here’s a CS major’s analysis of the better points:
- Support for Hi-Def up to 1080i - Obviously, the power to run at 1080i (1920×1080 pixels) is in the hardware, so this is expected. Should make games great on HD screens, just like we’ve seen on PC’s for years and all the console people have been missing out on.
- IBM PowerPC-based 3-core 3.2 GHz CPU - Also not surprising, given recent trends in the desktop processor market (including the announcement of IBM’s Cell processor model, of which the 360 chip seems to be a derivative). Note that this isn’t “three 3.2GHz cores”, it’s 3 paralell cores sharing some logic with the whole thing running at a clock of 3.2 GHz. Don’t get crazy ideas of multiplying by three. So what’s the big deal? Two things: Multithreading and Vector Processing. With three dual-threaded cores (according to AnandTech’s wonderful article), the processor is capable of running up to six threads at once, meaning in-game calculations can be split between the processors (physics, sound, extra graphics, input, etc), and that several things can be going on at once (eg: Playing a game while playing music on the stereo in the other room). Finally, Vector Processing is integral to graphics and physics calculations, and the PowerPC is notoriously good at it. This could allow the graphics card (with enough bus bandwidth) to share some of the graphics calculations with the main processor to improve performance even more.
- ATi R5xx-class 500MHzish GPU - sounds tasty. It shares the total 512MB of system memory, but on a super-fast memory bus, so it’s just as good as having it on the graphics board. It’s also rumored that the GPU might have 10MB of DRAM on the core, which sounds essentially like a cache for graphics. Could improve performance a lot.
So it sounds like something to drool over. I’m especially excited about seeing a real-world chip (maybe) based on IBM’s Cell, and that it performs well enough that it was chosen to go into the Xbox 360. They could have chosen an AMD or Intel chip, but they didn’t, and that’s interesting. Also, it will be interesting to see if there are compatibility issues because of the move away from the x86 architecture to the more RISCy PowerPC. I’m guessing they’ve built backward-compatibility into the processor from the ground up, which could give IBM some ideas for the desktop market. Read the AnandTech article for more details and some good pictures.
But man did the MTV special suck. All hype and no real content. Pure marketing genius. Hey, it got me to write this, increasing hype and talk. Well, it looks cool, and I can’t wait to play it, and the technical innovations going into it are incredible. I just love how gaming drives technology forward…
Anything about an integrated HDD included in the system? Maybe those links you left have something about it, but I haven’t gotten to them yet.
I think it’s going to be integrated at first (size hasn’t yet been decided) and eventually it’ll be optional (and presumably external), with memory cards from 128MB to 1GB. And yes, all that’s in the links.
Specs are nice… and from what I’ve read it seems that the logic shared between the three cores is minimal… hense the need for people to want to refer it as having “3 processors.”
Also, I don’t think it’s surprising at all that Microsoft decided to go with IBM and their PowerPC architecture for the Xbox360. Since the Xbox was their first foray into console gaming they went with what they knew… Intel’s Pentium 3 and Nvidia graphics running basically on a ‘pc-in-a-closed-system’ idea. Now that they have had their experience, the idea of moving towards solutions that aren’t necessarily comfortable might be a way to enhance development and increase profits. Already I’ve heard that they will make money with this console, instead of the giant losses they had on the original xbox hardware.
Also, Nintendo’s Gamecube used an IBM PowerPC processor running around 455mhz and had an ArtX (a company since purchased by ATI) graphics chip with 3MB embedded DRAM. What Microsoft has done here, in my opinion, is basically take what the gamecube had and multiply by a fuckton. And if you’ve seen any of the recent gamecube games (RE4 sticks out in my mind) you will see just how developers crank out the best of that hardware… something I’m sure directly appealed to Microsoft.
I anxiously await Sony and Nintendo’s proposals. It’s rumored that Sony has a Cell processor running at 4ghz with 8 parallel pipes and Nintendo seems to also be working with IBM again on a custom chip to meet it’s needs. I think Microsoft, especially if it launches this year, is going to completely take over this next gen console war. With their hardware, I don’t blame them.
Yeah, it sounds very nice. It’s interesting that all three next-gen consoles (Xbox360, PS3, and the new Nintendo console) will be using IBM processors and ATi graphics. This could mean great things for the PC market, which is where I see all this innovation heading. With the previous generation of consoles, it was the PC that dictated the hardware in the console, this time it could be the other way around, and the incredible market for the consoles should bring a lot of the same innovation into the PC market. Like I said, I can’t wait to get a Mac running an 8-way Cell processor at around 4 GHz. ‘Cause you know it’s gonna happen.