Article on 360's gestation

[Megadrive1988]

60-shader GPU sounds very reasonable

but a 16-core CPU? holy smokes. I guess Microsoft wanted to try to counter what they may have thought would be much more powerful, more multi-core CELL CPU for PS3 since back in 2002 CELL was more monsterous, at least on the surface (Sony's hype) and somewhat under the surface (various STI patents).


lol, Microsoft wanted the Xbox 3 CPU in Xbox 2 / Xbox 360 :lol

 

[Megadrive1988]

Am I the only one that thinks that the 360 is just the grandson of canned projects like the 3DO M2 and the Microsoft Talisman?

The engineers are the same.

YES, kind of. except there's more to it than that. first of all, forget 3DO M2.
think 3DO MX instead (which could be concidered 3DO M3, or more practically, M2.5) because 3DO MX (or one version of it) was among the first to have graphics/video memory embedded into the graphics chip / or entire chipset.


check this out, originally from Intelligent Gamer / Fusion magazine, 1996

http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.video.3do/msg/b6a5b6fab5e29e0a?dmode=source&hl=en

Date: 1996/05/10

As for MX (see IG's Fusion issue 10), the current concept being tossed around is the idea of actually including the video RAM frame buffer within the actual MX chipset rather than externally -- as transferring data from separate RAM chips to the math processors is one of the most vital time delays in any computer or game console, having the RAM bundled with the fast MX chipset would mean incredible speedups in processing.

Developers claim that such an MX chipset could deliver -- believe it or not -- 15-20 million
polygon per second performance.

The drawback? The failure rate of such combined chips could be prohibitively high -- between the RAM and the high-intensity math processor, the chips could fail in
production at a rate of 20% or greater depending on how much RAM was included on a chip. Additionally, the heat generated by such a configuration would mandate special cooling measures.

they were ahead of their time. but tried it before Sony did with Graphics Synthesizer.

since the embedded memory for 3DO MX was reported on in spring 1996, the R&D had to have been going on in 1995. Sony was just getting underway with PS2 at that time (1995) and probably did not put eDRAM into Graphics Synthesizer until 1997 or so. just a guess and my own speculation.


anyway, moving on, Xbox 360 is like a 3DO MX++++++++++ (lol 3DO M5)
though with additional:

-Silicon Graphics,
-ATI Marlborough Mass / ATI East
-Lockheed Martin REAL3D (ATI Orlando Florida)
and maybe Microsoft Talisman technolgies

 

[assen]

...and maybe Microsoft Talisman technolgies

Talisman was nothing like current GPUs - it was based around caching and reusing rendered pieces of the scene as 2D sprites, and compositing them without rerendering each frame - a technique which is commonly called "impostoring" nowadays.

 

[one]

http://1up.com/do/feature?cId=3150432

In a rare opportunity, Dean and his publisher have given 1UP permission to run excerpts of two chapters from Xbox 360 Uncloaked, both of which offer some fascinating details surrounding decisions made with the early preparations for Xbox 360. For example, did you know that Microsoft was originally given the option to have Grand Theft Auto exclusively and passed? Or did you always wonder where the "360" in Xbox 360 came from? Read on to find out plenty of juicy details, and then following enjoy our interview with Dean himself.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

"He was agnostic to technology," said one observer who worked with him. "Others were passionate. Bryan could care less. It was like, 'insert technology here' in his plans."

Gadzooks, it's a global grammatical phenomena! How come no-one appreciates what the phrase as written means and why it's wrong? Who's responsible for this corruption of the proper 'couldn't care less' and how on earth has it taken hold in proper literature?

 

[NavNucST3]

Gadzooks, it's a global grammatical phenomena! How come no-one appreciates what the phrase as written means and why it's wrong? Who's responsible for this corruption of the proper 'couldn't care less' and how on earth has it taken hold in proper literature?

Well, if you could get the majority of users...even on this board to spell 'definitely' properly, I will take up your cause of couldn't care less.


BTW, one, thanks for the link.

 

[Jawed]

It's an Americanism and as witless as the thoroughly random removal of double Ls, "superfluous" Us etc.

Jawed

 

[AlNom]

don't be rediculous.

*cringe*

 

[Acert93]

Gadzooks, it's a global grammatical phenomena! How come no-one appreciates what the phrase as written means and why it's wrong? Who's responsible for this corruption of the proper 'couldn't care less' and how on earth has it taken hold in proper literature?

Irregardless of English's roots in England, as the overlords of the world us Americans are come to liberate our poor language of such meaningless things... like contractions. Just drop them and ignore the impact it has on the sentance! Ok, I am a horrible speller, as all here can attest, but it is funny how we kill our own language. Sadly most Americans cannot use the language correctly in speech or writing. Not that English is any price pig mind you. It really is a dog language. English sucks because it is so irrelgular in spelling and pronunciation (plus it employs a number of very difficult to pronounce phonemes) and is a dog language in regards to grammatical constructions. The only "positive" I see in English is the robust use of synonymns. Most languages have 1 word to describe an idea. Because English has been influenced by Old English, French, Spanish, etc... over the centuries there are typically a number of words to express the same idea. This allows English to be very poetic at times. But this also makes it even more difficult to learn because of all the extra/useless filler words!

IMO, English deserves to be abused. It teaches people from youth, "Rules don't count!"

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Well, it ws a mildly interesting read. It doesn't present a strong image to the background of XB360, with some infighting and trouble agreeing, and a rather rushed concept, but I expect that's the same for all these companies and products. It gives a good idea of the business perspective, how to create a machine with brand and marketting in mind, rather than just functionality, and the different ways of making money being considerd. Not a great deal on the XB360 itself though. The 360 name comes the idea of the gamer being at the centre of the experience. Rare were expected to produce five titles for XB1. Interesting that Nintendo were resisting Rare and wanting to keep costs down. We can see where that philosophy has led them. Not an incredible read though, and unless you have some minutes to kill and really can't find better to do, I don't recommend it.

 

[AlNom]

The comment about Quake 4 was interesting for a second... but the mention of 60fps and hitting that target is just a lie! (Chapter 48 linked from Gamespot)

 

[Fox5]

I'll take smart people that have tried and failed (market failure not functional failure) on other projects any day of the week.

there is no better teacher than learning from mistakes.

Xbox is a market success and a functional failure, what with losing so much money. If the other companies make a profit with less than microsoft has, the only reason microsoft should have lost so much is due to poor decisions.

Of course, if 3do had been subsidized so it didn't cost $800 to buy, maybe it would have stood a chance as well. Oh, and paying top game developers to make games for it probably could have saved it too.

60-shader GPU sounds very reasonable

but a 16-core CPU? holy smokes. I guess Microsoft wanted to try to counter what they may have thought would be much more powerful, more multi-core CELL CPU for PS3 since back in 2002 CELL was more monsterous, at least on the surface (Sony's hype) and somewhat under the surface (various STI patents).


lol, Microsoft wanted the Xbox 3 CPU in Xbox 2 / Xbox 360 :lol

What if they wanted more weaker cores, like a Niagra processor or that multicore NEC cpu?