Gamespy leaks Xenon specs (?)

[Titanio]

http://xbox.gamespy.com/xbox/microsoft-xbox/594331p1.html

I guess these are still fluid, but they hammer it down to specifics (i.e. no ranges here). Mostly in line with whats rumoured before, but there's some new stuff there, and some more info on what was known before.

 

[McFly]

Sounds like a xbox 1.5 or maybe 1.7 ... at least the RAM configuration is at the lowest number people where specualting ... however, I wait for an official spec release till I say the magic word.

Fredi

 

[Inane_Dork]

I know they have heat and power issues to worry about, but 500 MHz for the graphics chip doesn't seem as fast as it should be.

 

[Joe DeFuria]

I know they have heat and power issues to worry about, but 500 MHz for the graphics chip doesn't seem as fast as it should be.

Is it not fast enough if it has 64 pixel pipelines?

 

[Carl B]

I know they have heat and power issues to worry about, but 500 MHz for the graphics chip doesn't seem as fast as it should be.

Is it not fast enough if it has 64 pixel pipelines?

WTF!?!?!

 

[Carl B]

Let me add on to my post above.

I really thought 32 pipelines were what people have been talking about. If it WERE to be 64, Microsoft would have to be paying through the nose for this thing, and the fab yields would be horrendous.

 

[Joe DeFuria]

Um...before the "Xenon has 64 pipelines!" headline hits The Inq...

I have exactly ZERO idea how many pipelines it has. My point is, saying 500 Mhz is too low or to high is pretty silly given we don't know major aspects of its archietecture / implementation.

 

[Megadrive1988]

32 pipelines would be a fair amount. all current highend Radeon X800 cards have 16, and the upcoming R520 is expected to have 24, well the highend versions anyway. So 24 or 32 pipelines is what I am expecting for Xenon.


the leaked document said Xenon will have 48 shader ALUs. So I am guessing 24 pipelines with 2 shader ALUs each ? each ALU does 2 ops per clockcycle, thus 96 shader ops per clock.


or if Xenon gets 32 pipes and 2 ALUs per pipe, woudn't that be 128 shader ops per cycle?

 

[Pozer]

12x DVD-rom!!! are they stupid! "Let's save an extra $2 and not use a 16x drive. It'll make streaming harder for devs" -MS engineer

 

[j^aws]

32 pipelines would be a fair amount. all current highend Radeon X800 cards have 16, and the upcoming R520 is expected to have 24, well the highend versions anyway. So 24 or 32 pipelines is what I am expecting for Xenon.


the leaked document said Xenon will have 48 shader ALUs. So I am guessing 24 pipelines with 2 shader ALUs each ? each ALU does 2 ops per clockcycle, thus 96 shader ops per clock.


or if Xenon gets 32 pipes and 2 ALUs per pipe, woudn't that be 128 shader ops per cycle?

In terms of Flops,

1 ALU ~ 10 Flops per cycle ( 2 scaler + 8 vector)

48 ALUs ~ 480 Flops per cycle

48 ALUs @ 500 MHz ~ 480*0.5 GHz ~ 240 GFlops

That's still powerful by anyone's standard.

 

[jvd]

64@500mhz = 32000
32@500mhz=16000

So those two would off more than twice the speed of the x800xt pe ... wow

Still i would have liked 550mhz

I have a feeling though it will be 24-32 pipelines . Fillrate from that would be mroe than enough to fill the screen quite a few times and offer like 4x fsaa .


If ati tweaks temporal aa more then we can see some high fsaa lvls from the system .

 

[nAo]

That's still powerful by anyone's standard.

And there is probably more than that, like components swizzling, biasing, shifting, formats conversion, etc...

 

[Joe DeFuria]

12x DVD-rom!!! are they stupid! "Let's save an extra $2 and not use a 16x drive. It'll make streaming harder for devs" -MS engineer

Lets not only make it more expensive, but obscenely louder!

 

[Dave Baumann]

Bear in mind that there will be a dispartity between looking at clockspeeds for PC parts and console parts. When we think PC we tend to look at the high end models, however these parts usually are the minority yielding parts; consoles are going to want to sell as much of the available die as possible so their clock rates are going to be towards the lower end of the spectrum, where they are yield in high volume.

 

[j^aws]

That's still powerful by anyone's standard.

And there is probably more than that, like components swizzling, biasing, shifting, formats conversion, etc...

Yes, the 'free' stuff you get with those Flops.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

The baseline is 720p at 1280x720 for gameplay and video clips

Producing cinematics for nextgen consoles is going to cost a lot... *checks his bank account* oh yeah...

 

[Evil_Cloud]

So where did they base their information on? Alpha Development kits they could see at a developer?

 

[Love_In_Rio]

the article says the alpha 1 developer´s kit has 3 power pc cores and the alpha 2 developer´s kit has 2... so ? probably the final hardware will finish having only two cores ???

 

[Megadrive1988]

would the fillrate be something like?

24 pipelines @ 500 MHz: 12,000 Mpixels aka 12 Gigapixels

32 pipelines @ 500 MHz: 16,000 Mpixels aka 16 Gigapixels




not a bad increase from the current 932 Mpixels aka ~0.9 Gigapixels of the current Box, right ?


edit: I overlooked jvd's post.

32@500mhz=16000

 

[Titanio]

the article says the alpha 1 developer´s kit has 3 power pc cores and the alpha 2 developer´s kit has 2... so ? probably the final hardware will finish having only two cores ???

No, the alpha kits have 2 cores, final hardware will have 3.

They seem to have gleaned this info from developers, basically. Editors at other sites are saying it's for real, but they're annoyed at Gamespy for publishing it, because they didn't first (evidently this info has made its way around journo circles, but only Gamespy has been brave enough to stand up and publish it - I guess they think an official announcement is incoming, and thus feel safer putting it out there now).