I was looking for info about the Xbox 2's specs....

[Josh378]

And well, i was thinking to myself..."how in the hell will they get a tri-core PowerPC 976 (aka G5) 3.5 ghz processor working in a console." And well, I've had a hard time finding info. I was wondering what should I expect in performance for Xbox 2's CPU if indeed it does hit it's PowerPC 976 3.5 ghz processor power. If anybody have any links towards this or any other xbox 2 info, could someone help me. I would love to see more discussions about xbox 2 and other spec (or speculated info) info about X2....

Thanks,

-Josh378

 

[Brimstone]

It was rumored a while back on the inquirer that Microsoft was intrested in a .net CPU. I could see this being the foundation of the IBM designed Power processor. Common Language Runtime is supposed to be designed to take advantage of parallelism.

Running in Parallel
In early 2002, Intel introduced an architectural innovation that results in even better performance of .NET applications. With Hyper-Threading technology, one physical Xeon processor can be viewed as two logical processors each with its own state. The performance improvements due to this design arise from two factors: an application can schedule threads to execute simultaneously on the logical processors in a physical processor, and on-chip execution resources are utilized at a higher level than when only a single thread is consuming the execution resources.

The CLR is designed to fully exploit parallelism with support for Hyper-Threading and multi-processor systems. A developer writing a .NET application does not need additional code to take advantage of these features since the CLR manages all the runtime details with its thread pool. The pool can spawn new threads and block others to optimize run-time CPU utilization. It also recycles threads when they are done, starting them up again without the overhead of killing and creating new ones. The thread pool is also aware of issues specific to managed code, such as garbage collection cycles, and adjusts its scheduling logic accordingly.

http://www.devx.com/Intel/Article/6960


This post on Aceshardware forum has some intresting speculation.

Also, if XBox2 is all about .NET CLR and DirectX Next and so on, then what better way to show how well it works than by having different hardware to run the same things on? XNA is little more than CLR for everything, I believe. I mean, if Microsoft could sell CLR as an easy and viable platform even for something as performance-oriented as games, you have something pretty darn powerful there. It makes Windows and Windows-based software a reasonable platform for any given hardware platform. Moreover, it means things like -- say a .NET runtime is built for PS3... now all of a sudden, co-development on XBox2 and PS3 is something you get for free... more or less. That's sure to look attractive to multi-SKU developers.

http://www.aceshardware.com/forum?read=115069761

 

[Wunderchu]

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13470