Microsoft develops '' X-Engine '' tools for first party developers

[AzBat]

Xbox-Scene.com has some exclusive photos of the dev units shoe-horned with 1gb of RAM...

Doesn't look anything like this...

Tommy McClain

 

[Sc4freak]

The article says that it's a prototype, which would explain why it doesn't look like the official black Xbox 360 devkit machines.

 

[Rangers]

A commenter on that Xbox scene link is calling fake, and seems to make good arguments

I call shenanigans.

RAM is the fastest device in the whole entire system. It has to be within centimeters of the CPU (a simple consequence of the speed of electrons in copper vs the clockspeed of the system). Not only that but every single wire leading to the module has to be the same length, or the signals won't arrive at the same time as each other (which is why some of the traces on the bottom of your motherboard are all wiggly).

*There is no fucking way that that is full-speed DRAM in that sidecar*

If you could put RAM at arbitrary distances from the CPU, there's be no need for complicated signaling methods like Hypertransport, PCI Express, Ethernet, HDMI, LVDS, or USB3. All you'd need is a bunch of perfect wires from Imaginary Physics Land, and you could address any device at any speed at any distance.

The four wires are either USB or SATA; you simply can't address RAM over four wires. The board on top is unlikely to be RAM - too few chips. Ever seen a DIMM with one chip on it? No? Neither have I.

How convenient that these pictures appear to have been taken by the worst photographer ever. Poundland sells tripods - use one!

[quote name='gamerfreak1727' date='Jul 13 2009, 06:32 PM' post='4507140']
What makes you think that they're not all the same length?

Because

1) We're talking microns, not milimeters. Go read a Computer Architecture textbook, and we can have an informed discussion.
2) Because if you could attach RAM like that, it would revolutionise the PC industry. Just for starters, you could make a RAM upgrade that went in the ExpressCard slot, thus making it useful for something. But why stop there? Why build a mainframe when we can now attach RAM with half a foot of unshielded USB Cable?

Don't you think it would provide a better return on the investment developing your 'custom wiring' to manufacture RAM upgrades for PCs that can be plugged in like USB sticks than to hide away this revolutionary technology in an obscure, NDA's product?

[quote name='gamerfreak1727' date='Jul 13 2009, 06:32 PM' post='4507140']
just like the Xbox 1 DVD wires


XDK uses plain SCSI ( http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewI...em=220427966061 ). Obviously they've not made their signaling breakthrough yet.