a4164 said:
Its not too late if they were designing it since Xbox1 was finished?
Where would they get this world-class semiconductor design team from? M$ has never done anything even remotely similar in the past. They'd need like a couple dozen well-experienced engineers. We haven't heard anything in the rumor mill signalling they've gone down this path.
No, you fanbois gotta lay off that crack pipe, hehe.
M$ is going to use off-the-shelf tech again just like last time. I know, I know, you want your sugar daddy Billy Goat to whip out something even longer and phatter than Evil Sony's Cell, but face it, it's not going to happen.
But if designing its own CPU/GPU was an option, wouldn't that be the cheapest route for them.
What basis do you have to support such a standpoint? They'd create a team out of nothing, with zero experience to begin with other than what the people they hire bring with them, whip them into a world-beating design studio and come up with a monster CPU all in the space of a few years and all in total secrecy? Frankly, I don't see that ever happening.
Also, will MS want to just pull the fastest CPU from AMD or Intel
Of course they won't. What was the fastest out there at the time when M$ chose - GASP - a celeron 733 to power its superduper games console? Better yet, what was the fastest when the console actually BECAME AVAILABLE?
The fastest chips are monster expensive, even though the markup on CPUs is enormous it would still be prohibitively expensive.
Now I'm guessing everyone and their mother will be on 65nm by 2005. Whats Intel's roadmap (10 GHz by then?).
If they're pushing 6GHz by then I guess we should count ourselves lucky. You gotta remember, the P4 debuted at 1.5GHz. From there it's only little more than doubled in the space of several years. It's totally unreasonable to believe it would reach 10 in another two and a half years or so.
I assumed a more senseable route would be to use Intel's Banias core, that thing should scale well and keep heat to a minimum
Banias still draws 30+ watts at top speed, and most likely it will stay that way or get worse as speed increases. Besides, it's based on the aging P6 architecture which debuted wayyyyy back in 1995. Hardly worthy of a console set to debut a whole decade later!
but what are the odds of Xbox2 being water-cooled
Extremely small. A well-designed heatsink can deal with 100+ watts of power dissipation no problem, though I bet it wouldn't be ideal from M$'s point of view. Biggest concern would be getting it quiet, though considering the huge box they used first time round, they could fit some giant fans in there and have them run at a low RPM...
Lastly, would MS go with a Athlon64/Opteron/Itanium. What are the practical advantages of a 64-bit CPU.
Hm, difficult to say. Itanium is out of the picture because of its enormously crappy price/performance (and its power consumption is equally monstrous to boot).
They couldn't do a uniformed memory setup with Hammer, because the Hammer's on-die memory controller would give high latency for the graphics processor. On the other hand, I'm not sure they'd particulary WANT UMA for the next round anyway, as it is basically just a cost-saving measure that limits performance of all components in the system.
I'm pretty sure Inhell will win the contract again with a fairly high-GHz hyperthreaded P4, probably using a 400MHz bus (real MHz, I mean). Getting the P4 to GHz higher than the PS3s Cell will be vital in the marketing strategy to make it sound faster to the masses, despite it getting the proverbial offal kicked out of it on a pure numbercrunching level.
*G*
