Xbox 360 details @ CEDEC 2005

On the slide for X2cpu core is writing "2 symmetric fine-grained hardware multi-threading"
link

 

How do you judge those details from a technical point of view?I mean, transfer rates and such.

 

Inquirer?

 

The hard drive looks like it's being hobbled pretty seriously by the external interface. Thanks to the optional nature of the device, what should have been a near slam dunk with regards to transfer rate leaves it in the same ballpark as the optical drive.

The seek times are nice, but the transfer rate is pretty iffy, at least for loading or caching a lot of game data. Streaming from the hdd or dvd my perform much more similarly than they normally would (or should, depending on your viewpoint).

 

Obviously it makes quite a big difference as Oblivion and Enchant Arm devs are both strongly urging their customers to pick up the HDD.

Seek times shouldn't be underestimated I think, most of my load times I hear the DVD thrashing pretty bad, also, 17mb/s average vs 11mb/s for the DVD, 50% faster transfer speed with 10x's faster seek times.

 

Transfer speed is pretty much irrelavant.
In any real usage pattern the HD will destroy the DVD.

On a DVD any load that requires a seek (read anything in a streaming game) is dominated by the seek time. I usually figure about 0.1 seconds for the seek, that's usually at least 50% of the transfer time. On HD the seek is more or less free by comparison.

The hard part streaming off DVD is packaging your data to minimise the seeks, by comparison streaming off HD is easy, just read what you need.

 

I would expect the external interface to either be USB2 or SATA, both being faster than what a budget laptop drive can actually deliver in real life figures. I think you forget that this isn't a 7200RPM desktop harddrive, this is the cheapest MS could get their hands on, likely a 4200RPM unit.

Considering the roughly double data transfer rates, and also roughly, ten times quicker seek times, the HDD should absolutely destroy the optical drive performance-wise. I think you mostly worry over nothing here. Assume data compresses 2:1 on average, it's something like 10 seconds to fill up main memory. That won't kill you.

 

It's the new seagate LD25 series 5400 RPM SATA HDD. Very far from the cheapest thing they could get their hands on.

Comparitive drives on the market start at $75+shipping.

A 20GB 7200RPM desktop drive would have been less than half the price at retail($30).