Xbox360 Hardware Specs

Justin Buser · 12-07-2005, 06:57 PM

And here are the Official Specifications of the Xbox360:

Custom IBM PowerPC-based CPU

Three symmetrical cores running at 3.2 GHz each
Two hardware threads per core; six hardware threads total
VMX-128 vector unit per core; three total
128 VMX-128 registers per hardware thread
1 MB L2 cache

CPU Game Math Performance

9 billion dot product operations per second

Custom ATI Graphics Processor

10 MB of embedded DRAM
48-way parallel floating-point dynamically scheduled shader pipelines
Unified shader architecture

Polygon Performance

500 million triangles per second

Pixel Fill Rate

16 gigasamples per second fill rate using 4x MSAA

Shader Performance

48 billion shader operations per second

Memory

512 MB of 700 MHz GDDR3 RAM
Unified memory architecture

Memory Bandwidth

22.4 GB/s memory interface bus bandwidth
256 GB/s memory bandwidth to EDRAM
21.6 GB/s front-side bus

Overall System Floating-Point Performance

1 teraflop

Storage

Detachable and upgradeable 20GB hard drive
12x dual-layer DVD-ROM
Memory Unit support starting at 64 MB

I/O

Support for up to four wireless game controllers
Three USB 2.0 ports
Two memory unit slots

Optimized for Online

Instant, out-of-the-box access to Xbox Live features with broadband service, including Xbox Live Marketplace for downloadable content, gamer profile for digital identity, and voice chat to talk to friends while playing games, watching movies, or listening to music
Built-in Ethernet port
Wi-Fi ready: 802.11a, 802.11b, and 802.11g
Video camera ready

Digital Media Support

Support for DVD-Video, DVD-ROM, DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW, CD-DA, CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW, WMA CD, MP3 CD, JPEG Photo CD
Ability to stream media from portable music devices, digital cameras and Windows XP-based PCs
Ability to rip music to the Xbox360 hard drive
Custom playlists in every game
Built-in Media Center Extender for Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005
Interactive, full-screen 3-D visualizers

High-Definition Game Support

All games supported at 16:9, 720p, and 1080i, anti-aliasing
Standard-definition and high-definition video output supported

Audio

Multi-channel surround sound output
Supports 48KHz 16-bit audio
320 independent decompression channels
32-bit audio processing
Over 256 audio channels

System Orientation

Stands vertically or horizontally

Customizable Face Plates

Interchangeable to personalize the console

Kishin · 12-07-2005, 11:54 PM

3 Cored Processer sounds pretty powerful but expensive,It seems more powerful than most Gaming PCs. I guess they are really going to subsidize the price,but hey better for the consumer :-)

Akany · 13-07-2005, 02:53 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kishin

3 Cored Processer sounds pretty powerful but expensive,It seems more powerful than most Gaming PCs. I guess they are really going to subsidize the price,but hey better for the consumer :-)

Yeah all the next gen consoles makers (or at least MS and Sony) are going to be losing money on the actual consoles. Then they make up for it with games and accessories sales.

sketchynetwk · 13-07-2005, 10:11 AM

Its all well and good them putting top of the range hardware in but how much is this going to cost the average Jo to buy? we will be talking about $500 just for the xbox (no games)

Agent X · 13-07-2005, 11:46 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sketchynetwk

Its all well and good them putting top of the range hardware in but how much is this going to cost the average Jo to buy? we will be talking about $500 just for the xbox (no games)

The next xbox is going to be in the $300 price range actually if it has HD-DVD it will probably be about $400

pApA SmerF01 · 13-07-2005, 02:49 PM

i seriously doubt that m$ would price their console @ $500. that's marketing suicide.

realistically it'll be more like $299, with a loss of 70 bucks on each console, so if you buy 2 games, they are making a profit. and since it'd be cheaper (theoretically) than the ps3 (considering it costs roughly $500 to produce and they don't want to take a $200 loss on each console sold), boom, msft just made a fortune.

Dan · 13-07-2005, 08:03 PM

It's interesting that Mac recently started talking about using Intel instead of IBM, and now MS picks up and grabs them. Were PowerPC's used in the original XBox, or is this something new?

The stats are decent overall, however. I've never heard of GDDR before, though.

Iron Orta · 14-07-2005, 03:06 AM

Xbox wasnt a power PC, and MS picking up of MAC isnt unusual, they do own over 30% of the shares in the company. I feel MS will test the market with a $299 price tag, i mean they have a good 6 months or more if that needs to be lowered in their opinion. I read in one magazine (PC Answers) that MS are willing to give 360s away to take more of the market.

pApA SmerF01 · 14-07-2005, 10:37 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Iron Orta

Xbox wasnt a power PC, and MS picking up of MAC isnt unusual, they do own over 30% of the shares in the company. I feel MS will test the market with a $299 price tag, i mean they have a good 6 months or more if that needs to be lowered in their opinion. I read in one magazine (PC Answers) that MS are willing to give 360s away to take more of the market.

considering they're losing money anyways on the console, why not?

as long as ps3 seems oblivious to the threats on their market share i think microsoft can do great this next generation.

they have the hardware (some people agree, some don't) and the software. plus, they have built up recognition and have momentum going into the launch.

basically, the only place they would need to "give em away" is probably japan, their weakest market.

puma juice · 14-07-2005, 09:11 PM

japans market is still to be determined and until the statements made by sony (which their system is falling apart day-by-day) are verified to be true i think that the next generation of gaming is gonna be lifted to a whole different level with microsoft and the 360 leading the industry

Xboxlover · 15-07-2005, 07:09 PM

This is NEXT GEN!! and we are talking price cuts already. these consoles have to carry on for the next 4years or so.

cmpolis · 16-07-2005, 12:03 AM

Wow, the specs make it look alot faster than almost all expensive gaming computers, I wonder how microsoft is going to be able to make this affordable for the masses.

Justin Buser · 16-07-2005, 12:05 AM

They will do it by subsidising the manufacture of the console with their billions of dollars

Quote:

Originally Posted by cmpolis

Wow, the specs make it look alot faster than almost all expensive gaming computers, I wonder how microsoft is going to be able to make this affordable for the masses.

pApA SmerF01 · 17-07-2005, 04:36 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by cmpolis

Wow, the specs make it look alot faster than almost all expensive gaming computers, I wonder how microsoft is going to be able to make this affordable for the masses.

this console will only cost about $370 to manufacture....so they'll sell for $299

X-B-O-X Lover · 18-07-2005, 05:59 PM

sup all
i'm newbie, i support xbox360 all the way
but dont you agree ps3 is much better than xbox360?
3 core @3.2 ghz =9.6ghz compare to 1 core with 7 syn @3.2ghz=28.2 ghz?? that
do the math, my future xbox360 is much weaker??
what can i do here.....
plus Backwards Compatible only top selling games??? that mean that over hundreads games aren't able to play????? tops sellling Backwards Compatible mean that....only a few can play??

bennyboo03 · 18-07-2005, 06:27 PM

lol u are an xbox lover lol

Grindstone · 18-07-2005, 06:36 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by X-B-O-X Lover

sup all
i'm newbie, i support xbox360 all the way
but dont you agree ps3 is much better than xbox360?
3 core @3.2 ghz =9.6ghz compare to 1 core with 7 syn @3.2ghz=28.2 ghz?? that
do the math, my future xbox360 is much weaker??
what can i do here.....
plus Backwards Compatible only top selling games??? that mean that over hundreads games aren't able to play????? tops sellling Backwards Compatible mean that....only a few can play??

How do you figure? Actually, you didn't. You posted that Xbox 360 will have 3 cores each running at 3.2Ghz, and that the PS3 has 1 core running at 3.2Ghz with 7 SPE's (that do not run at 3.2 Ghz).

On paper, the PS3 looks like a behemoth. But it's architecture is such that it will not meet it's peak performace due to bottle-necking problem with the bandwidth. Plus, the cell tech is not necessarily designed for gaming as the SPE's are bascially useless for gaming number crunching. I'm actually only giving you the crap I can remember, you should google PS3 + Xbox 360, or just check the front page of this website, they have some good articles as well as Anantech, ign. et al.

PS3 will support 1080p (for now) and 7 blue-tooth controlers. But this is subject to change. The graphics will be similar, but with the Xbox 360's unified shader ATI GPU, it may be a little bit better than the RSX nVidia GPU in the PS3. The real arguments will be made after the consoles come out. For the 1080p, even if it does support that resolution, a) less than 1% of the general population owns that kind of HDtv, and b) who is going to develop a game that cater's to that >1%? and c) even if someone does, if the RSX does not perform as well as the ATI GPU, what is the point if the Xbox 360 is going to look better at 1080i than a PS3 at 1080p?

As for backwards compatibility, it is not too important. How many PS1 games do you play currently? None sound right? I've sold all my old consoles for new ones, with no remorse nor inkling to play old, out-dated games. Look forward to the future.

Anyway, like I said, do some research, come back and educate us all.

bennyboo03 · 18-07-2005, 06:39 PM

man grindstone, ur so smart i dont know wat u just said! now u should be in a high rank fr MS. thats a compliment

pApA SmerF01 · 19-07-2005, 12:25 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Grindstone

How do you figure? Actually, you didn't. You posted that Xbox 360 will have 3 cores each running at 3.2Ghz, and that the PS3 has 1 core running at 3.2Ghz with 7 SPE's (that do not run at 3.2 Ghz).

On paper, the PS3 looks like a behemoth. But it's architecture is such that it will not meet it's peak performace due to bottle-necking problem with the bandwidth. Plus, the cell tech is not necessarily designed for gaming as the SPE's are bascially useless for gaming number crunching. I'm actually only giving you the crap I can remember, you should google PS3 + Xbox 360, or just check the front page of this website, they have some good articles as well as Anantech, ign. et al.

PS3 will support 1080p (for now) and 7 blue-tooth controlers. But this is subject to change. The graphics will be similar, but with the Xbox 360's unified shader ATI GPU, it may be a little bit better than the RSX nVidia GPU in the PS3. The real arguments will be made after the consoles come out. For the 1080p, even if it does support that resolution, a) less than 1% of the general population owns that kind of HDtv, and b) who is going to develop a game that cater's to that >1%? and c) even if someone does, if the RSX does not perform as well as the ATI GPU, what is the point if the Xbox 360 is going to look better at 1080i than a PS3 at 1080p?

As for backwards compatibility, it is not too important. How many PS1 games do you play currently? None sound right? I've sold all my old consoles for new ones, with no remorse nor inkling to play old, out-dated games. Look forward to the future.

Anyway, like I said, do some research, come back and educate us all.

that's a really good take on the problems of the cell.

another interesting thing to point out is that the spe's have to be read in-line (one at a time, in order) and they have no independent thought, so everything has to be run through their only general processing core.

also, they can't run the cell at full power because the gpu eats up most of the bandwidth, and the carryover is very minimal.

CaveMan · 22-07-2005, 09:16 PM

This was typed up awhile ago, and for a different site, I was comenting on the article on the site, and I was surrounded by ps3 fanboys so that’s were the attitude came from. But still most of it is up to date. I just didn’t feel like fixing it allover again, after it took me so long to do it in the first place.

PS3

The PS3 has all that CPU power, but the one big problem the machine has is its bandwidth. They said in their press conference at E3 that the PS3 has around (48.0 GPS) of bandwidth. But the 360 has around (278.4 GPS) bandwidth. That’s over five and a have times the PS3. If the PS3 has 2 teraflops of floating point computational power then why five in a half have time less bandwidth then the other guy, when your two time the CPU power.
It even said in this article that the bandwidth is very imported, when you’re talking about the preferments. And you can’t forget that the PS3 uses a lot of buzz words. If you still think that Kill Zone was in game, well they said it was, but latter they changed there mind and said it was representation of what it will be able to do. The RSX isn’t even belt yet.
That goes for the unreal engine demo too. Now think back to the PS2 conference. Look at the demos; the graphics in the games never got as good as their (tech demos) for example. Like I said a lot of hype
And who’s going to have two, not one but two HD TVs in the same room, much less same house. And don’t even get me started with that ugly boomerang thing they call a controller.
Based on measurements of running next generation games, only ~10-30% of the instructions executed are floating point. The remainders of the instructions are load, store, integer, branch, etc. Even fewer of the instructions executed are streaming floating point—probably ~5-10%. Cell is optimized for streaming floating-point, with 87.5% of its cores good for streaming floating-point and nothing else. The 360 is far more superior in general general purpose CPU computations.

XBOX 360

Now about the 360 I think they could have had a better showing….a lot better showing at E3. Shore they talked about the Xbox live community that’s good and all, but I think that there conference was like a pep rally…… a boring pep rally. They should have hade some tech demos, but real ones,
People started saying that the 360s at E3 were showing lag and showed some jagged parts in the game. ……well they were using the alpha units (not the finished units). They were using 2 (G5)for each xbox, you know, those Macs that cost around $ 2,000.00 each. And so those were showing the lag.
For those saying that the best game in the world in final fantasy XI well it’s going to be on the 360. So stop bragging. But really halo 2 got much more good revues then XI.
And it’s going to look much better on the 360, online.
One last thing, one of many things that the PS3 can’t do that the 360 can is procedural geometry. I’ll let you look it up for yourself.

OVERALL
Like every one said, it’s to come down to the games. For those who think that Sony has all the good game makers, sorry to burst your bubble but this next generation they coming to 360 too. Oh ya for those of you who believe that MS lost $10 million this year. Tell me why MS gained 8.0% of the market this year so far.

For a real comparison of the xbox360 and the PS3:

http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/617/617951p1.html