Inside Microsoft's Xbox 360 - A Tour of the 360's Motherboard
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 18, 2005 12:19 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
Taking the Surface Tour
Moving away from the ports and looking inwards, we take a look at some of the ICs and other devices present on the Xbox 360's motherboard.
The Xbox 360's OS and other necessary software is loaded in the 128Mb (16MB) NAND Flash device that's on the motherboard:
Originally we assumed the chip below was a TV encoder, but we've since found out that the TV encoder on ATI's Xenos GPU is identical to what is on the ATI Radeon X1000 series of PC graphics cards - meaning the Xbox 360's TV encoder is located on the Xenos GPU itself and makes use of ATI's Xilleon display engine.
If it isn't the TV encoder, then what is this mystery chip? We haven't been able to find the physical interface for the Ethernet port, so it is possible that the 100Mbit PHY is located within this chip, as well as the audio codec, both of which would make sense given its location on the motherboard (within close proximity to the AV cable connector). In addition to those two options, it is possible that this chip may house whatever DRM technology is used in the Xbox 360.
Next up we've got a single 64MB Samsung GDDR3 memory device from the Xbox 360's motherboard; there are a total of 8 of these chips on the motherboard, adding up to the system's full 512MB of unified system memory. The part number on the chip indicates a 700MHz operating frequency, with a 1.4Gbps/pin data rate, which is exactly what is specified by Microsoft:
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Calin - Friday, November 18, 2005 - link
I don't think you can modify it now to run Linux - at least not to run Linux well. The hardware inside doesn't have yet drivers in Linux (while the CPU could be supported right now by Linux, the video probably isn't. The others probably are, but might not identify themselves as the parts they (just like the chips are engraved with Microsoft XBox 360 no matter who produce them)Alphafox78 - Friday, November 18, 2005 - link
Its way too early for that, the DRM has to be cracked first so uncoded apps can be usedPhantronius - Friday, November 18, 2005 - link
You would think Anandtech had never seen a console before judging from the way they rip into them like a 5 year old.ksherman - Friday, November 18, 2005 - link
YOU HAVE A YONAH PROCESSOR!?!?!?! is it any good? i guess it would likely be under an NDA...Great article! too bad i cant afford one of these puppies for a while... happy with my BF2 fragging machine for now!
fuzzynavel - Friday, November 18, 2005 - link
Nice pair of 360 articles....but have you actually played the damn thing yet!!!!finbarqs - Friday, November 18, 2005 - link
Yes, playing the game, are ANY games 60 FPS? 30 FPS is the previous gen, we're moving to a new era where all games needs to be 60fps... Namely Bizarre, who keeps saying that their PGr3 game will run at 60 fps... But been so quiet since they said it.. In fact, no one mentions it... Bizarre probably has a NDA on that because people will not buy the game because it didn't hit 60fps.Calin - Friday, November 18, 2005 - link
Yes, I was wondering about that too...mrgq912 - Friday, November 18, 2005 - link
I always thought those lines on the motherboards were a design element. Who ever knew it actually carried data.Learn something new on anand everyday. got a love it.
Zirconium - Friday, November 18, 2005 - link
All kidding aside, it is interesting to see the ways the board designers try to make all the traces the same length from the GPU to the memory. It also shows that the technology is so fast, that slight differences in the amount of time it takes the signal to travel can cause errors.Googer - Friday, November 18, 2005 - link
They are just like physical copper wires and those lines are not there for beauty either. Some lines carry data and others transmit the various levels of power (voltage) needed to run the components. These are the lines that keep every thing on and connected to each other.