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
Up Close and Personal with the CPU, GPU and... Yonah?
The heart and soul of the Xbox 360 is of course its CPU and GPU, first off we have the 3 core PowerPC processor. In order to give you an idea of its size, we've compared it here to Intel's 65nm Yonah processor, with a die size of just 90 mm^2:
The 90nm Xenon processor looks to be a little less than 3 Yonahs, but remember that the move to 65nm will cut the Xenon basically in half, making it closer to 1.5 Yonahs if they were on the same manufacturing process. Through this comparison we can get a rough idea of the size of the logic in the Xenon CPU.
As another comparison point, here is Yonah vs. a AA battery, as well as the 3-core Xenon processor with a AA battery:
Now let's have a look at Yonah vs. the ATI Xenos GPU:
Finally we've got the Xbox 360 South Bridge, which is quite small:
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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.