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
Final Words, and a Refresher on the Benefits of Serial Buses
We hope you enjoyed this brief tour of the Xbox 360's motherboard, being the last weekend before Microsoft's official retail launch, we figured it would be a good send-off.
We'll actually end this tour of the 360's motherboard with a little comparison point in the advancement of bus technologies. For the past several years, the PC industry has seen a transition away from older parallel bus interfaces (IDE, Parallel Ports, traditional FSBs, PCI/AGP) to much faster serial buses (SATA, USB, Hyper Transport, PCI Express). The Xbox 360's motherboard actually gives us an opportunity to present a good comparison of the benefits of a serial interface, from a layout perspective.
The link between the Xenon CPU and the Xenos GPU in the Xbox 360 is actually two 10.8GB/s serial buses, which you can clearly see from the picture below. Note the clear definition of the traces the clean routing, to the point where you can count the individual data, address and clock lines:
This is similar to the type of routing you'd see connecting two Hyper Transport ports on an AMD motherboard.
Now let's take a look at the parallel GDDR3 interface between the ATI GPU and the Samsung GDDR3 memory:
Note the significant increase in traces, attributed to a much wider parallel interface than what exists between the CPU and GPU. The more complex routing of parallel buses becomes an even bigger problem as devices demand more bandwidth, which is why we have seen such a large scale transition to serial interfaces.
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Calin - Friday, November 18, 2005 - link
Power can be provided using two complete layers- one for ground, one for power. With the added benefit that, if they separate layers with data connections (those nice lines), they reduce interference between signals on different layers.Lifted - Friday, November 18, 2005 - link
Loading a little faster this time around. Ohh look, pictures!Gigahertz19 - Friday, November 18, 2005 - link
Haha 1st post..who carez about X-Box..I got my PCDonegrim - Friday, November 18, 2005 - link
A pc with a similar spec to the xbox would cost at least 3 times as much, probably more. And to play multiplayer games you would need another pc per person.DrZoidberg - Monday, November 21, 2005 - link
u dont need another pc for multiplayer, u just need to play online multiplayer games.Griswold - Friday, November 18, 2005 - link
3 times the price of an xbox360 isnt that much really. Especially when you think about the tenfold possibilites you have with a PC compared to a console. These arguments just dont cut it. If you can get the games you want to play on the PC you work with, no point in buying a console. If you prefer the console style games and dont really care too much about a PC besides browsing and e-mails, stick to the consoles.If you want the best of both worlds, get both.
I dont own a console because I realized, the games I like to play are simply sub standard as far as playability is concerned on consoles and/or dont exists (yet) and when they do, they play horrible due to other limitations.
Langley951 - Monday, July 23, 2018 - link
The Xbox 360 sold much better than its predecessor, and although not the best-selling console of the seventh generation, it is regarded as a success since it strengthened Microsoft as a major force in the console market at the expense of well-established rivals. https://mcdvoice.me/