Microsoft’s Xbox 2 Architecture Unveiled

Microsoft will use IBM’s POWER 64-bit processors in the Xbox 2. The 65nm chips were reportedly taped-out recently and are now evaluated by engineers at Microsoft and IBM, though, the architecture of those microprocessors still remains to be investigated.

As everybody knows, there is a lot going on with multi-core, multi-threaded designs at IBM. Apparently, Microsoft also wants to jump on that bandwagon, or so it may seem. Microsoft wants to incorporate IBM’s POWER 976 architecture into the CPUs for Xbox 2 console to allow truly high-performance processing. POWER 976 is expected to be a dual-core processor able to handle two threads at once. What may seem a pretty hard to believe is that Microsoft wants more than 1 such chip to power its forthcoming console, according to the scheme published there are three of such chips.

The whole Xbox 2 CPU system will be capable of processing a number of threads simultaneously; because of its RISC nature, the new architecture is a big-endian system, a term that describes the order in which a sequence of bytes are stored in computer memory. Traditional x86 architectures use the little-endian approach.

The graphics processor of the Xbox 2 is to be developed by ATI Technologies, the I/O controller is to be developed by Silicon Integration Systems Corporation.

Microsoft is expected to formally announce the Xbox 2 (the “Xenon”) on the 2nd of June 2004. They may adjust some parameters but will not change the overall structure of the console.

Here is a PIC of the System Block Diagram

Can't wait to get me one !!