And though unexpected, this may well be a good choice. The particular PowerPC CPU in the Xbox 360 has 1 MB of L2 cache and three cores clocked at 3.2 GHz each. Each core runs two threads for a total of six. At this, Holmdahl explained that six threads essentially meant that six applications could be running at once. Audio could be handled by one thread, artificial intelligence on another, and so on. "This allows developers to pick and choose what they want to focus the consoles power on. We consider it a future proof design." Since a CPU of that power will generate a lot of heat, Microsoft also chose a vacuum sealed water cooled heatsink to manage heat.
The GPU is also a custom processor, designed by ATI. It is clocked at 500 MHz and has a 3D Logic DRAM (10MB) chip embedded directly in it. The GPU also features 48 unified shaders, which can be used as either vertex or pixel units.
Xbox 360 System Performance
Custom IBM PowerPC-based CPU * 3 symmetrical cores running at 3.2 GHz each
* 2 hardware threads per core; 6 hardware threads total
* 1 VMX-128 vector unit per core; 3 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 * 500 MHz
* 10 MB 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 fillrate using 4X MSAA
Shader Performance * 48 billion shader operations per second
Memory * 512 MB GDDR3 RAM
* 700 MHz DDR
* 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 TFLOP
Storage * Detachable and upgradeable 20 GB hard drive
* 12X dual-layer DVD-ROM
* Memory unit support starting at 64 MB
I/O * Support for up to 4 wireless game controllers
* 3 USB 2.0 ports
* 2 memory unit slots
Uh, those specs arent anything to dismiss lightly, tri core 3.2ghz cpu, here comes the parallel multithreaded game software from the game boxes that will in turn feed the PC game makers on how to deal with multicore desktop PC's.That thing has decent internal bandwidth too, those PPC chips arent Intel or AMD, closer to what went into Apple G4's I believe, just 3 on a die.Ya its short a little on video, but keep in mind TV resolution blows chunks,so it isnt gonna matter that it doesnt have a huge VRAM and a necessarily super fast one ether.With 1 TFLOP under the hood that thing is a processing beast from hell.
