Xbox 360 CPU vs other CPUs?

[jay_nar2012]

What CPU = the Xbox's CPU?

How does it compare to-

A Celeron D
A Pentium 4
A pentium (core based)
A Phenom 2 (x2, x3 x4 x6)
A phenom (x2 x3 x4 x6)
A Sempron (AM2 or AM3)
A Athlon x2, x3 x4
A i3
A i5
A i7
A Extreme series i7
A Bulldozer
A Liano
Maybe a trinity.

 

[esrever]

a tegra 3.

 

[jay_nar2012]

Hmmm, so its worse than a sempron?

Aren't Xbox CPUs 3 core ARM CPUs or powerpc CPUs with hyperthreading?

 

[jay_nar2012]

And that equals a C2D or C2Q?

 

[esrever]

its a very old and in order cpu. It isn't particularly fast by todays standards and should be faster than a sempron. I would guess its about as fast as a pentium D at best.

 

[esrever]

thats slower than a c2d and much slower than a c2q.

 

[Murissokah]

The correct answer would be, it does not. It's a purpose-built processor that runs on IBM's PowerPC instruction set, comparing it to a x86 CPU would not make sense. If you must compare raw horsepower, it has 165 milion transistors, about half the first Core 2 Duo had.

Please keep in mind that comparing performance on different instruction sets is really absurd, it's like saying your eggbeater is better than your drill because it spins faster.

 

[jay_nar2012]

How about if it was given more instructions?

 

[esrever]

The correct answer would be, it does not. It's a purpose-built processor that runs on IBM's PowerPC instruction set, comparing it to a x86 CPU would not make sense. If you must compare raw horsepower, it has 165 milion transistors, about half the first Core 2 Duo had.

Thats about as many transistors as an atom I would guess.

 

[Murissokah]

How about if it was given more instructions?

That cannot be done. The instruction set is the building block on a CPU architecture. It is a set of operations that are chosen as basic operations. Once that is decided, the hardware is built to run these operations only. When you compile a program for a chosen instruction set, you are translating the program code into a series of basic intructions for which the processor has the hardware to execute. If you were to change the instruction set, your processor would no longer be compatible, you would have to write a new compiler and re-compile all programs for this new architecture.

 

[jay_nar2012]

So you can't change instructions after the CPU is made basically as its part of the architecture..

 

[jay_nar2012]

How about the Xbox's GPU, what does that compare to?

 

[Murissokah]

So you can't change instructions after the CPU is made basically as its part of the architecture..

How about if it was given more instructions when it was designed?

Then it would have been yet another architecture, a PowerPC variant.

To picture the this, imagine one processor was built with basic operations in mind. It had the hardware to do simple add/subtract operations in one cycle. It understands add/subtract instructions. If you want to multiply, you have issue a lot of add instructions.

A second processor, built for more advanced math, has the hardware for add/subtract/multiply/divide. It takes more transistors to create this hardware, but it now can understand add/subtract/multiply/divide instructions. If you have to multiply, it can do it in one cycle.

So basically, a purpose-built processor has the potential to be a lot more efficient. On the other hand, a lot of improvements are already explored on current architectures, meaning you have to be really creative to gain efficiency.

To try and brings this back on topic, the Xenon CPU (x360) has 165 milion transistors, a Prescott family Pentium 4 had 125 milion, a Conroe Core 2 Duo had 290 milion. The Xenon has the advantage of being purpose-built, so it might be just as fast when runnig the software it was made to run. A direct comparison cannot be made since one cannot run the code compiled for the other.

 

[Murissokah]

How about the Xbox's GPU, what does that compare to?

The Xenos GPU (X360's video GPU) is basically a reworked Radeon x1800. Very old tech.

 

[jay_nar2012]

Why does nintendo use crappy hardware (There DSi can't even go on the nintendo website).

Change of topic i know but why not talk about the consoles?

 

[jay_nar2012]

How about wii and PS3?

 

[whooleo]

The 360's CPU has the "raw" power of about a 2GHz Core 2 Duo or Athlon 64 X2 @ 2.4GHz. As for as the GPU the Xenos (Xbox 360 GPU) is not a reworked X1800, yes it shares the base R500 architecture but it's shaders are unified among a few other differences. The package also contains a 10MB eDRAM die with the ability to do Z-culling, AA, and a few other things that helps take the load off the GPU. Overall "raw" GPU power is about a GeForce 9600 GT.

 

[jay_nar2012]

i'm trying to learn a little more about the consoles hardware and what its hardware compares too...

 

[jay_nar2012]

And the wii?

 

[whooleo]

How about wii and PS3?

The PS3 on the other hand is different. The Cell (PS3 CPU) is a floating point power house and also has the ability to do vertex operations to assist the GPU, overall performance is hard to judge but FP performance is good (better than 360) but general purpose performance is bad (worse than 360). As for as the GPU, it is a GeForce 7900 GTX (G71) with lower clocks and a chopped in half back-end (128-bit memory bus and 8 ROPS) but it also has a direct connection to Cell (to access system memory if need be) that has about the same bandwidth as the GPU memory bus (about 22GB/s) which can also be used to offload vertex calculations to the Cell.

 

[whooleo]

i'm trying to learn a little more about the consoles hardware and what its hardware compares too...

The Wii however is basically an overclocked Gamecube with an additional 64MB of external GDDR3 RAM. The CPU is very similar to the G3 (PowerPC 750) which is used in older Power Macs, except it has about 40-50 additional SIMD instructions added. To be specific the CPU is based off the PowerPC 750CXe. The GPU is another matter. It is a DirectX 7 era/feature similar design and performs like a high-end GeForce 4 Ti just without the shaders but instead a TEV unit that can perform similar functions to shaders but not as good.

This is just a summary as the Wii/GC architecture is much more in-depth.

 

[jay_nar2012]

How about the Wii compared to the first P3 coppermine Xbox?

 

[esrever]

basically 360>ps3>>>>>wii

 

[jay_nar2012]

I would be careful about saying that, a fanboy might come a long.....

 

[esrever]

well they are all pretty weak by todays standards but given the hardware, the 360 should provide better performance if you just make a game from scratch with no optimizations.