Xbox 360 CPU vs other CPUs?

[whooleo]

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

In "raw"power the Wii wins, it has a faster CPU and GPU, however it's GPU is not capable of shaders and therefor is technically capable of less effects (not by much due to the TEV unit).

 

[whooleo]

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.

You are correct. The 360 is capable of better performance without optimizations due to it's easier to work with architecture.

 

[jay_nar2012]

Microsoft should of upgraded a little when they made the slim..

 

[getochkn]

Yes they're old by today's standards and they were released 7 years ago, so comparing to today's standards is sort of stupid.

When they were released, Core2 weren't even out yet. AMD64 just hit the market.

 

[getochkn]

Microsoft should of upgraded a little when they made the slim..

Upgrade it and then what, games made for the slim to take advantage of that extra power couldn't be played on the older systems? There's a reason they never upgrade the power/ram/etc on consoles, because it would leave people with older consoles out in the dust. They get more hard drive space and that's about it, and that comes with the price of hard drives coming down.

 

[whooleo]

Upgrade it and then what, games made for the slim to take advantage of that extra power couldn't be played on the older systems? There's a reason they never upgrade the power/ram/etc on consoles, because it would leave people with older consoles out in the dust. They get more hard drive space and that's about it, and that comes with the price of hard drives coming down.

+1

 

[whooleo]

Gekko (GC CPU): http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/53/GEKKO.jpg

Broadway (Wii CPU): http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e6/Broadwaycpu.JPG

Xenon (Xbox 360 CPU): http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/98/KL_Microsoft_XBOX_380_CPU_ES.jpg

Cell Broadband Engine (PS3 CPU): http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4e/Ps3-cell.jpg

Xenos (Xbox 360 GPU): http://cfile7.uf.tistory.com/image/1568B32C4AD6894318B2C9

RSX (PS3 GPU): http://img.diytrade.com/cdimg/1281427/21337420/0/1331871567/PS3_RSX_GPU_CXD2971DGB_AGB_1GB.jpg

Flipper (GC GPU): http://www.happytrees.org/main-images/chip-v2/ic-photo-ATI--D8926F2011--(Flipper_A)--(Gamecube-GPU).jpg

Hollywood (Wii GPU): http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7d/Hollywood_gpu.png

 

[whooleo]

Yes they're old by today's standards and they were released 7 years ago, so comparing to today's standards is sort of stupid.

When they were released, Core2 weren't even out yet. AMD64 just hit the market.

AMD64 hit the market in 2003 with the Opteron 64, however the full specification was finished in August 2000.

 

[nsouter853]

Compared to a modern gaming desktop, the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 have pretty weak hardware. This is why you see games companies lowering the graphics settings and resolution for the Xbox360/PS3 versions of games, and why PC games have better graphics. In fact, it is true that although you may have a 720p/1080p "capable" Xbox360/PS3 and cable and TV, you will rarely be actually playing with those resolutions, due to the limitations of the hardware.

This is not to say the two consoles are obsolete. They have certain advantages such as co-op (playing with 2-4 screens with your buddies) and price (they are cheap compared to a gaming PC).

 

[amuffin]

My phone is faster than the Xbox.

 

[Smeg45]

Its true that quite a few phones and tablets are faster than consoles. Don't forget though that consoles are designed primarily around games. They don't need to run a fat OS and assorted utilities. All that being said, console tech is 200% obsolete and holding back gaming period. You can see the effects of the llack of memory and grunt that show up in console games - checkpoints, tiny linear boxy levels, low res textures, low draw distance, overuse of blur to hide lack of AA, etc.

 

[thepeanutguy]

basically 360>ps3>>>>>wii

How did you arrive at that conclusion ? An optimized PS3 game will look and perform much better than an optimized 360 game.

E.g: Halo 3 runs at an abysmal native resolution of 640p; looks alright.
Gran Turismo 5 runs at native 1080p and looks great.

Obviously, the average video game that was developed on the PC will look ever so slightly better on the Xbox, compared to the PS3.

 

[esrever]

How did you arrive at that conclusion ? An optimized PS3 game will look and perform much better than an optimized 360 game.

E.g: Halo 3 runs at an abysmal native resolution of 640p; looks alright.
Gran Turismo 5 runs at native 1080p and looks great.

Obviously, the average video game that was developed on the PC will look ever so slightly better on the Xbox, compared to the PS3.

Halo 3 is a 5 year old game. Grand turismo 5 has been in production for 10 years. How are they even comparable games? Halo 3 had a specialized lighting engine on top of the game which made each frame to be rendered 2x thus requiring more power. The gpu and CPU inside the xbox 360 is more capable than the ones inside the ps3. Not only that but the memory architecture inside the xbox is far superior than the ps3. The EDRAM inside the 360 gpu allows the 360 to actually have AA. Look at how grand theft auto 4 on 360 and ps3. PS3 ran at 640p with no AA and lowered textures while the 360 ran at 720p with higher textures and 2x AA.

Almost every multiplatform game looks worse on the ps3. The ps3 exclusives also look worse than the 360 exclusives. There is really nothing to it. PS3's hardware is weaker on paper. The CPU can't effectively be coded for and the gpu is weaker than the 360's. It has no on die ram so there is never anti aliasing. It can't use as high quality textures as the 360. Overall it is the hardware inferior console.

 

[jay_nar2012]

Upgrade it and then what, games made for the slim to take advantage of that extra power couldn't be played on the older systems? There's a reason they never upgrade the power/ram/etc on consoles, because it would leave people with older consoles out in the dust. They get more hard drive space and that's about it, and that comes with the price of hard drives coming down.

I was thinking do what Apple did with their 3rd gen ipods, make 2 xboxs with upgrades and make 1 with old config if that makes sense.

They could make the games run on the new config and old config by disabling certein graphical setting when put in a older console automatically.

Just an idea but what ever.

 

[italiasian]

How did you arrive at that conclusion ? An optimized PS3 game will look and perform much better than an optimized 360 game.

E.g: Halo 3 runs at an abysmal native resolution of 640p; looks alright.
Gran Turismo 5 runs at native 1080p and looks great.

Obviously, the average video game that was developed on the PC will look ever so slightly better on the Xbox, compared to the PS3.

The ps3 renders the game at 720p but upscale it to 1080i, The xbox is the same.

 

[Pinhedd]

It's in this list here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Million_instructions_per_second#Million_instructions_per_second

That lists Integer throughput but the Xenon CPU was designed to have significant floating point throughput to help with game logic and physics calculations. The Xenon CPU is capable of about 90 gigaflops, which is just below the 2600k and slightly above the 8150

 

[jay_nar2012]

Is that good or bad?

 

[italiasian]

Is that good or bad?

You lose quality when you upscale images, so you would be better off setting your xbox or ps3 to default to 720p.

 

[jay_nar2012]

Noted.

 

[Pinhedd]

Is that good or bad?

The advantage that console CPUs have over desktop CPUs is that they can get rid of the parts of the CPU that aren't used and replace them with components that are useful to the design of the console.

X86 CPUs are basically just 30 years of incremental updates. While the architecture was separated into high level X86 instructions and low level microcode a long time ago there's still a lot of useless baggage which is just taking up space for no other reason than to ensure that voicemail programs from 1984 will still run on an Ivybridge processor.

The floating point througput on the Xenon processor was very impressive for 2005 and is still good by today's standards. The Integer performance leaves a lot to be desired though. Ultimately the Xenon was a well designed CPU that's still decent 8 years after its debut and I fully expect that Microsoft will employ something similar for the 360's successor.

 

[jay_nar2012]

The advantage that console CPUs have over desktop CPUs is that they can get rid of the parts of the CPU that aren't used and replace them with components that are useful to the design of the console.

X86 CPUs are basically just 30 years of incremental updates. While the architecture was separated into high level X86 instructions and low level microcode a long time ago there's still a lot of useless baggage which is just taking up space for no other reason than to ensure that voicemail programs from 1984 will still run on an Ivybridge processor.

The floating point througput on the Xenon processor was very impressive for 2005 and is still good by today's standards. The Integer performance leaves a lot to be desired though. Ultimately the Xenon was a well designed CPU that's still decent 8 years after its debut and I fully expect that Microsoft will employ something similar for the 360's successor.

How about the PS3 and Wii CPU, they any good?

 

[Pinhedd]

How about the PS3 and Wii CPU, they any good?

An interesting thing to note about the Wii, 360 and PS3 is that they all employ processors based on the PowerPC architecture. Each implementation is different but the core design is similar

The Wii is simliar to a very scaled down single core 360 processor without the heavy floating point additions (simliar to SSE on x86 CPUs). It's nothing special but it's also cheap and low power, which is what the Wii aimed for.

The PS3's Cell processor is especially interesting because it actually contains two different types of processors. It has a single core processor called the PPE which runs two threads at once (similar to Hyperthreading) and a number of coprocessors called SPEs.

The PPE is based on the PowerPC architecture but is not intended to perform general execution tasks. Instead it acts as a controller and scheduler for the SPEs which are supposed to perform the brunt of the workload. It's worth noting that the Xenon processor for the 360 contains 3 modified PPEs.

The SPEs are individual RISC processors that are interconnected but do not share resources. The PPE is responsible for loading programs and data into the SPEs and configuring the interconnects. The theory behind the construction is that the output of one SPE could act as the input to another SPE. This effectively forms a high-level pipeline architecture.

Since each SPE is basically nothing more than a digital signal processor they swap branch predition and out of order execution for extra execution capacity. This means that code has to be optimized by the compiler because there's little to no hardware optimization.

The floating point throughput on the Cell is very high but it's not as easy to use. Double precision floating point throughput is atrocious but that's not used in games very much

 

[thepeanutguy]

Halo 3 is a 5 year old game. Grand turismo 5 has been in production for 10 years. How are they even comparable games? Halo 3 had a specialized lighting engine on top of the game which made each frame to be rendered 2x thus requiring more power. The gpu and CPU inside the xbox 360 is more capable than the ones inside the ps3. Not only that but the memory architecture inside the xbox is far superior than the ps3. The EDRAM inside the 360 gpu allows the 360 to actually have AA. Look at how grand theft auto 4 on 360 and ps3. PS3 ran at 640p with no AA and lowered textures while the 360 ran at 720p with higher textures and 2x AA.

Almost every multiplatform game looks worse on the ps3. The ps3 exclusives also look worse than the 360 exclusives. There is really nothing to it. PS3's hardware is weaker on paper. The CPU can't effectively be coded for and the gpu is weaker than the 360's. It has no on die ram so there is never anti aliasing. It can't use as high quality textures as the 360. Overall it is the hardware inferior console.

Oh, your god, that was horribly wrong.
Link to this "lighting engine" ?

"Not only that but the memory architecture inside the xbox is far superior than the ps3" - lulwat? You do know the PS3 uses 256MB of GDDR3 and 256MB of Rambu XDR2 DRAM, right? - Monumentally faster!

"PS3 ran at 640p with no AA and lowered textures while the 360 ran at 720p with higher textures and 2x AA" - No, the Xbox does not have any form of modern AA; you just pulled this out your ass.

"The ps3 exclusives also look worse than the 360 exclusives" - Being that the only new (decent) exclusive is Halo, I'd like to see some proof.

"PS3's hardware is weaker on paper" - At what? Floating point arrhythmic, anisotropic filtering etc?

"The CPU can't effectively be coded for and the gpu is weaker than the 360's" - You probably meant to say something along the lines of "it's harder to develop on".

"It has no on die ram so there is never anti aliasing" - What your saying is completely insane. The Xbox does not have on "die" RAM, nor does that play any role what so ever with AA

All in all, looks like you pulled 95% of that from thin air.

 

[jay_nar2012]

To the Peanut guy-

Here is the Xbox's GPU.

You see that little chip to the left, thats eDRAM, and its in die form.

 

[thepeanutguy]

To the Peanut guy-

Here is the Xbox's GPU.
http://www.llamma.com/xbox360/news/images/xbox-360-elite/360elite 048.jpg

You see that little chip to the left, thats eDRAM, and its in die form.

Woah! I stand corrected.
What's it capacity and throughput?