What is Digg?11 Comments
- inactive, on 01/05/2009, -4/+24XBOX 360's chip is called Xenon; a G4/G5 or PPE970 as far as anyone knows, well, 3 of these PPEs, and a massive cache on a single die.
PS3 uses a Cell processor. The Cell processor utilizes a single PPE that has been specialized for controlling numerous SPEs(Xenon doesn't have this nor does anything similar in concept, these are what make Cell special). They all interface across what is called EIB(Xenon doesn't have this, again, this is another architecture that Makes Cell special).
What is miscontrued: Xbox's team worked with IBM's same department as Sony was(it is claimed, I've been unable to verify this). Though I'd say Xbox merely saw the Cell design, if they even did, and decided against it.
The simple truth is the chips have little similarities(a PPE, Wii has one too, so did Macs, at one time). IBM regularly repurposes chips for their customers. It's not Sony's chip. Toshiba also was part of the group which co-developed with IBM. The black-fact is, it was a partnership, and IBM retained rights to use Cell, as do Toshiba and Sony. Cell is actually strongest suited for data stream processing. Like encryption, DSP, and that which uses smaller data sets. Which for games as we know them is not at all ideal(not saying you can't code for the SPEs, and it's becoming easier to do with dev tools from Sony finally becoming worthwhile).. - trixdropd, on 01/05/2009, -0/+7Buried as a dupe.
- AndrewDB, on 01/05/2009, -0/+6Hey would you look at that .. related by keyword, " Book explains how Microsoft used Sony's chip for xbox 360 " with only 773 diggs.
And strangely enough, I remember this being on the front page.
I guess I'm going to have to digg this again!
/sarcasm. - everlast88, on 01/05/2009, -5/+11this has been on the front page 5 times now, i'm not going to let it happen again
- doshindude, on 01/05/2009, -0/+5buried as propaganda. Microsoft did not use the chip. they merely looked at it and then continued developing their own.
- inactive, on 01/06/2009, -0/+2Huh?
http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_proje ...
http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_proje ...
From Xenon's page:
"Acknowledgements
In addition to our customers and Power.org partners, the IBM Research data parallel SIMD processing effort has benefited from the contributions of the IBM PowerPC Architecture Control Board; IBM design groups in Austin, Raleigh and Rochester; the IBM compiler groups at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Toronto and Haifa Research Labs; and application groups in the Watson Research Center, Haifa Research Labs and the S/T/I design center that developed the Cell Broadband Engine in Austin."
There you go. Take the last one mentioned and blow it out of proportion. But if you bothered reading that far don't miss this paragraph(all the talk about Cell and SIMD(wide-bus, doing more at the same time) research takes the bulk of the mid section, they are both multicore, though the cores work differently):
"While supporting the increased number of registers was easy to accommodate in a new instruction set such as the Cell SPE, it was more challenging to add more registers and new functions into the ***pre-existing Power Architecture*** set while complying with the Power Architecture instruction formats of the established VMX multimedia instructions. At the same time, specifying an efficient compilation target excluded the use of special formats, such as paired registers, register subsetting or register windowing."
And:
"Using results from our VMX2 research, we put together a proposal called “VMX128” in which we recommended pushing an ***existing RISC architecture*** to an incredible 128 registers. Our proposal helped IBM win the bid for the design of the Microsoft Xbox 360."
IBM designed a chip and made a bid for Microsoft's buck. Microsoft just graciously accepted! - jamesdew, on 01/06/2009, -0/+2well you did
- renegadeafk, on 01/04/2009, -8/+9pwnd
- inactive, on 01/06/2009, -0/+1I don't know but between the credibility of a digg user or two IBMers in this matter I take IBMers any day of the week and twice on Sunday.
- Chris_F, on 01/06/2009, -1/+2He speaks the truth.
- thetrza, on 01/04/2009, -9/+4More power to them. Sucks for Sony.
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