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Sony and Microsoft Next Generation Consoles.

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ducky2 Posted: 00:44 Feb24 2005 Post ID: 79459
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Sony Playstation 3 Ship Date: Early 2006

Central Processing Unit

The PlayStation 3's CPU will be a chip codenamed "Cell", and the system will use chip-to-chip interface technology and memory technology from Rambus. Cell's technical details were released at the February 2005 ISSCC. IBM has won the contract to produce Cell chips for the console. The CPU's supposed distributed processing features have been of great interest to the press, speculation being that many items in the home, with differing numbers of Cell chips, can pool their power. Cell is a dual-core, 64-bit RISC IBM POWER derivative. Early versions of the chip will be 90-nm, with a change to a 65-nm process, if cost and performance allow. Abstracts from presentations to be presented at ISSCC show the Cell processor running at 4.6 GHz.

Graphics Processing Unit

In December 2004, Nvidia announced that they have been in a multi-year agreement with SCEI to develop the PlayStation 3's GPU, a custom variant of their next-generation graphics processor. In fact, they had worked for two years on the chip before making the announcement. They were previously responsible for the GPU in the Xbox console. The GPU will be manufactured at the joint Sony/Toshiba fabrication facility in Nagasaki, Japan.

RAM

Reuters news service reports that Elpida will be supplying the RAM used in the Playstation 3, and the company confirms spectulation that the Playstation 3 will utilize the 512 megabit version (64 Megabyte per RAM chip) of XDR DRAM, with Rambus' interface technology. Up to four can be used per Cell chip, for a maximum RAM figure of 256 Megabytes per Cell Chip.

Information Courtesy of: http://home.btconnect.com/hgi/ps3/ps3overview.html

Microsoft Xbox Next: Ship date: Late 2005

Basic Hardware Specifications
Xenon is powered by a 3.5+ GHz IBM PowerPC processor and a 500+ MHz ATI graphics processor. Xenon has 256+ MB of unified memory. Xenon runs a custom operating system based on Microsoft� Windows NT�, similar to the Xbox operating system. The graphics interface is a superset of Microsoft� Direct3D� version 9.0.

CPU
The Xenon CPU is a custom processor based on PowerPC technology. The CPU includes three independent processors (cores) on a single die. Each core runs at 3.5+ GHz. The Xenon CPU can issue two instructions per clock cycle per core. At peak performance, Xenon can issue 21 billion instructions per second.
The Xenon CPU was designed by IBM in close consultation with the Xbox team, leading to a number of revolutionary additions, including a dot product instruction for extremely fast vector math and custom security features built directly into the silicon to prevent piracy and hacking.
Each core has two symmetric hardware threads (SMT), for a total of six hardware threads available to games. Not only does the Xenon CPU include the standard set of PowerPC integer and floating-point registers (one set per hardware thread), the Xenon CPU also includes 128 vector (VMX) registers per hardware thread. This astounding number of registers can drastically improve the speed of common mathematical operations.
Each of the three cores includes a 32-KB L1 instruction cache and a 32-KB L1 data cache. The three cores share a 1-MB L2 cache. The L2 cache can be locked down in segments to improve performance. The L2 cache also has the very unusual feature of being directly readable from the GPU, which allows the GPU to consume geometry and texture data from L2 and main memory simultaneously.
Xenon CPU instructions are exposed to games through compiler intrinsics, allowing developers to access the power of the chip using C language notation.

GPU
The Xenon GPU is a custom 500+ MHz graphics processor from ATI. The shader core has 48 Arithmetic Logic Units (ALUs) that can execute 64 simultaneous threads on groups of 64 vertices or pixels. ALUs are automatically and dynamically assigned to either pixel or vertex processing depending on load. The ALUs can each perform one vector and one scalar operation per clock cycle, for a total of 96 shader operations per clock cycle. Texture loads can be done in parallel to ALU operations. At peak performance, the GPU can issue 48 billion shader operations per second.
The GPU has a peak pixel fill rate of 4+ gigapixels/sec (16 gigasamples/sec with 4� antialiasing). The peak vertex rate is 500+ million vertices/sec. The peak triangle rate is 500+ million triangles/sec. The interesting point about all of these values is that theyre not just theoreticalthey are attainable with nontrivial shaders.
Xenon is designed for high-definition output. Included directly on the GPU die is 10+ MB of fast embedded dynamic RAM (EDRAM). A 720p frame buffer fits very nicely here. Larger frame buffers are also possible because of hardware-accelerated partitioning and predicated rendering that has little cost other than additional vertex processing. Along with the extremely fast EDRAM, the GPU also includes hardware instructions for alpha blending, z-test, and antialiasing.
The Xenon graphics architecture is a unique design that implements a superset of Direct3D version 9.0. It includes a number of important extensions, including additional compressed texture formats and a flexible tessellation engine. Xenon not only supports high-level shading language (HLSL) model 3.0 for vertex and pixel shaders but also includes advanced shader features well beyond model 3.0. For instance, shaders use 32-bit IEEE floating-point math throughout. Vertex shaders can fetch from textures, and pixel shaders can fetch from vertex streams. Xenon shaders also have the unique ability to directly access main memory, allowing techniques that have never before been possible.
As with Xbox, Xenon will support precompiled push buffers (command buffers in Xenon terminology), but to a much greater extent than the Xbox console does. The Xbox team is exposing and documenting the command buffer format so that games are able to harness the GPU much more effectively.
In addition to an extremely powerful GPU, Xenon also includes a very high-quality resize filter. This filter allows consumers to choose whatever output mode they desire. Xenon automatically scales the games output buffer to the consumer-chosen resolution.

Memory and Bandwidth
Xenon has 256+ MB of unified memory, equally accessible to both the GPU and CPU. The main memory controller resides on the GPU (the same as in the Xbox architecture). It has 22.4+ GB/sec aggregate bandwidth to RAM, distributed between reads and writes. Aggregate means that the bandwidth may be used for all reading or all writing or any combination of the two. Translated into game performance, the GPU can consume a 512�512�32-bpp texture in only 47 microseconds.
The front side bus (FSB) bandwidth peak is 10.8 GB/sec for reads and 10.8 GB/sec for writes, over 20 times faster than for Xbox. Note that the 22.4+ GB/sec main memory bandwidth is shared between the CPU and GPU. If, for example, the CPU is using 2 GB/sec for reading and 1 GB/sec for writing on the FSB, the GPU has 19.4+ GB/sec available for accessing RAM.
Eight pixels (where each pixel is color plus z = 8 bytes) can be sent to the EDRAM every GPU clock cycle, for an EDRAM write bandwidth of 32 GB/sec. Each of these pixels can be expanded through multisampling to 4 samples, for up to 32 multisampled pixel samples per clock cycle. With alpha blending, z-test, and z-write enabled, this is equivalent to having 256 GB/sec of effective bandwidth! The important thing is that frame buffer bandwidth will never slow down the Xenon GPU.

Audio
The Xenon CPU is a superb processor for audio, particularly with its massive mathematical horsepower and vector register set. The Xenon CPU can process and encode hundreds of audio channels with sophisticated per-voice and global effects, all while using a fraction of the power of a single CPU core.
The Xenon system south bridge also contains a key hardware component for audioXMA decompression. XMA is the native Xenon compressed audio format, based on the WMA Pro architecture. XMA provides sound quality higher than ADPCM at even better compression ratios, typically 6:112:1. The south bridge contains a full silicon implementation of the XMA decompression algorithm, including support for multichannel XMA sources. XMA is processed by the south bridge into standard PCM format in RAM. All other sound processing (sample rate conversion, filtering, effects, mixing, and multispeaker encoding) happens on the Xenon CPU.
The lowest-level Xenon audio software layer is XAudio, a new API designed for optimal digital signal processing. The Xbox Audio Creation Tool (XACT) API from Xbox is also supported, along with new features such as conditional events, improved parameter control, and a more flexible 3D audio model.

Input/Output
As with Xbox, Xenon is designed to be a multiplayer console. It has built-in networking support including an Ethernet 10/100-BaseT port. It supports up to four controllers. From an audio/video standpoint, Xenon will support all the same formats as Xbox, including multiple high-definition formats up through 1080i, plus VGA output.
In order to provide greater flexibility and support a wider variety of attached devices, the Xenon console includes standard USB 2.0 ports. This feature allows the console to potentially host storage devices, cameras, microphones, and other devices.

Storage
The Xenon console is designed around a larger world view of storage than Xbox was. Games will have access to a variety of storage devices, including connected devices (memory units, USB storage) and remote devices (networked PCs, Xbox Live"). At the time of this writing, the decision to include a built-in hard disk in every Xenon console has not been made. If a hard disk is not included in every console, it will certainly be available as an integrated add-on component.
Xenon supports up to two attached memory units (MUs). MUs are connected directly to the console, not to controllers as on Xbox. The initial size of the MUs is 64 MB, although larger MUs may be available in the future. MU throughput is expected to be around 8 MB/sec for reads and 1 MB/sec for writes.
The Xenon game disc drive is a 12� DVD, with an expected outer edge throughput of 16+ MB/sec. Latency is expected to be in the neighborhood of 100 ms. The media format will be similar to Xbox, with approximately 6 GB of usable space on the disk. As on Xbox, media will be stored on a single side in two 3 GB layers.

Industrial Design
The Xenon industrial design process is well under way, but the final look of the box has not been determined. The Xenon console will be smaller than the Xbox console.
The standard Xenon controller will have a look and feel similar to the Xbox controller. The primary changes are the removal of the Black and White buttons and the addition of shoulder buttons. The triggers, thumbsticks, D-pad, and primary buttons are essentially unchanged. The controller will support vibration.

Information Courtesy of: http://www.xbox-scene.com/xbox1data/sep/EplZAyukEVDWcUicJE.php
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nintendo_dude Posted: 14:15 Feb24 2005 Post ID: 79713
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I will be looking foreward to the next xbox,but the next nintendo will be the best.


I'm finished here...

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The Ultimate Cheater Posted: 16:18 Feb24 2005 Post ID: 79821
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I can't wait till playstation3 comes out.
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iknowalot Posted: 18:00 Feb24 2005 Post ID: 79858
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yeah like I'll read all that.
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problemsolver Posted: 18:01 Feb24 2005 Post ID: 79859
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I read it....nearly fell asleep

Problems solved are limited to specific categories. Problemsolver Inc. cannot be held responsible for the outcome of any problem solved.
^Always read the fine print.^
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actionshark Posted: 19:27 Feb24 2005 Post ID: 79921
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The xbox 360 is gonna be pretty good, and the ps3 im not sure about...


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iknowalot Posted: 20:12 Feb24 2005 Post ID: 79960
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read it. I can't believe how the Xenon console is going to be smaller than the XBox console, with all that stuff ducky said. What about the XBox 360? Any new stuff there?
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die_zombie Posted: 03:23 Feb25 2005 Post ID: 80010
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they should make a playstation and xbox and stuff thats like as small as a discman...(ps. i didnt read that stuff, so if he said that then...well...yeah)
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ducky2 Posted: 17:22 Feb25 2005 Post ID: 80513
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don't worry i probably wouldn't read it anyway!
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die_zombie Posted: 17:23 Feb25 2005 Post ID: 80514
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who will read it for us.....such a tradgedy
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darkboarder_77 Posted: 13:13 Feb26 2005 Post ID: 81052
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Playstation 3
XBox 2
GameCube 2

Those are the names of the next gen consoles.

Nintendo TS (?)
I just made this up, but TS would stand for "Triple Screen". Still, "DS" doesn't stand for "dual screen" if many of you are wondering, it actually stands for some two long words that I forgot.
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actionshark Posted: 14:20 Feb26 2005 Post ID: 81132
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Then what happened to the Xbox 360?? Did they cancel it...:(


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darkboarder_77 Posted: 14:58 Feb26 2005 Post ID: 81172
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Never heard of it.
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die_zombie Posted: 16:29 Feb26 2005 Post ID: 81382
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maybe there are going to be two new xboxs, though i doubt it
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ducky2 Posted: 17:52 Feb26 2005 Post ID: 81447
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On 26-Feb-2005 actionshark said:Then what happened to the Xbox 360?? Did they cancel it...:(
Xbox 2, Xbox Next, Xbox 360 and Xenon are all the same consoles, just different names.
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ducky2 Posted: 17:55 Feb26 2005 Post ID: 81452
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There might even be 3 different versions of the Xbox Next.
1. A normal console without the Hard Drive.
2. Console with Hard Drive.
3. A PC version of the Xbox that comes with CD burner, keyboard, mouse, windows and a lot of other stuff.
But they're just rumours!
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darkboarder_77 Posted: 17:56 Feb26 2005 Post ID: 81453
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You know more than me about this.
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ducky2 Posted: 18:00 Feb26 2005 Post ID: 81456
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I just read a heap of stuff on the internet and in Magazines about it.
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Cross Stinger Posted: 18:06 Feb26 2005 Post ID: 81461
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On the Xbox 2 CPU ? if the name is Xenon, do you think Intel will chew their back over their Xeon PC processor?
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ducky2 Posted: 18:10 Feb26 2005 Post ID: 81462
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Maybe
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