FarFarAway
New member
Beyond3d have a nice little (well, big) article on the development on the Xenos (Xbox 360 to you and me) and ATI's new chip and how it all fits together.
[QUORE="Beyond3d"]When creating a high performance computing platform bandwidth between components and operations is highly important, especially when creating a system that has to last for 3-5 years before a new version comes about, such is the world of consoles. With the Xenos processor being both a high performance graphics processing element of the XBOX 360 as well as the "Northbridge" component of the system, which is essentially the communication hub for the other components of the system, it has many interconnects and bandwidths to deal with. Below is a diagram highlighting the connection bandwidths between the most important elements it is connected to:[/QUOTE]
The memory bandwidth is a sweet 22.4GB/s so it looks like the chip running @ 550MHz and the RAM @ 500MHz will do the job nicely!
There is a lot of Technical jargon in the article and it goes into great detail.
Basically the advantage of the new ATI GPU and CPU interface is approx (I'm no expert, just trying to simplify it):
*Unified shader/pixel pipeline allowing for a "no-queueing" type of processing
*Reduced lines from DRAM to GPU meaning higher bandwidth
*The GPU being able to "Lock" some of the system memory to perform certain tasks it feels it needs more memory for
*A new "daughter" memory chip for the GPU so that it takes the strain away from the system memory bus having to read/write constantly when performing graphics functions.
*A SM 3.0 "equivalent" that looks to be above DX 9.0c and SM 3.0 specs and kind-of implementing Microsofts New Direct X version: WGF. This will give greater power to the OS to perform 3d tasks and will be fully implemented in Longhorn. It is also thought that a WGF will benefit from the implementation of Universal Pixel and Shader pipelines.
Anyhoo...that's my sum-up....read the article @ BeyondRd
[QUORE="Beyond3d"]When creating a high performance computing platform bandwidth between components and operations is highly important, especially when creating a system that has to last for 3-5 years before a new version comes about, such is the world of consoles. With the Xenos processor being both a high performance graphics processing element of the XBOX 360 as well as the "Northbridge" component of the system, which is essentially the communication hub for the other components of the system, it has many interconnects and bandwidths to deal with. Below is a diagram highlighting the connection bandwidths between the most important elements it is connected to:[/QUOTE]
The memory bandwidth is a sweet 22.4GB/s so it looks like the chip running @ 550MHz and the RAM @ 500MHz will do the job nicely!
There is a lot of Technical jargon in the article and it goes into great detail.
Basically the advantage of the new ATI GPU and CPU interface is approx (I'm no expert, just trying to simplify it):
*Unified shader/pixel pipeline allowing for a "no-queueing" type of processing
*Reduced lines from DRAM to GPU meaning higher bandwidth
*The GPU being able to "Lock" some of the system memory to perform certain tasks it feels it needs more memory for
*A new "daughter" memory chip for the GPU so that it takes the strain away from the system memory bus having to read/write constantly when performing graphics functions.
*A SM 3.0 "equivalent" that looks to be above DX 9.0c and SM 3.0 specs and kind-of implementing Microsofts New Direct X version: WGF. This will give greater power to the OS to perform 3d tasks and will be fully implemented in Longhorn. It is also thought that a WGF will benefit from the implementation of Universal Pixel and Shader pipelines.
Anyhoo...that's my sum-up....read the article @ BeyondRd
