Xbox 360: The Specs

The last part of our Xbox 360 tour at Microsoft last week involved a brief meeting with Todd Holmdahl (corporate vice president, Xbox product group) who is personally responsible for the design, engineering, testing, and manufacturing of all Xbox consoles worldwide. Holmdahl went into some detail about the underlying architecture of Xbox 360, including a basic overview of the hardware, platform, services, and software, and how everything related to the core components of the system.

To accompany our visit, Microsoft furnished us with the final tech specifications for the console -- something which has long been the subject of much speculation across eager Internet fan sites and news groups. And it's also interesting to note that GameSpy's previous Xbox 360 article that broke earlier in the year at GDC 2005 was pretty much on the money in terms of the specs we'd been privy too.

Holmdahl then showed us some rather cool visual aids to help us understand a little better exactly how much hard work has gone into the engineering and design of the machine. We checked out the final mainboard of the 360, complete with a water-cooled CPU, GPU, and memory modules installed. It's pretty hard to comprehend the level of technology funneled into the 360 in light of its exceptionally cool form-factor; the internal guts of the machine are likely to set a new standard in efficiency of operation for modern-day video-game systems.


Along with seeing the final CPU, GPU, TV encoder, and Southbridge chips in the flesh, we were told how the CPU's three cores are capable of running at a whopping 3.2 GHz each -- each core supporting two threads making for a total of six threads running at any one time. The CPU is a custom-built IBM PowerPC-based chip. The GPU is also a powerhouse, and Holmdahl seemed confident that the graphical grunt of the 360 is around twice as powerful as the most powerful PC chipset architecture currently in circulation. With a clock speed of 500 MHz, the GPU (designed by ATI) is able to support up to 48 different pixel shaders (advanced shader language) at any one time, something which will allow developers and artists to use some truly gorgeous rendering and special effects in their games.

The CPU and GPU are linked together by a blisteringly fast data bus which can transfer operations at an incredible 5.4 Gb per second. Couple this together with the TV encoder chip (responsible for the various high-definition output modes that connect to HD-compatible displays) and the Southbridge chip which deals with a variety of functions like audio, and the core of the 360 shapes up to be incredibly efficient and extremely powerful. The bottom line? Games for the Xbox 360 have the potential to be very, very special. After all, the overall system floating-point performance of the machine is an astounding 1 TFLOP!