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This article will cover XBOX 360's CPU, Graphic processor, Memory, System Bandwidth, Audio & Video capabilities, Optical drive and Physical characteristics. For more information visit http://www.justxbox.com.

Central processing unit

Custom IBM PowerPC-based "Xenon"

90 nm process, 165 million transistors

Three symmetrical cores, each one running at 3.2 GHz

Two hardware threads per core; six total

One VMX-128 vector unit per core; three total

128 VMX-128 registers per hardware thread

1 MiB L2 cache (lockable by the GPU)

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Graphics processing unit

Custom ATI R500-based "Xenos"

337 million transistors total

500 MHz parent GPU (90 nm process, 232 million transistors)

500 MHz 10 MB daughter embedded DRAM framebuffer (90 nm process, 105 million transistors)

NEC designed eDRAM has internal logic for color, alpha blending, Z/stencil buffering, and anti-aliasing.

48-way parallel floating-point dynamically-scheduled shader pipelines

4 arithmetic logic units per pipe for vertex or pixel shader processing

Unified shader architecture (This means that each pipeline is capable of running either pixel or vertex shaders.)

Support for DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 3.0, limited support for future DirectX 10 shader models

2 Shader operations per pipe per cycle

96 Shader operations per cycle across the entire shader array

Shader performance: 48 billion (48,000 million) shader operations per second

16 Filtered & 16 unfiltered texture samples per clock

Maximum polygon performance: 500 million triangles per second

Pixel fillrate: 16 gigasamples per second fillrate using 4X MSAA

Dot product operations: 9.6 billion per second theoretical maximum, 33.6 billion per second theoretical maximum when summed with CPU operations.

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Memory

512 MiB 700 MHz GDDR3 RAM (Total system memory is shared with the GPU via the unified memory architecture.)



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SYSTEM BANDWIDTH

22.4 GB/s memory interface bus bandwidth (700 MHz 2

accesses per clock cycle (one per edge) on a 128 bit bus)

256 GB/s eDRAM internal logic to eDRAM internal memory bandwidth

32 GB/s GPU to eDRAM bandwidth (2 GHz 2 accesses per clock cycle on a 64 bit DDR bus)

21.6 GB/s front side bus (aggregated 10.8 GB/s upstream and downstream)

1 GB/s southbridge bandwidth (aggregated 500 MB/s upstream and downstream)

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Audio

All games support at least six channel (5.1) Dolby Digital surround sound

Supports 48kHz 16-bit audio

320 independent decompression channels

32 bit processing

256+ audio channels

No voice echo to game players on the same Xbox console; voice goes only to remote consoles

Voice communication except during games or applications that do not support voice.

uses XMA codec (advanced audio technology from Microsoft)

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Video

VC-1 at non-HD NTSC and PAL resolutions

VC-1 or WMV will be used for streaming video

VC-1 supports DVD quality and high definition quality video additional MPEG2 decoder for DVD video playback

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DVD Drive

A 12X DVD-ROM drive, capable of reading DVD+R/RW discs, will be part of the console, with game titles shipping on single or dual-layer DVDs. The other supported formats are: CD-DA, CD-ROM, CD-R/RW, WMACD, MP3CD, and JPEG Photo CD.

Recently, it was announced that future revisions of the Xbox 360 may include HD DVD drives as part of Microsoft's partnership with Toshiba. The source of this information is the following statement made by Bill Gates on the 28th of June in Japan:

"The initial shipments of Xbox 360 will be based on today's DVD format. We are looking at whether future versions of Xbox 360 will incorporate an additional capability of an HD DVD player or something else."

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Physical characteristics

Weight 3.5 kg (7.7 lb)

309 x 83 x 258 mm (12.15 x 3.27 x 10.15 in)



About the author:

Webmaster at www.JustXBOX.com -- Your #1 site for XBOX 360 & XBOX Games, Reviews, & News

Written by: Princy

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