ATi speaks out on Xbox 360 and its graphic circuit

ATi was as you might know by now one of Microsoft’s mainpartners during the development of Xbox 360, for the simple reason that ATI supplies the graphic circuit. As we’ve reported at several occations the circuit is unique and specially made for the Xbox 360. In ab interview with Bit-tech.net Richard Huddy from ATI has answered a few questions on Xbox 360 and its ATi graphic circuit that has been codenamed Xenos. He puts a lot of focus on the ATi’s “unified shader” arcitecture that according to Richard will make Xbox 360 a more powerful console than Sony’s equivalent, PlayStation 3.

He tells us that it will supply all the graphic power, together with unified shader arcitecture, that the console will need at any possible occation. Something NVIDIA doesn’t quite agree on maybe because their RSX-circuit uses seperate pixel and vertex shaders. At the same time he claims that Sony’s Cell-processor has a lot of power that won’t be used by games and application developers.

“The PS3 does appear to have a huge amount of CPU power with the seven Cell cores. The problem they have is that CPU power isn’t really what developer’s need – the bottleneck is really the graphics. Everybody is going multi-threaded and multi-core – the Xbox 360 has three PowerPC cores, AMD and Intel both have dual-core chips, so everyone is having to learn how to write this stuff. But writing multi-threaded apps for two or three cores is difficult. Doing it for seven separate cores, when the main core has a slightly different feature-set from the other six, is very, very difficult.”

Interestign reading for those who wants to know more about ATi’s Xenos-circuit.

:: Read the entire at Bit-tech.net