At numerous occations unofficial specifications have appeared for Microsoft’s console Xbox 360 but now that the console has finally arrived we can publish the real specifications that are in no way to be ashamed of. The most is correct compared to earlier speculations. IBM supplies the processor(s) and ATI the grpahics. Speakign the graphic circuit it’s a specially designed version of ATI’s R520-circuit that will be available to PCs soon. Compared to today’s grpahic circuits Xbox 360 is superior with 48 combined pixel and vertex piplines (ATI X850 XT has 16 pixel pipelines and 6 vertex pipelines). Even if the circuits doesn’t use the pipelines the same way the circuit in Xbox 360 is without a doubt faster than anything available today. Especially when it comes to applying antialiasing that seems to be a crucial component of the games to Xbox 360.
Below you can find the official specifications for Xbox 360 that Microsoft has published at xbox.com.
Custom IBM PowerPC-based CPU |
- Three symmetrical cores running at 3.2 GHz each
- Two hardware threads per core; six hardware threads total
- VMX-128 vector unit per core; three total
- 128 VMX-128 registers per hardware thread
- 1 MB L2 cache
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CPU Game Math Performance |
- 9 billion dot product operations per second
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Custom ATI Graphics Processor |
- 10 MB of embedded DRAM
- 48-way parallel floating-point dynamically scheduled shader pipelines
- Unified shader architecture
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Polygon Performance |
- 500 million triangles per second
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Pixel Fill Rate |
- 16 gigasamples per second fill rate using 4x MSAA
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Shader Performance |
- 48 billion shader operations per second
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Memory |
- 512 MB of 700 MHz GDDR3 RAM
- Unified memory architecture
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Memory Bandwidth |
- 22.4 GB/s memory interface bus bandwidth
- 256 GB/s memory bandwidth to EDRAM
- 21.6 GB/s front-side bus
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Overall System Floating-Point Performance |
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Storage |
- Detachable and upgradeable 20GB hard drive
- 12x dual-layer DVD-ROM
- Memory Unit support starting at 64 MB
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I/O |
- Support for up to four wireless game controllers
- Three USB 2.0 ports
- Two memory unit slots
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Optimized for Online |
- Instant, out-of-the-box access to Xbox Live features with broadband service, including Xbox Live Marketplace for downloadable content, gamer profile for digital identity, and voice chat to talk to friends while playing games, watching movies, or listening to music
- Built-in Ethernet port
- Wi-Fi ready: 802.11a, 802.11b, and 802.11g
- Video camera ready
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Digital Media Support |
- Support for DVD-Video, DVD-ROM, DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW, CD-DA, CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW, WMA CD, MP3 CD, JPEG Photo CD • Ability to stream media from portable music devices, digital cameras and Windows XP-based PCs
- Ability to rip music to the Xbox 360 hard drive
- Custom playlists in every game
- Built-in Media Center Extender for Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005
- Interactive, full-screen 3-D visualizers
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High-Definition Game Support |
- All games supported at 16:9, 720p, and 1080i, anti-aliasing
- Standard-definition and high-definition video output supported
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Audio |
- Multi-channel surround sound output
- Supports 48KHz 16-bit audio
- 320 independent decompression channels
- 32-bit audio processing
- Over 256 audio channels
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System Orientation |
- Stands vertically or horizontally
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Customizable Face Plates |
- Interchangeable to personalize the console
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At Xbox.com you can read about the “highlights” with Xbox 360. There you can among others infd information on the console handling of your personal profile, Xbox Live!, games, how it handles multimedia and much more.
Source: Xbox.com
