65nm PowerPC Info?

[Henriok]

Originally posted by Prom1
Oh yeah by the way maybe not in this article, but Microsoft HAS formerly announced that they WILL be using IBM PowerPC 970/97x cpus in their next gen XBox.

No? I have seen nothing about this. Please provide a URL. If this is publicly known, that shouldn't be any problem.

 

[lind0834]

Originally posted by Prom1
Oh yeah by the way maybe not in this article, but Microsoft HAS formerly announced that they WILL be using IBM PowerPC 970/97x cpus in their next gen XBox.

You mean this article that mentions an IBM chip.. not specifically a PPC?

https://www.macrumors.com/pages/2003/11/20031103121349.shtml

 

[wizard]

Originally posted by dguisinger
Again, I think you are wrong. There is very little performance wise that dual processors adds to a game, when the game uses 3D Graphics and 3D Sound acceleration.

That is simple a statement that is far to general. I'm sure a lot of flight simulator users would totally disagree with you on that count. You only need two things to make SMP successful. One is a good programmer and the second is a problem domain that can be broken up into multiple threads that can execute at the same time.

Transforms and lighting are now handled in the graphics chip. Dolby digital is handled in the sound chip. So whats left for the CPU? Loading/Saving data, network communications, input handling, and AI. Possibly voice recognition or text to speech. Yeah that really needs super fast CPUs *SARCASIM*. The AI could use a faster CPU than what they have now, and maybe a SMT/HyperThreading CPU would help....but they dont need dual cores.

You must be careful that SARCASM does not get interpeted as ignorance. Besides what is the differrence from the programmers point of view of having a SMT cpu and tow real CPU's. Careful now as there are real differrences.

As to need it is obvious that some games perform fine on a game boy. But we are not really talking aobut yesterdays games now are we. We are talking about a console that is to be designed to support the games of tommorrow. If the capability is there it will be used. Maybe not in every game made by ever developer, but I can almost gaurantee that any future blockbuster game will be SMP aware in some manner.

Further; how does one expect XBOX to compete with a Cell based console if it doesn't have multple processors. In a nut shell this is the key question, MS has competition in the console business, they have to deliever a system that competes agianst they latest hardware from the competition. As I've said; MS has no choice with respect to multiprocessing, that doesn't mean the referenced articles are accurate, just that I don't see an alternative to cell.

What they could use is a multiple core graphics chip. If you had 4 graphics cores, you could give each one a quarter of the screen output. You would instantly quadrupal the capabilities of the machine. Remember 3DFX Voodoo 2 was able to work 2 cards at a time for high performance. One would render the current frame, while the 2nd would render the next frame...SLI I beleive it was called. I wouldn't be surprised if this is where MS pulls a dual core, because graphics power is really where consoles are growing on needs, not the CPU power.

 

[DeepIn2U]

I confess

lind0834
Ok I confess that I extrapalated the info I read around the web. The only 64-bit cpu's IBM makes that is KNOWN is the G5 and the Power4 and upcoming Power5; of the two latter would be WAY too expensive to use in a consumer gaming system. Thus the G5 could be the only answer.

Notice that I said Could be!