Xbox 360: New Tech Specs Details Surface

Back in June, when we interviewed Todd Holmdahl, Corporate Vice President of the Xbox Product Group at Microsoft, and the man in charge of more than 1,000 engineers, we asked him if he could provide further details on the Xbox 360 CPU such as manufacturing process, the amount of transistors and other technical data that geeks like me find exciting. Unfortunately, Microsoft could not disclose such information at that time.

Today the desired photos showing the CPU and GPU die in complete nudity have made their way onto the Internet. We presume, due to some of the labels, that these pictures come from Asia.

The picture below is the first photograph of the Xbox 360 processor die, showing the physical design of the three-core CPU that powers the next-generation Xbox. In the picture you can see the three cores and the shared 1MB L2 cache among other sections:



A second set of pictures shows a system diagram for the Xbox 360 CPU that explains the different units that make each core as well as the entire processor and how these parts interacts with the other areas of the Xbox 360 architecture:





Last, but not least, also accompanying these new pictures comes a photo of a die, but this time showing the physical design of the Xenos GPU; the graphic chip designed by ATI for the Xbox 360. In the picture, you can see both the GPU parent die (photo provided by TSMC, the manufacturer of the chip) and the daughter die, the GPU embedded DRAM provided by NEC Electronics.



This new picture also reveals, for the first time, the transistor count for each part of the two-die design. The parent die has a total of 232 million transistors while the daughter die has 100 million, making the whole package a 330+ million transistor design. In comparison, an AMD Athlon 64 processor has approximately 205 M transistors while the PlayStation 3 Cell processor has ~234M and the RSX GPU designed by nVIDIA has some 300M.

By looking at the pictures and photos above, one realizes the tremendous complexity and state-of-the-art technology that Microsoft has packed into the Xbox 360; a console that for the first time will remain competitive against desktop PCs for more than a year after it launches.

We’ll have more on the Xbox 360 soon.