Xbox 360 System Architecture

Author

Andrews, Jeff ; Baker, Nick

Author_Institution

Microsoft Corp., CA

Volume

26

Issue

2

fYear

2006

Firstpage

25

Lastpage

37

Abstract

This article covers the Xbox 360´s high-level technical requirements, a short system overview, and details of the CPU and the GPU. The Xbox 360 contains an aggressive hardware architecture and implementation targeted at game console workloads. The core silicon implements the product designers´ goal of providing game developers a hardware platform to implement their next-generation game ambitions. The core chips include the standard conceptual blocks of CPU, graphics processing unit (GPU), memory, and I/O. Each of these components and their interconnections are customized to provide a user-friendly game console product. The authors describe their architectural trade-offs and summarize the system´s software programming support

Keywords

computer architecture; computer games; microprocessor chips; software engineering; CPU cached data-streaming feature; GPU; Microsoft Xbox 360 game console; Xbox 360 development environment; Xbox 360 system architecture; graphics processing unit; hardware architecture; multiprocessing chip; software programming support; Bandwidth; Computer architecture; Decoding; Design optimization; Hardware; Pipelines; Scalability; Silicon; Software tools; Streaming media; Microsoft; Xbox 360; game console systems;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Micro, IEEE

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0272-1732

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/MM.2006.45

Filename

1624324