back to article Microsoft Xbox One to be powered by ginormous system-on-chip

Microsoft has revealed details of the chip powering its soon-to-be-released Xbox One – and it's one big ol' mofo. How big? Does a 363mm2 footprint – using a 28-nanometer process, no less – filled with five billion transistors impress you? Perhaps Microsoft is planning to use this big boy for Halo: OverReach By comparison, …

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        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: tweaked by Microsoft to witlolhin an inch of its life

          Believe what you want, I don't care. However people have been to both the TSMC and Flex facilities, can you really be sure that I havn't??? Thought not...

          1. Atonnis
            FAIL

            Re: tweaked by Microsoft to witlolhin an inch of its life

            I'll take the odds on that one, bozo.

          2. James O'Shea

            Re: tweaked by Microsoft to witlolhin an inch of its life

            re AC 11:45...

            As you posted AC, I feel that it is quite likely that you have never been within 100 miles of either facility. And, due to the fact that you saw fit to hide your identity, that even if you have been to one or both, you can't prove it.

            Now, as to the yields... I have no idea. _I_ haven't been to either facility. However, I suspect, based on people I know who have been to TSMC, that you are exaggerating somewhat. Yes, the yields have not been stellar. No, they're not as bad as stated. There _will_ be dead Xboxes. Lots of them. I doubt that there will be nearly the number that you suggest, though.

            Now, if you would provide some actual support for your position, something a little better than "I know 'cause I know", perhaps there might be a re-evaluation. As is, though...

  1. mark l 2 Silver badge

    i wonder how much cooling its going to require with 5 billion transistors?

    is it going to need a air conditioning unit installed under your TV and double as an extra heater in winter?

    1. Brenda McViking

      Burn baby burn

      Personally I think that the chip companies should leverage the extremely useful heat producing capabilities of their multi-billion transistors switching.

      I mean, who wouldn't want a house centrally heated by their computer? Picture it - SWMBO puts the thermostat up, AGAIN, and you get the option to model the microclimate in your back garden and sell the data to the MET office or perform a simulated nuclear test on the neighbour's cat. I might actually consider spending £2500 on a boiler if it came with an intel inside sticker and a HDMI port and could run Crysis at 42fps.

      1. Colin Ritchie
        Windows

        Re: Burn baby burn

        In 2005 I was playing WoW on a G5 iMac, the IBM CPU would hit 90 degrees and keep the room lovely and warm on a long winter's night in Molten Core. The twin fans sounded like a remote control aircraft was flying round the room and my nickname on coms was Squadron Leader...

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      cooling

      If most of it is cache memory, probably not that much more.

      The Transistors in Microchips only use significant power when they are switching, so if they switch only rarely (In digital terms), Eg as in memory, they dont generate much heat.

      Thats why memory sticks, which are easilly pushing 1 million transistors, rarely require extra cooling.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: cooling

        "Thats why memory sticks, which are easilly pushing 1 million transistors, rarely require extra cooling."

        I mean Billion of course. Sorry.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    2 billion transistors are set aside to power the NSA compressed audio, video and data streams - direct from your house. Nowhere to hide, gamers.

    1. xyz Silver badge
      Black Helicopters

      I was just about to don my tinfoil hat when I saw your post

      >>2 billion transistors are set aside to power the NSA compressed audio, video and data streams - direct from your house. Nowhere to hide, gamers

      Or how to get the public to pay for a massive planetary wide distributed computer for the NSA. No wonder MS wanted it connected to the internet at all times.

      1. Aldous
        Facepalm

        Re: I was just about to don my tinfoil hat when I saw your post

        You guys do realize the NSA has been doing this for years right?

        Every thread about anything has a mention of the NSA since PRISM was leaked. You realize the Army shoot people? and that what a politician says is not always true right?

        If the NSA/CIA/Mutant Lizard people want a distributed computer system they will just buy one. When the EFF were fighting to say DES (The U.S government approved crypto cipher) was insecure it was the intelligence community saying it was fine.

        The EFF then made custom ASICs for $250k and the DESchall did it with a distributed net of home machines. Do you think that was news to the spooks? They probably had whole DC's full of stuff to break DES, similar things were seen with the Clipper chip.

        Why would they need to risk being found out by hijacking machines that they do not control (would you want Bunnie Huang to find your NSA back door). They can either get them built themselves (ASICS would be far more useful then standard CPU's) or create a botnet on the millions of US Gov owned P.Cs.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: I was just about to don my tinfoil hat when I saw your post

          You tell them the facts and they'll just downvote you.

          Its highly entertaining if you're in the know about the Intelligence Community and/or Cryptographic Research. Same with the armchair CEOs, armchair Engineers, and armchair Warriors running around here.

        2. Salts

          Re: I was just about to don my tinfoil hat when I saw your post

          Have an up vote

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    One billion transistors to play the latest games...

    And another four billion to ensure you don't have any fun whilst doing so...

  4. Mikko

    Meanwhile, the 28 nm GTX Titan apparently contains about 7 billion transistors, and the Nvidia's GTX 680 about 3.5 billion transistors (the GTX 680 on a slightly under 300 square mm chip).

    The Xbox One GPU is far less powerful, but it will still eat up a significant amount of space. Then there is the 8-core CPU, not to mention the cache that takes up half the transistor budget... For me, it looks like the NSA had to settle for a few hundred million transistors at the most.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Nobody gives a shit so long as the bloody chip doesn't detach itself from the mobo like the 360.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    ??WTF??

    Would be impressed if this was for some sort of life-saving system that will change humanity for the better - nope, it is so that young kids can do role playing games, shooting the crap out of each other in a virtual world while in the real world they are doing nothing which could be classed as useful... Thank you Microsoft for providing the virtual opium to destroy our digital youth of today :(

    1. Atonnis
      FAIL

      Re: ??WTF??

      ??WTF?? You blame a console for bad parenting?

      And your assumption of youth is quite faulty as well. Given the price range of the devices + games, these things need someone old enough to afford the bills.

  7. Robert Grant

    Old news?

    Didn't the Xbox 360 have memory shared between GPU and CPU? That (development ease aside) was why lots of cross-platform games looked better on that than on the PS3.

  8. BigAndos

    Reminds me a bit of the logic chip in the Acorn Electron mentioned in the retrospective article last week. Funny how things go round again in tech, bit like how virtualisation and the cloud have brought "dumb client"/Server models back into fashion.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    1920 x 1080

    Xbox one is meant to drive a FullHd monitor, right? Nvidia behemoths gfx cards pushing 3 billion tn are meant to push larger / combo displays past 1080p. Which means xbox will have power to turn all the eye-candy on such a small display, by comparison. Or can it drive a displayport beyond 1080p screen? Specs? Of course the games will look great and 60fps smooth, since I bet it wont be designed to play in more than 1080p, which is the norm these days. Or most people will have a monitor that resolution available.

  10. South

    Better than my new PC?

    Q: just built my first gaming rig after becoming disillusioned with consoles.

    i7 950k (o/c 3.8ghz)

    14gb ram

    asus GTX680 4gb

    My question is are the new consoles going to blow this out of the water performance wise.

    1. Ramiro

      Re: Better than my new PC?

      Certainly not. By most people reckoning, consoles nowadays are much more about the convenience than raw performance.

    2. soaklord

      Re: Better than my new PC?

      Question: Did you pay less than $500 USD to build your machine?

      Apple != Oranges

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    ... tweaked by Microsoft within an inch of its life

    Then MS say the specs for the PS4 and went two more inches.

  12. 080

    X Box One or Playstation, how boring, WGAF

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    more flashing LEDs, that's what we need

    Judging by the photo of the chip it looks like it may have some LEDs on it. Well I hope so anyway, because I've just realised that despite silicon chips doing so much for us... they look really boring. So more flashing LEDs on my chips, please.

    (Please don't burst my bubble and tell me they aren't LEDs.)

  14. cyberdemon Silver badge
    Devil

    Maybe I'm just cynical..

    This seems to me like an effort to foil the mod-chippers.

    Putting it all on a SoC with custom silicon could make it pretty much unhackable..

    I'm sure a lot of managers at Microsoft would love it to be a black box filled with epoxy and only ethernet in one end and HDMI out the other, with a couple of antennas inside for controllers etc.

    If it weren't for the small issues of cooling, and those pesky soldiers in their disconnected army bases kicking up a fuss about always-on connectivity, they'd probably have done that already!

  15. Lord Zedd

    Shared memory

    Another reason I won't be buying one. Plus, having all that crammed onto one chip means it will have cooling issues even worse than the 360.

    1. Mikel

      Re: Shared memory

      I'm sure it isn't the size of a suitcase because they thought that was sexy look for under your flatscreen.

  16. Down not across

    Fanboy voting

    It does make me chuckle to see, what looks like fanboy downvoting, in action. If anyone dares to post (obvious trolls and shills excepted) anything positive or supportive of XBone or technology it uses, it gets downvoted.

    Are the Sony supporters really that insecure?

    For the record I don't really care either way as both consoles are likely to serve their purpose and neither company can be trusted.

    Yeah there are some interesting differences that have sparked debate and discussion and I will be interesting to see how it all works out in the end once we can see stuff actually running on the released hardware.

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