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Lifting the veil on the hybrid processor-graphics chip in the new Xbox 360 S
>> From venturebeat.com:
[QUOTE]
The company's engineers created a chip that combined the machine's microprocessor and its graphics chip on a single piece of silicon. In the past, different versions of the console have all used two separate chips for those tasks.
The code name for the project was Vejle, named after a city in Denmark. (It's not Valhalla, as some thought).
The new chip takes the exact same 3.2-gigahertz, three-core microprocessor and 500-megahertz graphics chip design and puts them on the same chip. In order to create this, Microsoft and IBM engineers had to work together to build the necessary connectivity within the chip to route electrical signals in and out of the chip. You can't just glue the two designs together. Rather, IBM had to get rid of its main communications channel between the chips, dubbed the front-side bus, and build a substitute for it.
The main chip is packaged with a separate 10-megabyte embedded memory chip. So the two chips are packaged in a single module. The combined chip uses 60 percent less power than the original 2005 pair of chips, and it uses 50 percent less space. Robert Drehmel, senior technical engineer at IBM, said that one of the big challenges was to marry two chips that were built by different companies, designed by different engineering teams, and created with different chip design tools. IBM had to learn more about the unfamiliar ATI design, design specific tools to adapt it, and then recreate an overall design that did the same thing as the prior designs.
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Full Story: venturebeat.com
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