[geeks] Xbox questions

[Will Mc Donald]

I was reading (on The Register I think, nope Anandtech actually, here
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1484 ) that the X-Box is destined to
use the new NVidia northbridge/southbridge chipset that's optimised for
multimedia IO as well as the Geforce 3 or NV20 or whatever GPU. So the PC
architecture shouldn't be as much of a bottlneck as you'd think.

I don't think MS making a big thing about it having a 733 MHz processor
implies that they don't know their market. *They* know that it's not just
raw CPU that makes a console, I'm sure they appreciate that to be
competitive it's going to have to be a well-rounded system but a large
portion of the general public think "Big Numbers = Good".

Having a fixed hardware platform means that (even as an MS product) it's
liable to be pretty stable. Or at least it has the potential to be stable if
the software developers do their stuff. :)

I reckon X-Box will be a huge success. But I'm frequently wrong. :) Oh, and
this is the first big showdown between Sony and MS in any major market
apparently, it should prove interesting.

I could trawl up more material but it's Friday and it's time to bugger off
to the pub.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Brian Hechinger" <wonko at tmok.com>
To: <geeks at sunhelp.org>
Sent: Friday, June 08, 2001 3:25 PM
Subject: [geeks] Xbox questions


> some non-computer geek friend of mine was talking about how great the Xbox
was
> going to be (and my snide remark of course was that it was going to crash
all
> the time *G*) and i was just curious if anyone knew any technical details
about
> it.
>
> the PS2 has some sexy sounding hardware in it, maybe not the fastest CPU,
but
> big sexy graphics hardware and fat pipes between CPU/memory/video ala SGI.
> it seems like a very well designed system.
>
> the Xbox has almost no detail that i've been able to find other than it
has a
> 733Mhz CPU (which they make a big deal out of, proving yet again that they
> don't truely understand how all this stuff works) and NVIDIA gfx hardware.
> but is it just a PC mobo with low transfer speeds between CPU/mem/vid or
is
> it some custom hardware deal?
>
> anyone know? i'm kinda interested.
>
> -brian