|  The new Xbox 360 system places players at the center of powerful next-generation games and entertainment experiences. The elegant design features a breakthrough wireless controller and an array of Faces, interchangeable faceplates that let gamers personalize their console. The unveiling spotlighted some of the groundbreaking games in development for the new Xbox 360 system, advancements for the Xbox Live™ service - the only unified console gaming service - and new digital media experiences that only Xbox 360 can deliver.
The console features 512 MiB of 700 megahertz GDDR3 RAM on a 128-bit bus. The memory is shared by the CPU and the GPU via the unified memory architecture. This memory is produced by either Samsung, or Infineon Technologies. According to Microsoft, the Xbox 360 has an extensive amount of bandwidth in comparison to its competition; however this statistic includes the eDram logic to memory bandwidth, and not internal CPU bandwidths. The eDram internal logic to its internal memory bandwidth is 256 GB/s. The high bandwidth is used primarily for z-buffering, alpha blending, and antialiasing; it saves time and space on the GPU die. Between the eDram die and the GPU data is transferred at 32 GB/s. The memory interface bus has a bandwidth of 22.40 GB/s and the southbridge a bandwidth of 1 GB/s. All games made for the Xbox 360 are required to support at least six channel Dolby Digital surround sound. Over 256 audio channels and 320 independent decompression channels using 32 bit processing are used for audio, with support for 48 kHz 16-bit sound. Sound files for games are encoded using Microsoft's XMA audio format. An MPEG-2 decoder is included for DVD video playback. VC-1 or WMV is used for streaming video and other video is compressed using VC-1 at non-HD NTSC and PAL resolutions or WMV HD. Unlike the original Xbox, voice communication is handled by the console, not by the game code, allowing for cross-game communication. There is no voice echo to game players on the same console; voice goes only to remote consoles. Additionally, a wide array of standard and HDTV resolutions, up to 1920×1080 in progressive mode (after fall software upgrade), are supported by the console hardware. - Custom IBM Power-PC Based CPU
Three symmetrical cores running at 3.2 GHz each
Two hardware threads per core; six hardware threads total
VMX-128 vector unit per core; three total
128 VMX-128 registers per hardware thread
1 MB L2 cache
CPU Game Math Performance
9 billion dot product operations per second - Custom ATI Graphics Processor
500MHz processor
10 MB of embedded DRAM
48-way parallel floating-point dynamically scheduled shader pipelines
Unified shader architecture
Polygon Performance
500 million triangles per second - Pixel Fill Rate
16 gigasamples per second fill rate using 4x MSAA - Shader Performance
48 billion shader operations per second - Memory
512 MB of GDDR3 RAM
700 MHz of DDR
Unified memory architecture
22.4 GB/s memory interface bus bandwidth
256 GB/s memory bandwidth to EDRAM
21.6 GB/s front-side bus - Overall System Floating Point Performance
1 teraflop - Storage
Detachable and upgradeable 20GB hard drive
12x dual-layer DVD-ROM
Memory Unit support starting at 64 MB - I/O
Support for up to four wireless game controllers
Three USB 2.0 ports
Two memory unit slots
Optimized for Online - Built-in Ethernet port
Wi-Fi ready: 802.11a, 802.11b, and 802.11g
Video camera ready
Digital Media Support - Support for DVD-Video, DVD-ROM, DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW, CD-DA, CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW, WMA CD, MP3 CD, JPEG Photo CD
Ability to stream media from portable music devices, digital cameras and Windows XP-based PCs
Ability to rip music to the Xbox 360 hard drive
Custom playlists in every game
Built-in Media Center Extender for Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005
Interactive, full-screen 3-D visualizers
High-Definition Game Support - All games supported at 16:9, 720p, and 1080i, anti-aliasing
Standard-definition and high-definition video output supported - Audio
Multi-channel surround sound output
Supports 48KHz 16-bit audio
320 independent decompression channels
32-bit audio processing
Over 256 audio channels Yet the Xbox 360 is a strong and important console, with plenty up its sleeve. Clearly technically superior to the Xbox and PS2, its real challenge is still cloaked in a degree of secrecy, with Sony's PS3 still months away at the time of writing. Thus we can only conclude that in the Xbox 360, Microsoft has delivered an astonishingly competent machine at a price that - if you tried to replicate the technology in a PC - looks an absolute bargain.
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