Hybrid engine
The trend of hardware makers designing their own SoCs continues. At the Hot Chips conference yesterday, Microsoft engineer Rune Jensen revealed details of the SoC you can find in the latest versions of the Xbox 360.
Codenamed Vejle, the chip combines a previously separate triple-core CPU with the GPU onto one piece of silicon and manufactures the resultant SoC on a 45nm process.
The design and performance of the cores remain essentially the same - something that's essential on consoles to ensure developers have a stable platform to work with. But combining the silicon and shrinking the process saves money and means the console requires less cooling.
The key design features concern how the cores communicate with each other and, then, the rest of the system.
Here's a diagram of that evolution as published on VentureBeat.
The chip was designed in partnership with IBM and, considering its part of the IBM chip alliance, it's fair to assume that GlobalFoundries is a manufacturing partner.
Here are a couple more Microsoft slides as published by PC Magazine.
Incidentally, talking about SoCs, Charlie D at SemiAccurate reckons Facebook is switching to ARM-based processors made by Smooth-Stone for its servers. There's nothing concrete yet, but that would be a hell of a significant toe dipped in the ARM server water if it's true.
