Xbox system

1. ABSTRACT The Xbox is a video gaming brand created by Microsoft. It includes a series of video game consoles developed by Microsoft, with consoles in the sixth to eighth generations, as well as applications (games), streaming services, and the online service, Xbox Live. The brand was first introduced on November 15, 2001 in the United States, with the launch of the original Xbox console. That original device was the first video game console offered by an American company after the Atari Jaguar stopped sales in 1996. It reached over 24 million units sold as of May 10, 2006. Microsoft's second console, the Xbox 360, was released in 2005 and has sold over 77.2 million consoles worldwide as of April 18, 2013. The successor to the Xbox 360 and Microsoft's most recent console, the Xbox One, was revealed on May 21, 2013. The Xbox One has been released in 21 markets around the world on November 22, 2013, with the UK as its first country. The head of Xbox is Phil Spencer, who succeeded former head Marc Whitten in late March 2014.

2. 1.Introduction 1.1 The XBOX System The Xbox is a video gaming brand created by Microsoft. It includes a series of video game consoles developed by Microsoft, with consoles in the sixth to eighth generations, as well as applications (games), streaming services, and the online service, Xbox Live. The brand was first introduced on November 15, 2001 in the United States, with the launch of the original Xbox console. That original device was the first video game console offered by an American company after the Atari Jaguar stopped sales in 1996. It reached over 24 million units sold as of May 10, 2006. Microsoft's second console, the Xbox 360, was released in 2005 and has sold over 77.2 million consoles worldwide as of April 18, 2013. The successor to the Xbox 360 and Microsoft's most recent console, the Xbox One, was revealed on May 21, 2013. The Xbox One has been released in 21 markets around the world on November 22, 2013, with the UK as its first country. The head of Xbox is Phil Spencer, who succeeded former head Marc Whitten in late March 2014. In 1998, four engineers from Microsoft's DirectX team, Kevin Bachus, Seamus Blackley, Ted Hase and DirectX team leader Otto Berkes, disassembled some Dell laptop computers to construct a prototype Microsoft Windows-based video game console. The team hoped to create a console to compete with the Sony's upcoming PlayStation 2, which was luring game developers away from the Windows platform. The team approached Ed Fries, the leader of Microsoft's game publishing business at the time, and pitched their "DirectX Box" console based on the DirectX graphics technology developed by Berkes' team. Fries decided to support the team's idea of creating a Windows DirectX based console. During development, the original Direct Xbox name was shortened to Xbox. Microsoft's marketing department did not like the Xbox name, and suggested many alternatives. During focus testing, the Xbox name was left on the list of possible names to demonstrate how unpopular the Xbox name would be with consumers. However, consumer testing revealed that Xbox was preferred by far over the other suggested names and "Xbox" became the official name of the product. The Xbox was the second console produced by an American company since the Apple Pippin ceased production in 1997, after the release of the Nuon in 2000. It Microsoft's first video game console after collaborating with Sega to port Windows CE to the Dreamcast console. Microsoft repeatedly delayed the console, which was first mentioned

3. publicly in late 1999 during interviews with Microsoft's then-CEO Bill Gates. Gates stated that a gaming/multimedia device was essential for multimedia convergence in the new times. He has even been quoted as saying "if we do not advance, to the next generation, we will most surely fall behind our competitors (Apple)". The Xbox was officially announced at the Game Developers Conference on March 10, 2000. Audiences were impressed by the console's technology. At the time of Gates' announcement, Sega's Dreamcast sales were diminishing and Sony's PlayStation 2 was just going on sale in Japan.The Xbox was officially unveiled to the public by Gates and guest professional wrestler The Rock atCES 2001 in Las Vegas on January 3, 2001. Microsoft announced Xbox's release dates and prices at E3 2001 in May. Most Xbox launch titles were unveiled at E3, most notably Halo: Combat Evolved and Dead or Alive 3] Due to the immense popularity of gaming consoles in Japan, Microsoft delayed the release of the Xbox in Europe to focus on the Japanese video game market. Although delayed, the European release proved to be more successful than the launch of the Xbox in Japan. Some of Microsoft's plans proved effective. In preparation for its launch, Microsoft acquired Bungie and used Halo: Combat Evolved as its launch title. At the time, Golden Eye 007 for the Nintendo 64 had been one of the few hit FPS games to appear on a console, some of other ones being Perfect Dark and Medal of Honor. Halo: Combat Evolved proved a good application to drive the Xbox's sales. In 2002, Microsoft made the second place slot in consoles sold in North America. The Xbox Live service gave Microsoft an early foothold in online gaming and would help the Xbox become a relevant competitor to other sixth- generation consoles. Popular launch games for the console included Dead or Alive 3, Amped: Freestyle Snowboarding, Halo: Combat Evolved, Fuzion Frenzy, Project Gotham Racing, and Jet Set Radio Future.

4. Consoles Xbox Xbox (console) Xbox console with "Controller S" The original Xbox was released on November 15, 2001 in North America, February 22, 2002 in Japan, and March 14, 2002 in Australia and Europe. It was Microsoft's first foray into the gaming console market. As part of the sixth-generation of gaming, the Xbox competed withSony's PlayStation 2, Sega's Dreamcast (which stopped American sales before the Xbox went on sale), and Nintendo's GameCube. The Xbox was the first console offered by an American company after the Atari Jaguar stopped sales in 1996. The name Xbox was derived from a contraction of DirectX Box, a reference to Microsoft's graphics API, DirectX. The integrated Xbox Live service launched in November 2002 allowed players to play games online with a broadband connection. It first competed with Dreamcast's online service but later primarily competed with PlayStation 2's online service. Although these two are free while Xbox Live required a subscription, as well as broadband-only connection which was not completely adopted yet, Xbox Live was a success due to better servers, features such as a buddy list, and milestone titles like Halo 2 released in November 2004, which is the best- selling Xbox video game and was by far the most popular online game for years.

5. Xbox 360 Left: Xbox 360 Elite, Right: Xbox 360 S and new-style controller The Xbox 360 was released as the successor of the original Xbox in November 2005, competing with Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Wii as part of the seventh generation of video game consoles. As of June 30, 2013, 78.2 million Xbox 360 consoles have been sold worldwide. The Xbox 360 was officially unveiled on MTV on May 12, 2005, with detailed launch and game information divulged later that month at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3). The console sold out completely upon release in all regions except in Japan. The Xbox 360 introduced an expanded Xbox Live service (which now included a limited "Free" tier), the ability to stream multimedia content from PCs, while later updates added the ability to purchase and stream music, television programs, and films through the Xbox Music and Xbox Video services, along with access to third-party content services through third-party media streaming applications. Microsoft also released Kinect, a motion control system for the Xbox 360 which uses an advanced sensor system. At their E3 presentation on June 14, 2010, Microsoft announced a redesigned Xbox 360 that would ship on the same day. The redesigned console is slimmer than the previous Xbox 360 model and features integrated 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, TOSLINK S/PDIF optical audio output, five USB 2.0 ports (compared to the three from older versions) and special port designed for the Kinect peripheral. Older models of the Xbox 360 have since been discontinued. The first new console to be released features a 250 GB hard drive, while a later less expensive SKU features 4 GB internal storage.

6. Xbox One Main article: Xbox One The Xbox One with the redesigned Kinect and controller The Xbox One was released on November 22, 2013 in North America, as the successor of the Xbox 360. The Xbox One competes with Sony's PlayStation 4 and Nintendo's Wii U as part of the eighth generation of video game consoles. Announced on May 21, 2013, the Xbox One will place a large emphasis on internet-based features; including the ability to record and stream gameplay, and the ability to integrate with a set-top box to watch cable or satellite TV through the console with an enhanced guide interface and Kinect-based voice control. Following its unveiling, the Xbox One proved controversial for its original digital rights management and privacy practices; while Microsoft touted the ability for users to access their library of games (regardless of whether they were purchased physically or digitally) on any Xbox One console without needing their discs, and the ability to share their entire library with 10 designated "family" members, all games would have to be tied to the user's Xbox Live account and their Xbox One console, and the console would be required to connect to the Internet on a periodic basis (at least once every 24 hours) in order to synchronize the library, or else the console would be unable to play any games at all. After an overwhelmingly negative response from critics and consumers (who also showed concerns that the system could prevent or hinder the resale of used games), Microsoft announced that these restrictions would be dropped.Microsoft was also criticized for requiring the Xbox One to have its updated Kinect peripheral plugged in to function, which critics and privacy advocates believed could be used as a surveillance device. Despite showing a commitment to user privacy, Microsoft still ultimately decided to allow the console to function without Kinect.

7. Comparison Xbox Xbox 360 Xbox One Console Console Launch price US$299.99 GB£299.99 €479,99 US$299.99 (Core) (discontinued) US$399.99 (Premium – 20 GB) (discontinued) US$249.99 (Premium – 60 GB) (discontinued) US$479.99 (Elite) (120 GB) (discontinued) US$299.99 (Arcade – 256 MB internal memory) (discontinued) US$199.99 (Arcade – 512 MB internal memory) (discontinued) US$299.99 ("Super Elite") (250 GB) (discontinued) US$399.99 (Xbox 360 S – 250 GB + Kinect) US$299.99 (Xbox 360 S – 250 GB) US$299.99 (Xbox 360 S – 4 GB internal memory + Kinect) US$199.99 (Xbox 360 S – 4 GB internal memory) US$499 GB£429 €499

8. US$199.99 (Xbox 360 E – 4 GB internal memory) US$299.99 (Xbox 360 E – 250 GB) US$299.99 (Xbox 360 E – 4 GB internal memory + Kinect) Release date  NA November 15, 2001  JP February 22, 2002  EU March 14, 2002  November 22, 2005  EU December 2, 2005  JP December 10, 2005  AUS March 23, 2006 Further information: Xbox 360 launch#Release dates and pricing November 22, 2013 Discontinue d  JP 2007  NA 2008  EU 2008 N/A N/A Units sold 24+ million (as of May 10, 2006) 77.2 million (as of April 18, 2013) 3 million (as of January 6, 2014) Best-selling game Halo 2, 8 million (as of May 9, 2006) Kinect Adventures (pack- in with Kinect peripheral),24 million Best selling non-bundled game: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, 14.23 million N/A Media CD, DVD CD, DVD, HD DVD (movies only) with add-on drive CD, DVD, Blu-ray Disc Accessories (retail)  Xbox Live Starter Kit  Xbox Media Center Extender  DVD Playback Kit  Xbox Music Mixer see Xbox 360 accessories TBA

9.  Memory Unit (8 MB)  Logitech Wireless Controller (2.4 GHz)  More... CPU 733 MHz x86 Intel Celeron/Pentium III Custom HybridCPU 3.2 GHz IBM PowerPC tri- core CPU codenamed "Xenon" 1.75 GHz AMD x86- 64 eight- core CPU codenamed "Jaguar‖ GPU 233 MHz nVidia custom GeFor ce 3 NV2A DirectX 8.0 based GPU 500 MHz ATi custom Radeon X1800 DirectX 9.0c based GPU codenamed "Xenos" 853 MHz AMD Radeon HD 7000 series DirectX 11.1 based GPU codenamed "Durango" Memory 64 MB DDR SDRAM @ 200 MHz; in dual-channel 128- bit configuration giving 6400 MB/s 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM @ 700 MHz 22.4 GB/s, 10 MB EDRAM GPU frame buffer memory 8 GB of DDR3 RAM @ 2133 MHz 68.3 GB/s, 32 MB ESRAM GPU frame buffer memory Video I/O  VGA, Component (YPbPr ), SCART, S- Video,Composite  1080i, 720p, 576p, 576i, 4 80p, 480i  HDMI (on models manufactured after August 2007), VGA, Component/D- Terminal (YPbPr),SCART, S -Video, Composite  1080p, 1080i, 720p, 576p, 57 6i, 480p, 480i Various monitor resolutions available via VGA and HDMI/DVI (640×480, 848×480, 1024×768, 1280×720, 1280×768, 1280×1024, 1360×768, 1440×900, 1680×1050 & 1920×1080)  HDMI (one in, one out)  4K 2160p, 1080p, 1 080i, 720p Audio I/O  Optical Toslink, Stereo RCA  DTS (movies only), Dolby Digital Live, Dolby  HDMI, Optical Toslink, Stereo RCA  DTS (movies only), WMA Pro, Dolby Digital,Dolby  HDMI (one in, one out), Optical Toslink  DTS-HD Master

10. Digital, Dolby Surround, Stereo Surround, Stereo Audio, Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD High Resolution Audio, Dolby Digital Plus, DTS,Dolby Digital Online service Xbox Live (2002–10) XLink Kai (2003-present) Xbox Live Xbox Live Arcade Xbox Live Marketplace Xbox Live Vision (webcam), headset Xbox Live Video Marketplace Windows Live Messenger Internet Explorer (Xbox Live Gold required) VideoKinect (Kinect sensor is no longer needed) Xbox Live Xbox Store Internet Explorer Skype Backward compatibilit y N/A 50% of Xbox Library None[37] System software Xbox Music Mixer DVD Playback Kit, Xbox Linux see Xbox 360 system software Xbox OS System software features Audio CD playback [show] TBA Consumer programma bility Via Softmods and/or modchips ; Modified Windows CE 2.x, Linux Development on PC with XNA Game Studio($99/year subscription, binary distribution with XNA 1.0 Refresh) TBA

11. Xbox (console) The Xbox is a video game console developed by Microsoft. It was released on November 15, 2001, in North America, followed by Australia and Europe in 2002. It was Microsoft's first foray into the gaming console market. As a sixth-generation console, it competed with Sony's PlayStation 2, Sega's Dreamcast, and the Nintendo GameCube. It featured Xbox Live, a fee-based online gaming service that enabled subscribers to download new content and connect with other players through a broadband connection.[6][7] Unlike other online services from Sega and Sony, Xbox Live had support in the original console design through an integrated Ethernet port. Xbox's successor, the Xbox 360, was launched in November 2005. History In 1998, four engineers from Microsoft's DirectX team, Kevin Bachus, Seamus Blackley, Ted Hase and DirectX team leader Otto Berkes, disassembled some Dell laptop computers to construct a prototype Microsoft Windows-based video game console. The team hoped to create a console to compete with the Sony's upcoming PlayStation 2, which was luring game developers away from the Windows platform. The team approached Ed Fries, the leader of Microsoft's game publishing business at the time, and pitched their "DirectX Box" console based on the DirectX graphics technology developed by Berkes' team. Fries decided to support the team's idea of creating a Windows DirectX based console.

12. During development, the original DirectXbox name was shortened to Xbox. Microsoft's marketing department did not like the Xbox name, and suggested many alternatives. During focus testing, the Xbox name was left on the list of possible names to demonstrate how unpopular the Xbox name would be with consumers. However, consumer testing revealed that Xbox was preferred by far over the other suggested names and "Xbox" became the official name of the product. The Xbox was the second console produced by an American company since the Apple Pippin ceased production in 1997, after the release of the Nuon in 2000. It Microsoft's first video game console after collaborating with Sega to port Windows CE to the Dreamcast console. Microsoft repeatedly delayed the console, which was first mentioned publicly in late 1999 during interviews with Microsoft's then-CEO Bill Gates. Gates stated that a gaming/multimedia device was essential for multimedia convergence in the new times. He has even been quoted as saying "if we do not advance, to the next generation, we will most surely fall behind our competitors (Apple)". The Xbox was officially announced at the Game Developers Conference on March 10, 2000. Audiences were impressed by the console's technology. At the time of Gates' announcement, Sega's Dreamcast sales were diminishing and Sony's PlayStation 2 was just going on sale in Japan. The Xbox was officially unveiled to the public by Gates and guest professional wrestler The Rock at CES 2001 in Las Vegas on January 3, 2001. Microsoft announced Xbox's release dates and prices at E3 2001 in May. Most Xbox launch titles were unveiled at E3, most notably Halo: Combat Evolved and Dead or Alive 3. Due to the immense popularity of gaming consoles in Japan, Microsoft delayed the release of the Xbox in Europe to focus on the Japanese video game market. Although delayed, the European release proved to be more successful than the launch of the Xbox in Japan. Some of Microsoft's plans proved effective. In preparation for its launch, Microsoft acquired Bungie and used Halo: Combat Evolved as its launch title. At the time, Golden Eye 007 for the Nintendo 64 had been one of the few hit FPS games to appear on a console, some of other ones being Perfect Dark and Medal of Honor. Halo: Combat Evolved proved a good application to drive the Xbox's sales. In 2002, Microsoft made the second place slot in consoles sold in North America. The Xbox Live service gave Microsoft an early foothold in online gaming and would help the Xbox become a relevant competitor to other sixth- generation consoles. Popular launch games for the console included Dead or Alive 3, Amped: Freestyle Snowboarding, Halo: Combat Evolved, Fuzion Frenzy, Project Gotham Racing, and Jet Set Radio Future.

13. Promotion In 2002 the Independent Television Commission (ITC) banned a television advertisement for the Xbox in the United Kingdom after complaints that it was highly distasteful, violent, scary and upsetting. It depicted a mother giving birth to a small boy who was fired like a projectile through a hospital window and who aged rapidly as he flew through the air yelling. As he soared across a large area, he passed quickly through stages of his life as though time was passing him by. After aging into an old man, he crash-landed into his own grave. Dust and smoke poured from the grave. The advertisement ended with the slogan Life is short. Play more. Discontinuation and successor The Xbox's successor, the Xbox 360, was officially unveiled announced on May 12, 2005 on MTV and released in North America on November 22, 2005. Nvidia ceased production of the Xbox's GPU in August 2005, which marked the end of brand-new Xbox production. The Xbox was discontinued in Japan in 2007 immediately after 360's launch, due to poor sales in the country. Sales were much better throughout Europe and North America where the console was discontinued in late 2008 and early 2009, respectively. The last Xbox game in Europe was Xiaolin Showdown released in June 2007, and the last game in North America was Madden NFL 09 released in August 2008. Support for out-of-warranty Xbox consoles was discontinued on March 2, 2009. Support for Xbox Live on the console ended on April 15, 2010. The Xbox 360 supports a limited number of the Xbox's game library if the player has an official Xbox 360 Hard Drive. Xbox games were added up until November 2007. Xbox game saves cannot be transferred to Xbox 360, and the ability to play Xbox games through Xbox LIVE has been discontinued since April 15, 2010. It is still possible to play Xbox games with System Link functionality online via both the original console & the Xbox 360 with tunneling software such as XLink Kai.

14. Hardware Xbox was the first video game console to feature a built-in hard disk drive, used primarily for storing game saves and content downloaded from Xbox Live. This eliminated the need for separate memory cards (although some older consoles, such as the Amiga CD32 used internal flash memory and others like the TurboGrafx-CD, Sega CD and Sega Saturn had featured built-in battery backup memory prior to 2001). An Xbox user could rip music from standard audio CDs to the hard drive, and these songs were used for the custom soundtracks in some games. The Xbox was the first gaming product to feature Dolby Interactive Content-Encoding Technology, which allows real-time Dolby Digital encoding in game consoles. Previous game consoles could only use Dolby Digital 5.1 during non-interactive "cut scene" playback. The Xbox is based on commodity PC hardware and is much larger and heavier than its contemporaries. This is largely due to a bulky tray-loading DVD-ROM drive and the standard-size 3.5 inch hard drive. The Xbox has also pioneered safety features, such as breakaway cables for the controllers to prevent the console from being pulled from the surface it rests on. Several internal hardware revisions have been made in an ongoing battle to discourage modding (hackers continually updated modchip designs in an attempt to defeat them), to cut manufacturing costs, and to make the DVD-ROM drive more reliable (some of the early units' drives gave Disc Reading Errors due to the unreliable Thomson DVD-ROM drives used). Later generation units that used the Thomson TGM-600 DVD-ROM drives and the Philips VAD6011 DVD-ROM drives were still vulnerable to failure that rendered the consoles either unable to read newer discs or caused them to halt the console with an error code usually indicating a PIO/DMA identification failure, respectively. These units were not covered under the extended warranty. In 2002 Microsoft and Nvidia entered arbitration over a dispute on the pricing of Nvidia's chips for the Xbox. Nvidia's filing with the SEC indicated that Microsoft was seeking a US$13 million discount on shipments for NVIDIA's fiscal year 2002. Microsoft alleged violations of the agreement the two companies entered, sought reduced chipset pricing, and sought to ensure that Nvidia fulfill Microsoft's chipset orders without limits on quantity. The matter was privately settled on February 6, 2003. Launch-era Xbox gaming units were made in Hungary and the controllers made mostly in Indonesia. The Xbox includes a standard AV cable which provides composite video and monaural or stereo audio to TVs equipped with RCA inputs. European Xboxes also included an RCA jack to SCART converter block as well as the standard AV cable.

15. An 8 MB removable solid state memory card can be plugged into the controllers, onto which game saves can either be copied from the hard drive when in the Xbox dashboard's memory manager or saved during a game. Most Xbox game saves can be copied to the memory unit and moved to another console but some Xbox saves are digitally signed. It is also possible to save an Xbox Live account on a memory unit, to simplify its use on more than one Xbox. Technical specifications Controllers Original Xbox controller Xbox controller S The Xbox controller features two analog sticks, a pressure-sensitive directional pad, two analog triggers, a Back button, a Start button, two accessory slots and s ix 8-bit analog action buttons (A/Green, B/Red, X/Blue, Y/Yellow, and Black and White buttons). The standard Xbox controller (also nicknamed the "Fatty" and later, the "Duke") was originally the controller bundled with Xbox systems for all territories except Japan. The controller has been criticized for being bulky compared to other video game controllers; it was awarded "Blunder of the Year" by Game Informer in 2001, a Guinness World Record for the biggest controller

16. in Guinness World Records Gamer's Edition 2008, and was ranked the second-worst video game controller ever by IGN editor Craig Harris. The "Controller S" (codenamed "Akebono"), a smaller, lighter Xbox controller, was originally the standard Xbox controller only in Japan, designed for users with smaller hands. The "Controller S" was later released in other territories by popular demand and by 2002 replaced the standard controller in the Xbox's retail package, with the larger original controller remaining available as an accessory. Software Operating system The Xbox runs a custom operating system which was once believed to be a modified version of the Windows 2000 kernel. It exposes APIs similar to APIs found in Microsoft Windows, such as DirectX 8.1. The system software may have been based on the Windows NT architecture that powered Windows 2000; it is not a modified version of either. The user interface for the Xbox is called the Xbox Dashboard. It features a media player that can be used to play music CDs, rip CDs to the Xbox's built-in hard drive and play music that has been ripped to the hard drive; it also let users manage game saves, music, and downloaded content from Xbox LIVE, and lets Xbox LIVE users sign in and manage their account. The dashboard is only available when the user is not watching a movie or playing a game. It uses many shades of green and black for the user interface, to be consistent with the physical Xbox color scheme. When the Xbox was released in 2001 the LIVE service was not online yet, so the dashboard's LIVE feature was unusable. Xbox LIVE was released in 2002, but in order to access it users had to buy the Xbox LIVE starter kit containing a headset, a subscription, and supplemental. While the Xbox was still being supported by Microsoft, the Xbox Dashboard was updated via Xbox LIVE several times to reduce cheating and add features. Games The Xbox launched in North America on November 15, 2001. Its most successful launch game was Halo: Combat Evolved. Its sequel, Halo 2, is the best-selling Xbox game worldwide. Although there were several more popular second-party launch titles, including NFL Fever 2002, Project Gotham Racing, and Dead or Alive 3, the early public

17. reputation of the Xbox was damaged by the failure of Azurik: Rise of Perathia and other games designed and marketed by Microsoft. Although the console gained strong third party support from its inception, many early Xbox games did not fully use its powerful hardware, with few additional features or graphical improvements to distinguish them from the PS2 version, thus negating one of the Xbox's main selling points. Sony countered the Xbox for a short time by temporarily securing PlayStation 2 exclusives for highly anticipated games such as the Grand Theft Auto series and Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. In 2002 and 2003, several releases helped the Xbox gain momentum and distinguish itself from the PS2. The Xbox Live online service was launched in late 2002 alongside pilot titles MotoGP, MechAssault and Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon. Several best-selling and critically praised titles for the Xbox were published, such as Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, Ninja Gaiden and LucasArts' Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Take-Two Interactive's exclusivity deal with Sony was amended to allow Grand Theft Auto III and its sequels to be published for the Xbox. Many other publishers got into the trend of releasing the Xbox version alongside the PS2 version, instead of delaying it for months. In 2004 Halo 2 became the highest-grossing release in entertainment history, making over $125 million in its first day and becoming Xbox Live's third killer app after MechAssault & Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six 3. That year Microsoft made a deal to put Electronic Arts's popular titles on Xbox Live. The last game released on the Xbox was Madden NFL 09, on August 12, 2008. Services On November 15, 2002, Microsoft launched its Xbox Live online gaming service, allowing subscribers to play online Xbox games with other subscribers around the world and download new content directly to the system's hard drive. The online service works only with a broadband Internet connection. Approximately 250,000 subscribers signed up within two months of Xbox Live's launch. In July 2004, Microsoft announced that Xbox Live had reached 1 million subscribers; in July 2005, membership reached two million, and by July 2007 there were more than 3 million subscribers. By May 2009, the number had ballooned to 20 million current subscribers. On February 5, 2010, Marc Whitten posted on gamers coreblog that Xbox Live support for the original Xbox games would be discontinued as of April 14, 2010. Services were discontinued on schedule, but a group of 20 gamers continued to play for almost a month afterwards by simply leaving their consoles on connected to Halo 2. APACHE N4SIR was the final user to play on the original Xbox's Live Service and was finally disconnected on 2010-05-11 at 01:58 EDT (UTC-4).

18. Sales Region Units sold (as of May 10, 2006) First available North America 16 million November 15, 2001 Europe 6 million March 14, 2002 Asia & Pacific 2 million February 22, 2002 Worldwide 24 million On November 15, 2001, Xbox launched in North America and quickly sold out. Its launch in that region was successful, selling 1.53 million units three months after launch, which is higher than its successor Xbox 360, as well as the GameCube, PlayStation 3, Wii U, and even the PlayStation 2 and Wii. The Xbox has sold 24 million units worldwide as of May 10, 2006, according to Microsoft. This is divided out to 16 million units sold in North America, six million units in Europe, and just two million units sold in Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. The Xbox was almost always behind the PlayStation 2 in terms of sales, although in April 2004, the Xbox outsold the PS2 in the U.S. Despite lagging far behind the PlayStation 2's sales, the Xbox was overall a success (especially in North America), keeping a steady second place in the generation sales.

19. Xbox 360 Microsoft’s Xbox 360 game console is the first of the latest generation of game con-soles. Historically, game console architecture and design implementations have provided large discrete jumps in system performance, approximately at five-year intervals. Over the last several generations, game console systems have increasingly become graphics supercom- puters in their own right, particularly at the launch of a given game console generation. The Xbox 360, pictured in Figure 1, contains an aggressive hardware architecture and imple-mentation targeted at game console workloads. The core silicon implements the product designers’ goal of providing game developers a hardware platform to implement their next-gen-eration game ambitions. The core chips include the standard conceptual blocks of CPU, graph-ics processing unit (GPU), memory, and I/O. Each of these components and their intercon-nections are customized to provide a user-friendly game console product. Design principles One of the Xbox 360’s main design princi-ples is the next-generation gaming principle— that is, a new game console must provide value to customers for five to seven years. Thus, as for any true next-generation game console hardware, the Xbox 360 delivers a huge discrete jump in hardware performance for gaming. The Xbox 360 hardware design team had to translate the next-generation gaming prin-ciple into useful feature requirements and next-generation game workloads. For the game workloads, the designers’ direction came from interaction with game developers, including game engine developers, middle-ware developers, tool developers, API and dri-ver developers, and game performance experts, both inside and outside Microsoft. One key next-generation game feature requirement was that the Xbox 360 system must implement a 720p (progressive scan) pervasive high-definition (HD), 16:9 aspect ratio screen in all Xbox 360 games. This fea-ture’s architectural implication was that the Xbox 360 required a huge, reliable fill rate. Another design principle of the Xbox 360 architecture was that it must be flexible to suit the dynamic range of game engines and game developers. The Xbox 360 has a balanced hardware architecture for the software game pipeline, with homogeneous, reallocatable hardware resources that adapt to different game genres, different developer emphases, and even to varying workloads within a frame of a game. In contrast, heterogeneous hard-ware resources lock software game pipeline performance in each stage and are not reallo-catable. Flexibility helps make the design ―futureproof.‖ The Xbox 360’s three CPU cores, 48 unified shaders, and 512-Mbyte DRAM main memory will enable developers

20. A third design principle was programma-bility; that is, the Xbox 360 architecture must be easy to program and develop software for. The silicon development team spent much time listening to software developers (we are hardware folks at a software company, after all). There was constant interaction and iter-ation with software developers at the very beginning of the project and all along the architecture and implementation phases. This interaction had an interesting dynam-ic. The software developers weren’t shy about their hardware likes and dislikes. Likewise, the hardware team wasn’t shy about where next- generation hardware architecture and design were going as a result of changes in silicon processes, hardware architecture, and system design. What followed was further iteration on planned and potential workloads. An important part of Xbox 360 pro-grammability is that the hardware must present the simplest APIs and programming models to let game developers use hardware resources effectively. We extended pro-gramming models that developers liked. Because software developers liked the first Xbox, using it as a working model was nat-ural for the teams. In listening to developers, we did not repackage or include hardware features that developers did not like, even though that may have simplified the hard-ware implementation. We considered the software tool chain from the very beginning of the project. Another major design principle was that the Xbox 360 hardware be optimized for achiev-able performance. To that end, we designed a scalable architecture that provides the great-est usable performance per square millimeter while remaining within the console’s system power envelope. As we continued to work with game devel-opers, we scaled chip implementations to result in balanced hardware for the software game pipeline. Examples of higher-level implementation

21. scalability include the num-ber of CPU cores, the number of GPU shaders, CPU L2 size, bus bandwidths, and main memory size. Other scalable items rep-resented smaller optimizations in each chip. Hardware designed for games Figure 2 shows a top-level diagram of the Xbox 360 system’s core silicon components. The three identical CPU cores share an 8-way set-associative, 1- Mbyte L2 cache and run at 3.2 GHz. Each core contains a complement of four-way single- instruction, multiple data (SIMD) vector units.1 The CPU L2 cache, cores, and vector units are customized for Xbox 360 game and 3D graphics workloads. The front-side bus (FSB) runs at 5.4 Gbit/pin/s, with 16 logical pins in each direction, giving a 10.8-Gbyte/s read and a 10.8-Gbyte/s write bandwidth. The bus design and the CPU L2 provide added sup-port that allows the GPU to read directly from the CPU L2 cache. As Figure 2 shows, the I/O chip supports abundant I/O components. The Xbox media audio (XMA) decoder, custom-designed by Microsoft, provides on-the-fly decoding of a large number of compressed audio streams in hardware. Other custom I/O features include Figure: xbox 360 block diagram CPU I/O chip Core 0 Core 1 Core 2 L1D L1I L1D L1I L1D L1I 1 Mbyte L2 Memory GPU decode r MC1 BIU/IO interface XMA 512 Mbyte DRAM 3D core SMC MC0 10 Mbytes Video AnalogEDRAM out chip BIU Bus interface unit MC Memory controller HDD Hard disk drive MU Memory unit IR Infrared receiver SMC System management controller XMA Xbox media audio

22. The GPU 3D core has 48 parallel, unified shaders. The GPU also includes 10 Mbytes of embedded DRAM (EDRAM), which runs at 256 Gbytes/s for reliable frame and z-buffer bandwidth. The GPU includes interfaces between the CPU, I/O chip, and the GPU internals. The 512-Mbyte unified main memory con-trolled by the GPU is a 700-MHz graphics- double-data-rate-3 (GDDR3) memory, which operates at 1.4 Gbit/pin/s and provides a total main memory bandwidth of 22.4 Gbytes/s. The DVD and HDD ports are serial ATA (SATA) interfaces. The analog chip drives the HD video out. CPU chip Figure 3 shows the CPU chip in greater detail. Microsoft’s partner for the Xbox 360 CPU is IBM. The CPU implements the Pow-erPC instruction set architecture,2-4 with the VMX SIMD vector instruction set (VMX128) customized for graphics workloads. The shared L2 allows fine-grained, dynamic allocation of cache lines between the six threads. Commonly, game workloads significantly vary in working-set size. For example, scene management requires walking larger, random-miss-dominated data structures, similar to database searches. At the same time, audio, Xbox proce-dural synthesis (described later), and many other game processes that require smaller working sets can run concurrently. The shared L2 allows workloads needing larger working sets to allo-cate significantly more of the L2 than would be available if the system used private L2s (of the same total L2 size) instead. The CPU core has two-per-cycle, in-order instruction issuance. A separate vector/scalar issue queue (VIQ) decouples instruction issuance between integer and vector instruc-tions for nondependent work. There are two symmetric multithreading (SMT),5 fine-grained hardware threads per core. The L1 caches include a two-way set- associative, 32-Kbyte L1 instruction cache and a four-way set- associative, 32-Kbyte L1 data cache. The write-through data cache does not allocate cache lines on writes. The integer execution pipelines include branch, integer, and load/store units. In addition, each core contains an IEEE-754-compliant scalar floating-point unit (FPU), which includes single- and double-precision support at full hardware throughput of one operation per cycle for most operations. Each core also includes the four-way SIMD VMX128 units: floating- point (FP), per-mute, and simple. As the name implies, the VMX128 includes 128 registers, of 128 bits each, per hardware thread to maximize throughput. The VMX128 implementation includes an added dot product instruction, common in graphics applications. The dot product implementation adds minimal latency to a multiply-add by simplifying the rounding of intermediate multiply results. The dot prod-uct instruction takes far less latency than dis-crete instructions. Another addition we made to the VMX128 was direct 3D (D3D) compressed data formats,6-8 the same formats supported by the GPU. This allows graphics data to be gener-ated in the CPU and then compressed before being stored in the L2 or memory. Typical use of the compressed formats allows an approx-imate 50 percent savings in required band-width and memory footprint

23. CPU data streaming In the Xbox, we paid considerable atten-tion to enabling data-streaming workloads, which are not typical PC or server workloads. We added features that allow a given CPU core to execute a high-bandwidth workload (both read and write, but particularly write), while avoiding thrashing its own cache and the shared L2. First, some features shared among the CPU cores help data streaming. One of these is 128- byte cache line sizes in all the CPU L1 and L2 caches. Larger cache line sizes increase FSB and memory efficiency. The L2 includes a cache-set-locking functionality, common in embedded systems but not in PCs. Specific features that improve streaming bandwidth for writes and reduce thrashing include the write-through L1 data caches. Also, there is no write allocation of L1 data cache lines when writes miss in the L1 data cache. This is important for write streaming because it keeps the L1 data cache from being thrashed by high bandwidth transient write-only data streams. We significantly upgraded write gathering in the L2. The shared L2 has an uncached unit for each CPU core. Each uncached unit has four noncached write-gathering buffers that allow multiple streams to concurrently gath-er and dump their gathered payloads to the FSB yet maintain very high uncached write-streaming bandwidth. The cacheable write streams are gathered by eight nonsequential gathering buffers per CPU core. This allows programming flexibility in the write patterns of cacheable very high bandwidth write streams into the L2. The write streams can randomly write within a window of a few cache lines without the writes backing up and caus-ing stalls. The cacheable write- gathering buffers effectively act as a bandwidth compression scheme for writes. This is because the L2 data arrays see a much lower bandwidth than the raw bandwidth required by a program’s store pat-tern, which would have low utilization of the L2 cache arrays. Data transformation workloads commonly don’t generate the data in a way that allows sequential write behavior. If the write gathering buffers were not present, software would have to effectively gather write data in the register set before storing. This would put a large amount of pressure on the number of registers and increase latency (and thus through-put) of inner loops of computation kernels. We applied similar customization to read streaming. For each CPU core, there are eight outstanding loads/prefetches. A custom prefetch instruction, extended data cache block touch (xDCBT), prefetches data, but delivers to the requesting CPU core’s L1 data cache and never puts data in the L2 cache as regular prefetch instructions do. This modifi-cation seems minor, but it is very important because it allows higher bandwidth read streaming workloads to run on as many threads as desired without thrashing the L2 cache. Another option we considered for read streaming would be to lock a set of the L2 per thread for read streaming. In that case, if a user wanted to run four threads concurrently, half the L2 cache would be locked down, hurting workloads requiring a large L2 working-set size. Instead, read streaming occurs through the L1 data cache of the CPU core on which the given thread is operating, effectively giv-ing private read streaming first in, first out (FIFO) area per thread. A system feature planned early in the Xbox 360 project was to allow the GPU to directly read data produced by the CPU, with the data never going through the CPU cache’s back-ing store of main memory. In a specific case of this data streaming, called Xbox procedur-al

24. synthesis (XPS), the CPU is effectively a data decompressor, procedurally generating geometry on-the-fly for consumption by the GPU 3D core. For 3D games, XPS allows a far greater amount of differentiated geometry than simple traditional instancing allows, which is very important for filling large HD screen worlds with highly detailed geometry. We added two features specifically to sup-port XPS. The first was support in the GPU and the FSB for a 128-byte GPU read from the CPU. The other was to directly lower communication latency from the GPU back to the CPU by extending the GPU’s tail pointer write-back feature. Tail pointer write-back is a method of con-trolling communication from the GPU to the CPU by having the CPU poll on a cacheable location, which is updated when a GPU instruction writes an update to the pointer. The system coherency scheme then updates the polling read with the GPU’s updated HOT CHIPS 17 c Core 2 Core 1 L1I Core 0 L1I 32 Instruction unit Kbytes 32 Instruction unit L1DL1I Load/ 32 Instruction unit Kbytes Branch VIQ Int 32L1D Store Kbytes Branch VIQ Int Load/ 32 Kbytes L1D Store Branch VIQ Int Load/ 32 Kbytes Store Kbytes VSU VMX VMX VMX FPU MMU VS U VMX VMX FP D3Dpermcompressedsimp data, VMX MMU VSU VMX VMX FP perm simp FPU VMX stores to L2 VMX FPU MMU FP perm simp xDCBT 128-byte prefetch around L2, into L1 data cache L2 Node crossbar/queuing Uncached L2 L2 Non-sequential gathering, PIC L2 data locked set in L2UncachedUnit2 directory directoryUncached Unit2 Unit2 Test, Bus interface debug, clocks, Temperature sensor. Figure :- CPU cached data-streaming example.

25. pointer value. Tail write-backs reduce com-munication latency compared to using interrupts. We lowered GPU-to-CPU com-munication latency even further by imple-menting the tail pointer’s backing-store target on the CPU die. This avoids the round-trip from CPU to memory when the GPU point-er update causes a probe and castout of the CPU cache data, requiring the CPU to refetch the data all the way from memory. Instead the refetch never leaves the CPU die. This lower latency translates into smaller streaming FIFOs in the L2’s locked set. A previously mentioned feature very impor-tant to XPS is the addition of D3D com-pressed formats that we implemented in both the CPU and the GPU. To get an idea of this feature’s usefulness, consider this: Given a typ-ical average of 2:1 compression and an XPS-targeted 9 Gbytes/s FSB bandwidth, the CPU cores can generate up to 18 Gbytes/s of effec-tive geometry and other graphics data and ship it to the GPU 3D core. Main memory sees none of this data traffic (or footprint). CPU cached data-streaming example Figure 4 illustrates an example of the Xbox 360 using its data-streaming features for an XPS workload. Consider the XPS workload, acting as a decompression kernel running on one or more CPU SMT hardware threads. First, the XPS kernel must fetch new, unique data from memory to enable generation of the given piece of geometry. This likely includes world space coordinate data and specific data to make each geometry instance unique. The XPS kernel prefetches this read data during a previous geometry generation iteration to cover the fetch’s memory latency. Because none of the per-instance read data is typical-ly reused between threads, the XPS kernel fetches it using the xDCBT prefetch instruc-tion around the L2, which puts it directly into the requesting CPU core’s L1 data cache. Prefetching around the L2 separates the read data stream from the write data stream, avoid-ing L2 cache thrashing. Figure 4 shows this step as a solid-line arc from memory to Core 0’s L1 data cache. The XPS kernel then crunches the data, primarily using the VMX128 computation ability to generate far more geometry data than the amount read from memory. Before the data is written out, the XPS kernel com-presses it, using the D3D compressed data formats, which offer simple trade-offs between number of bits, range, and precision. The XPS kernel stores these results as gener-ated to the locked set in the L2, with only minimal attention to the write access pattern’s randomness (for example, the kernel places write accesses within a few cache lines of each other for efficient gathering). Furthermore, because of the write-through and no-write-allocate nature of the L1 data caches, none of the write data will thrash the L1 data cache of the CPU core. The diagram shows this step as a dashed-line arc from load/store in Core 0 to the locked set in L2. Once the CPU core has issued the stores, the store data sits in the gathering buffers wait-ing for more data until timed out or forced out by incoming write data demanding new 64-byte ranges. The XPS output data is writ-ten to software-managed FIFOs in the L2 data arrays in a locked set in the L2 (the unshaded box in Figure 4). There are multiple FIFOs in one locked set, so multiple threads can share one L2 set. This is possible within 128 Kbytes of one set because tail pointer write-back com-munication frees completed FIFO area with lowered latency. Using the locked set is impor-tant; otherwise, high-bandwidth write streams would

26. thrash the L2 working set. Next, when more data is available to the GPU, the CPU notifies the GPU that the GPU can advance within the FIFO, and the GPU performs 128-byte reads to the FSB. This step is shown in the diagram as the dot-ted-line arc starting in the L2 and going to the GPU. The GPU design incorporates special features allowing it to read from the FSB, in contrast with the normal GPU read from main memory. The GPU also has an added 128-byte fetch, which enables maximum FSB and L2 data array utilization. The two final steps are not shown in the diagram. First, the GPU uses the corre- sponding D3D compressed data format sup-port to expand the compressed D3D formats into single-precision floating-point formats native to the 3D core. Then, the GPU com-mands tail pointer write-backs to the CPU to indicate that the GPU has finished reading data. This tells the streaming FIFOs’ CPU software control that the given FIFO space is now free to be written with new geometry or index data. Figure 5 shows a photo of the CPU die, which contains 165 million transistors in an IBM second-generation 90-nm silicon-on-insulator (SOI) enhanced transistor process. Figure 5. Xbox 360 CPU die photo (courtesy of IBM). Graphics processing unit The GPU is the latest-generation graphics processor from ATI. It runs at 500 MHz and consists of 48 parallel, combined vector and scalar shader ALUs. Unlike earlier graphics engines, the shaders are dynamically allocat-ed, meaning that there are no distinct vertex or pixel shader engines—the hardware auto-matically adjusts to the load on a fine-grained basis. The hardware is fully compatible with D3D 9.0 and High-Level Shader Language (HLSL).

27. The ALUs are 32-bit IEEE 754 floating-point ALUs, with relatively common graphics simplifications of rounding modes, denor-malized numbers (flush to zero on reads), NaN handling, and exception handling. They are capable of vector (including dot product) and scalar operations with single-cycle throughput—that is, all operations issue every cycle. The superscalar instructions encode vec-tor, scalar, texture load, and vertex fetch with-in one instruction. This allows peak processing of 96 shader calculations per cycle while fetching textures and vertices. Feeding the shaders are 16 texture fetch engines, each capable of producing a filtered result in each cycle. In addition, there are 16 programmable vertex fetch engines with built-in tessellation that the system can use instead of CPU geometry generation. Finally, there are 16 interpolators in dedicated hardware. The render back end can sustain eight pix-els per cycle or 16 pixels per cycle for depth and stencil-only rendering (used in z-prepass or shadow buffers). The dedicated z or blend logic antialiasing and transparency. The z-prepass is a technique that performs a first-pass rendering of a command list, with no ren-dering features applied except occlusion determination. The z-prepass initializes the z-buffer so that on a subsequent rendering pass with full texturing and shaders applied, dis-carded pixels won’t spend shader and textur-ing resources on occluded pixels. With modern scene depth complexity, this technique significantly improves rendering performance, espe-cially with complex shader programs. -buffer, six shader operations, and two texture fetches and can sustain this at eight pixels per cycle. This blazing fill rate enables the Xbox 360 to deliver HD-resolution rendering simul- taneously with many state-of-the-art effects that traditionally would be mutually exclusive because of fill rate limitations. For example, games can mix particle, high-dynamic-range (HDR) lighting, fur, depth-of-field, motion blur, and other complex effects. For next-generation geometric detail, shad-ing, and fill rate, the pipeline’s front end can process one triangle or vertex per cycle. These are essentially full-featured vertices (rather than a single parameter), with the practical limitation of required memory bandwidth and storage. To overcome this limitation, sev-eral compressed formats are available for each data type. In addition, XPS can transiently generate data on the fly within the CPU and pass it efficiently to the GPU without a main memory pass. The EDRAM removes the render target and z-buffer fill rate from the bandwidth equation. The EDRAM resides on a separate die from the main portion of GPU logic. The EDRAM die also contains dedicated alpha blend, z-test, and antialiasing logic. The inter-face to the EDRAM macro runs at 256 Gbytes/s: (8 pixels/cycle + 8 z- + write) - The GPU supports several pixel depths; 32 bits per pixel (bpp) and 64 bpp are the most common, but there is support for up to 128 bpp for multiple-render-target (MRT) or floating- point output. MRT is a graphics technique of outputting more than one piece of data per sample to the effective frame buffer, interleaved efficiently to minimize the performance impact of having more data. The data is used later for a variety of advanced graphics effects. To optimize space, the GPU supports 32-bpp and 64-bpp HDR lighting formats.

28. Command Vertex processor FSB cache Vertex assembly/ Texture tesselator cache Sequencer Hi-Z Interpolators Main die Bus Shader complex Shader exportinterface unit Blending interface Mem1 MC1 I/O controller PCI-E I/O interfac e High-speed Graphics I/O bus AA+AZ Memory 10-Mbyte 0emM C0M EDRAM Display DRAM die Video Figure 6. GPU block diagram. whole process inserted in the traditional graph-ics pipeline for binning the geometry into a large number of bins. Handling the bins in a high-performance manner is complicated (for exam-ple, overflow cases, memory footprint, and bandwidth). Because the GPU’s EDRAM usu-ally requires only a couple of bins, bin handling is greatly simplified, allowing more- optimal hardware-software partitioning. With a binning architecture, the full com-mand list must be presented before rendering. The hardware uses a few tricks to speed this process up. Rendering increasingly relies on a z- prepass to prepare the z-buffer before exe-cuting complex pixel shader algorithms. We take advantage of this by collecting object extent information during this pass, as well as priming a full-resolution hierarchical z-buffer. We use the extent information to set flags to skip command list sections not needed with-in a tile. The full-resolution hi-z buffer retains its state between tiles. In another interesting extension to normal D3D, the GPU supports a shader export fea-ture that allows data to be output directly from the shader to a buffer in memory. This lets the GPU serve as a vector math engine if needed, as well as allowing multipass shaders. The latter can be useful for subdivision sur-faces. In addition, the display pipeline includes an in- line scaler that resizes the frame buffer on the fly as it is output. This feature allows games to pick a rendering resolution to work with and then lets the display hardware make the best match to the display resolution.

29. As Figure 6 shows, the GPU consists of the following blocks: • Bus interface unit. This interface to the FSB handles CPU-initiated transactions, as well as GPU-initiated transactions such as snoops and L2 cache reads. • I/O controller. Handles all internal mem-ory-mapped I/O accesses, as well as transactions to and from the I/O chip via the two-lane PCI-Express bus (PCI-E). • Memory controllers (MC0, MC1). These 128-byte interleaved GDDR3 memory controllers contain aggressive address tiling for graphics and a fast path to min-imize CPU latency. • Memory interface. Memory crossbar and buffering for non-CPU initiators (such as graphics, I/O, and display). Figure 7. Xbox 360 GPU “parent” die (courtesy of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.). Figure 8. Xbox 360 GPU EDRAM (“daughter”) die (courtesy of NEC Electronics).

30. • Graphics. This block, the largest on the chip, contains the rendering engine. High-speed I/O bus. This bus between the graphics core and the EDRAM die is a chip-to- chip bus (via substrate) operat-ing at 1.8 GHz and 28.8 Gbytes/s. When multisample antialiasing is used, only pixel center data and coverage information is transferred and then expanded on the EDRAM die. • Antialiasing and Alpha/A (AA+AZ). Han-dles pixel-to-sample expansion, as well as z-test and alpha blend. • Display. Figures 7 and 8 show photos of the GPU ―parent‖ and EDRAM (―daughter‖) dies. The parent die contains 232 million transistors in a TSMC 90-nm GT. The EDRAM die con-tains 100 million transistors in an NEC 90-nm process. Architectural choices The major choices we made in designing the Xbox 360 architecture were to use chip multiprocessing (CMP), in-order issuance cores, and EDRAM. Chip multiprocessing Our reasons for using multiple CPU cores on one chip in Xbox 360 was relatively straightforward. The combination of power consumption and diminishing returns from instruction-level parallelism (ILP) is driving the industry in general to multicore. CMP is a natural twist on traditional symmetric mul-tiprocessing (SMP), in which all the CPU cores are symmetric and have a common view of main memory but are on the same die ver-sus separate chips. Modern process geometries afford hardware designers the flexibility of CMP, which was usually too costly in die area previously. Having multiple cores on one chip is more cost-effective. It enables shared L2 implementation and minimizes communica-tion latency between cores, resulting in high-er overall performance for the same die area and power consumption. In addition, we wanted to optimize the architecture for the workload, optimize in-game

31. utilization of silicon area, and keep the system easy to program. These goals made CMP a good choice for several reasons: First, for the game workload, both integer and floating-point performance are impor-tant. The high-level game code is generally a database management problem, with plenty of object-oriented code and pointer manipu-lation. Such a workload needs a large L2 and high integer performance. The CMP shared L2 with its fine-grained, dynamic allocation means this workload can use a large working set in the L2 while running. In addition, sev-eral sections of the application lend themselves well to vector floating-point acceleration. Second, to optimize silicon area, we can take advantage of two factors. To start with, we are presenting a stable platform for the product’s lifetime. This means tools and programming expertise will mature significantly, so we can rely more on generating code than optimizing performance at runtime. More-over, all Xbox 360 games (as opposed to Xbox games from Microsoft’s first game console, which are emulated on Xbox 360) are com-piled from scratch and optimized for the cur-rent microarchitecture. We don’t have the problem of running legacy, but compatible, instruction set architecture executables that were compiled and optimized for a completely different microarchitecture. This problem has significant implications for CPU microarchi-tectures in PC and server markets. Third, although we knew multicore was the way to go, the tools and programming expertise for multithread programming are certain-ly not mature, presenting a problem for our goal of keeping programming easy. For the types of workloads present in a game engine, we could justify at most six to eight threads in the system. The solution was to adapt the ―more-but- simpler‖ philosophy to the CPU core topology. The key was keeping the num-ber of hardware threads limited, thus increas-ing the chance that they would be used effectively. We decided the best approach was to tightly couple dedicated vector math engines to integer cores rather than making them autonomous. This keeps the number of threads low and allows vector math routines to be opti-mized and run on separate threads if necessary. In-order issuance cores The Xbox 360 CPU contains three two-issue, in-order instruction issuance cores. Each core has two SMT hardware threads, which support fine-grained instruction issuance. The cores allow out-of-order execution in the com-mon cases of loads and vector/floating-point versus integer instructions. Loads, which are treated as prefetches, don’t stall until a load dependency is present. Vector and floating-point operations have their own, decoupled vector/float issue queue (VIQ), which decouples vector/floating point versus integer issuance in many cases. We had several reasons for choosing in-order issuance. First, the die area required by in- order-issuance cores is less than that of out-of-order-issuance cores. In-order cores sim-plify issue logic considerably. Although not directly a big area user, out-of-order issue logic can consume extra area because it requires additional pipeline stages to meet clock peri-od timing. Further, common implementa-tions of out-of-order issuance and completion use rename registers and completion queues, which take significant die area.

32. Second, in-order implementation is more power efficient than out-of-order implementation. Keeping power levels manageable was a major issue for the design team. All the additional die area required for out-of-order issuance consumes power. Out-of-order cores commonly increase performance because their issuance, tracking, and completion enable deeper speculative instruction execution. This deeper speculation means wasted power since whole execution strings are often thrown away. Xbox 360 execution does speculate but to a lesser degree. Third, the Xbox 360’s two SMT hardware threads per core keep the execution pipelines more fully utilized than they are in traditional in-order designs. This helps keep the execution pipelines busy without out-of-order issuance. Finally, in-order design is simpler, aiding design and implementation. Simplicity also makes performance more predictable, simpli-fying programming and tool optimizations. EDRAM HD, alpha blending, z-buffering, antialias-ing, and HDR pixels take a heavy toll on memory bandwidth. Although more effects are being achieved in the shaders, postprocessing effects still require a large pixel-depth com-plexity. Also as texture filtering improves, texel fetches can consume large amounts of memo-ry bandwidth, even with complex shaders. One approach to solving this problem is to use a wide external memory interface. This limits the ability to use higher-density mem-ory technology as it becomes available, as well as requiring compression. Unfortunately, any compression technique must be lossless, which means unpredictable—generally not good for game optimization. In addition, the required bandwidth would most likely require using a second memory controller in the CPU itself, rather than having a unified memory architecture, further reducing sys-tem flexibility. EDRAM was the logical alternative. It has the advantage of completely removing the render target and the z-buffer bandwidth from the main-memory bandwidth equation. In addition, alpha blending and z-buffering are read-modify-write processes, which further reduce the efficiency of memory bandwidth consumption. Keeping these processes on-chip means that the remaining high-band-width consumers—namely, geometry and texture—are now primarily read processes. Changing the majority of main-memory bandwidth to read requests increases main-memory efficiency by reducing wasted mem-ory bus cycles caused by turning around the bidirectional memory buses. Software By adopting SMP and SMT, we’re using standard parallel models, which keep things simple. Also, the uni-fied memory architecture allows flexible use of memory resources. Our operating system opens all three cores to game developers to program as they wish. For this, we provide standard APIs including Win32 and OpenMP, as well as D3D and HLSL. Devel-opers can also bypass these and write their own CPU assembly and shader microc-ode, referred to in the game industry as ―to the metal‖ programming. We provide standard tools including XNA-based tools Performance Investigator (PIX) and

33. Xbox Audio Cre-ation Tool (XACT). XNA is Microsoft’s game develop-ment platform, which devel-opers of PC and Xbox 360 games (as well as other plat-forms) can use to minimize cross-platform development costs.11 PIX is the graphics profiler and debugger. It uses per-formance counters embedded in the CPU and GPU and architectural simulators to provide performance feedback. The Xbox 360 development environment is familiar to most programmers. Figure 9 shows a screen shot from the XNA Studio Integrat-ed Development Environment (IDE), a ver-sion of Visual Studio with additional features for game developer teams. Programmers use IDE for building projects and debugging, including debugging of multiple threads. When stepping through source code, pro-grammers find the instruction set’s low-level details completely hidden, but when they open the disassembly window, they can see that PowerPC code is running. Other powerful tools that help Xbox 360 developers maximize productivity and performance include CPU profilers, the Visual C++ 8.0 compiler, and audio libraries. These tools and libraries let programmers quickly exploit the power of Xbox 360 chips and then help them code to the metal when necessary.

34. Xbox 360 was launched to customers in the US, Canada, and Puerto Rico on 22 November, 2005. Between then and the end of 2005, it launched in Europe and Japan. Dur-ing the first quarter of 2006, Xbox 360 has been launched in Central and South America, Southeast Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. Xbox 360 implemented a number of firsts and/or raised the bar for performance for users of PC and game console machines for gaming. These include • the first CMP implementation with more than 2 cores (3); • the highest frequency and bandwidth CPU frontside bus (5.4 Gbps and 21.6 GB/s); • the first CMP chip with shared L2; • the first game console with SMT; • the first game console with GPU-unified shader architecture; and • the first game console with MCM GPU/EDRAM die implementation. The Xbox 360 core chipset contains approximately 500 M transistors. It is the most complex, highest performance consumer electronic product shipping today and pre-sents a large discrete jump in 3D graphics and gaming performance.

35. Xbox One Xbox One is a video game console developed and marketed by Microsoft. Announced on May 21, 2013, it is the successor to theXbox 360 and is the third console in the Xbox family.[6] It directly competes with Sony's PlayStation 4 and Nintendo's Wii U as part of the eighth generation of video game consoles.[14][15] Xbox One was released across North America, several European markets, Australia, and New Zealand on November 22, 2013,[2] and is scheduled for release in 26 other markets, including Japan, the remaining European markets, and the Middle East, sometime in September 2014.[16] Microsoft and various publications have classified the device as an "all-in-one entertainment system",[17][18][19] making it a competitor to other digital media players such as the Apple TV and the Google TV platforms. Moving away from the Xbox 360's PowerPC-based architecture and back into the x86 architecture used in the first Xbox, the console features an AMD processor built around the x86-64 instruction set. Xbox One places an increased emphasis on entertainment integration, offering the ability to overlay live television programming from an existing set- top box, split-screen multitasking ofapplications, and improved second screen support. The console includes a newly upgraded Kinect motion sensing peripheral, previously an optional attachment for the Xbox 360. Microsoft is emphasizing the Kinect's integration with Xbox One through features such as a built-in Skype client for videoconferencing, user recognition and tracking, and the ability to use voice commands and gestures to navigate the console's user interface. New gaming functionality includes an expanded Xbox Live service, improved Kinect functionality, cloud computing, the ability to automatically record and share video highlights from gameplay, and support for live streaming gameplay online. Upon its unveiling, Xbox One was criticized for its initial digital rights management policies (including a requirement for a periodic connection to the internet, and ambiguous restrictions on the resale and sharing of previously-purchased games), along with Kinect usage requirements and higher price than its competitors. In response to the criticism, Microsoft dropped these restrictions prior to releasing the console. History Xbox One is the successor to Xbox 360, Microsoft's previous video game console, which was introduced in 2005 as part of the seventh generation of video game consoles. As of June 2013, it remains in production by Microsoft, having received a number of small hardware revisions to reduce the unit's size and improve its reliability. In 2010, Microsoft's Chris Lewis stated that the 360 was about "halfway" through its lifecycle; this was aided by the

36. introduction of the Kinect device that year which Lewis stated would extend the lifecycle by five years. Initial hardware for the 360's successor, commonly referred to by the industry as the "Xbox 720", was reportedly in hands of developers as early as May 2011. The official developer kit was codenamed Durango, and appeared to be available to developers by mid-2012. Leaked documents suggested that the new console would include an improved Kinect device, cloud access to games and media, integration with phone and tablet devices, and technology to provide players heads-up displays on glasses worn by the player, codenamed "Fortaleza"; Microsoft did not comment on these reported features. Similar, leaked design documents also suggested that Microsoft was seeking to eliminate the ability to play used games, though Microsoft later clarified they were still reviewing the design and were "thinking about what is next and how we can push the boundaries of technology like we did with Kinect", but did not comment on the validity of the information. The console was publicly unveiled under the name Xbox One on May 21, 2013 in a press conference designed to cover the unit's broad multimedia and social capabilities. A second press event for the console was held during E3 on June 10, 2013, focusing on its video game- oriented functionality. At that time, Microsoft announced that the console would release in 21 different markets at launch, but this was later amended down to 13. The change, which pushed the release date for the other 8 markets to 2014, was attributed to unforeseen complexity in localizing the new Kinect peripheral. Hardware Xbox One's exterior casing consists of a two-tone "liquid black" finish; with half finished in a matte grey, and the other in a glossier black. The design was intended to evoke a more entertainment-oriented and simplified look than previous iterations of the console; among other changes, the LED rings used by Xbox 360 are replaced by a glowing white Xbox logo used to communicate the system's status to the user. It is powered by an AMD "Jaguar" Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) with two quad- core modules totaling eight x86-64 cores clocked at 1.75 GHz , and 8 GB of DDR3 RAM with a memory bandwidth of 68.3 GB/s.The memory subsystem also features an additional 32 MB of "embedded static" RAM, or ESRAM, with a memory bandwidth of 109 GB/s.Eurogamer has been told that for simultaneous read and write operations the ESRAM is capable of a theoretical memory bandwidth of 192 GB/s and that a memory bandwidth of 133 GB/s has been achieved with operations that involvedalpha transparency blending.The system includes a 500 GB non-replaceable hard drive, and a Blu- ray Disc optical drive.About 362 GB of hard drive space is available for the storage of

37. games; support for external drives will be added in a future update, scheduled to come in April 2014. It was reported that 3 GB of RAM would be reserved for the operating system and utility software, leaving 5 GB for games. The graphics processing unit (GPU) is based on an AMD GCN architecture with 12 compute units, which have a total of 768 cores, running at 853 MHz providing an estimated peak theoretical power of 1.31 TFLOPS. For networking, Xbox One supports Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11n wireless, and Wi-Fi Direct. Xbox One supports 4K resolution (3840×2160) (2160p) video output and 7.1 surround sound. Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president of marketing and strategy for Microsoft, has stated that there is no hardware restriction that would prevent games from running at 4K resolution.[49] Unlike the Xbox 360, the Xbox One does not support 1080i and otherinterlaced resolutions. Xbox One supports HDMI 1.4 for both input and output, and does not support composite orcomponent video. The console can monitor its internal temperature and adjust accordingly to prevent overheating; alongside increasing fan speed, additional measures can be taken, including forcing the hardware to run in a lower power state—a feature that was not present on Xbox 360. Restricting power consumption lowers maximum performance, but the setting would be intended as a last resort to prevent permanent hardware damage. Controller Xbox One's controller maintains the overall layout found in the Xbox 360's design. The directional pad has been changed to a four-way design, and the battery compartment is slimmer. Menu and View buttons have replaced the Start and Back buttons.[53] Each trigger features independent rumble motors called "Impulse Triggers", which allows developers to program directional vibration. One trigger can be made to vibrate when firing a gun, or both can work together to create feedback that indicates the direction of an incoming hit.[54] Consumers who Pre-ordered the Xbox One, "Day One Edition" included controllers that had the words "Day One 2013" engraved in the center of the controller.Microsoft invested over $100 million into refining the controller design for the Xbox One. Kinect Xbox One ships with an updated version of Kinect for motion tracking and voice recognition; the new Kinect uses a 1080p wide-angle time-of-flight camera (in comparison to the VGA resolution of the previous version), and processes 2 gigabits of data per second to read its environment. The new Kinect has greater accuracy over its predecessor, can track up to 6 skeletons at once, perform heart rate tracking, track gestures performed with an Xbox One controller, and scan QR codes to redeem Xbox Live gift cards. The Kinect microphone

38. remains active at all times by default so it can receive voice commands from the user when needed, even when the console is in sleep mode (so it can be awakened with a command). As was the case on the Xbox 360, Kinect usage is optional, and privacy settings are available for adjusting how the sensor operates. A Windows-compatible version of the new Kinect is scheduled to be released in Summer 2014. Software and services Media inter-connectivity Similarly to Windows 8, Xbox One can snap applications (such as music, video, Skype, and Internet Explorer ) to the side of the screen as a form of multitasking. Xbox One can also serve as a pass-through for an existing television set-top box over HDMI. This functionality allows users to watch live TV from their existing provider through the console, and access features such as show recommendations, an electronic program guide (branded as OneGuide), and voice commands. The set-top box is controlled by the console by either using an I blaster in the Kinect sensor, or the HDMI-CEC protocol. On launch, OneGuide is only compatible with television providers in the United States. Voice control The console features a similar, albeit richer set of voice control abilities than those found in the first generation Kinect, allowing the user to control Xbox functions via voice command. Users can also initiate conversations through Skype. Operating system The device reportedly runs three operating systems: Xbox OS, an OS based on the Windows kernel, and another OS that allows the other two operating systems to communicate by virtualisation (as a hypervisor). This integration allows features like snapped Skype calls while in game. The Windows kernel on the Xbox is not compatible with standard Windows programs, though developers will be able to port them over with little effort. Xbox Live Microsoft have stated that the Xbox Live service has been scaled up to use 300,000 servers for Xbox One users, but have not stated how many of the servers are physical and how many are virtual. Cloud storage is available to save music, films, games and saved content and developers are able to use Live servers (along with the Windows Azure cloud

39. computing platform) to offer dynamic changes to players within their game. The service is still be subscription-based. The friends list has been expanded to 1,000 friends . SmartGlass Xbox SmartGlass provides extended functionality on Xbox One, allowing devices running Windows Phone, Windows 8, iOS and Android to be used as a "second screen." A demo during the E3 press conference demonstrated its use for setting up a multiplayer match in another game in the background on a tablet while playing another game on the television. Recording and streaming Xbox Live Gold subscribers can use the Upload Studio app to edit and share clips from the last five minutes of gameplay footage that is automatically recorded by the console.Integration with the live streaming platform Twitch will be provided in 2014; users will be able to use voice commands to immediately begin streaming footage of their current game directly to the service, and use the Kinect microphone for commentary and voiceovers. Despite the ability to record gameplay, Xbox One does not include DVR functionality for recording television programs; executive Yusuf Mehdi indicated that Xbox One would "work in tandem" with existing TV providers, but that Microsoft may need to work with them directly to provide extended functionality such as DVR integration. Games Microsoft presented several first-party and third-party titles for Xbox One at its E3 2013 news conference, some of which are exclusive to the console. First-party titles unveiled for Xbox One include Forza Motorsport 5, Ryse: Son of Rome, a revival of Killer Instinct, Project Spark and a teaser for an upcoming Halo game. Xbox One games are distributed on Blu-ray Disc and as downloads through Xbox Games Store. All Xbox One games, whether purchased as downloads or discs, must be cached on the console's hard drive. In the case of disc-based games, the disc will still be required to play. However, if the game is installed on another console, and that console owner no longer has access to the disc, the owner has the option of unlocking the install on their hard drive by purchasing it through Xbox Live; the installed game then acts as a game installed on the hard drive. Single-player games that take advantage of cloud computing require an internet connection. Xbox One does not have native backward compatibility with original Xbox or Xbox 360 games. Xbox Live director of programming Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb did state that users could theoretically use the HDMI-in port on the console to pass an Xbox 360 through Xbox One. In an interview, Senior director Albert Penello revealed the possibility that

40. Microsoft could offer backwards compatibility with older titles through a cloud gaming system in the future. Sales On November 22, 2013, Microsoft confirmed that it had sold one million Xbox One consoles within its first 24 hours of being available. Based on approximately 102,000 shopping receipts tracked by Info Scout, 1,500 of which included a purchase of either a video game or a video game console, the Xbox One was the highest-selling console during the Black Friday sales period in the United States. On December 11, 2013, Microsoft announced that it had sold approximately 2 million units in its first 18 days on sale. On December 12, 2013, Microsoft announced it was the fastest selling console in the United States based on NPD Group figures, however the NPD report clarified, "PlayStation 4 sales included an additional week within the November data month compared to Xbox One. When looking at sales on an average per-week basis, Xbox One led PS4. Keep in mind, however, that supply typically becomes constrained in the second week after launch." On January 6, 2014, Microsoft announced that approximately 3 million consoles had been sold worldwide in 2013.In their Q2 2014 earnings report on January 23, 2014, Microsoft announced that 3.9 million Xbox One units had been shipped worldwide.

41. Conclusion & Future Scope:- This research was motivated by a commercialized product of gesture-based interaction technology, Xbox360 game console. As an advance technology, gesture-based interaction has been applied successfully in game industry and paid more and more attention. But the traditional interaction has existed for a long time and continued to be dominant. We collected the data from several people by interview method and discussed advantages and disadvantage of gesture-based interactions. It provides people new experience and great pleasure which traditional interaction could not offer. It makes the interaction between human and computer more natural. It has been illustrated in science fiction movies that this technology can improve people’s lives if it is applied rightly. But there are still some disadvantages which may bring troubles and make users dissatisfied. Hours of use make users tired soon. Machines cannot distinguish between intentional behaviors and unintentional behaviors. Because of the invisible boundary existed , which cannot be seen , the user is very easily running out of the boundary, as a result, the camera fixed on the device cannot detect the user's actions, so there is no any reactions on the system.

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