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.
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 man-
agement 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 for-
mats,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 reg- isters 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 signif-
icantly 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 trans-
actions 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 informa- tion 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 pro-
gramming 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 exper-
tise 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 decou- ples 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 implemen-
tation. Keeping power levels manageable was a major issue for the design team. All the addi-
tional 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 mem-
ory 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 ren-
der 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 per-
formance 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 gam-
ing. 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.
