Praveen APCS 247San Jose State University

IntroductionIntroduction

First Generation 1972

We are in seventh Generation, since 2004

HD DVD Blue Ray Bluetooth SD Card Streaming

Xbox Xbox 360360

Best Hardware for next generation games

Homogenous hardware architecture for the pipeline

Three cores and two threads per core

Procedural SynthesisProcedural Synthesis

Dynamically generating lower level geometry data from statically stored higher level scene data

Optimal use of system bandwidth and memory

Shift burden from art to programming and to the hardware

Images -> Polygons -> Vertices -> Memory

On Rendering

Memory - > Vertex data -> GPU -> Monitor

Vague. Limited and repetitive models

Procedural Synthesis…Procedural Synthesis…

Images are compressed and stored in memory and are decompressed by GPU while rendering

Compression ratio:

Stored scene data / Rendered vertex data

TreeLeafWind VectorDescriptions

Procedural Synthesis…Procedural Synthesis…

Approximating a higher order curve with a network a flat surfacesHigher order curves are stored in main memory and then transferred to CPU where they are tessellated and finally fed to GPUs.Tessellation is done at real time and allows the software to control LOD (Level of Detail)Farther Objects: Low LODCloser Objects: High LOD

GPUGPU

Graphics Processing Units: Renders graphics from vertex data 48 combined vector and scalar ALUs Superscalar instruction encodes vector, scalar, texture load and vertex fetch in one instruction 10MB of eDRAM which has built in logic for functions like zcompare, anti -aliasing Occlusion determination through Z prepass

Power Processing Elements Power Processing Elements PPEsPPEsThree cores, each core is a PPE3.2 GHz64KB L1 CacheHost Thread and Data Generation threadUses SMT (Simultaneous Multithreading) to handle two threads of execution(therefore, for 3 cores 6 threads can run parallel)

CachingCaching

32KB L1 2-way set associative instruction cache32KB L1 4-way set associative write through data cache1MB L2 cacheProducer – Consumer Traditional: Main memory – GPU Xbox: CPU – GPUL2 stores in case of over production of data from CPUWrite streaming & Read streaming modesAvoids thrashing by locking

PS PS 33

One PPE

Eight SPEs (one SPE is for backup)

Element Inter connect BUS EIB

Direct Memory Access Control DMAC

What have you decided ? At the last minute sony realized that cell GPU was not up to

the level so they purchased nvidia ‘s 7800 GTX GPU. The main drawback of this GPU is Not designed for console GPU. It was designed and

optimized for PC GPU Xbox GPU was co designed by Microsoft and ATI. So they

were able to optimize its capabilities for video game playing. Eventually procedural synthesis in xbox 360 looks some

what better than reality synthesizer in ps3 Both models have some defects that can be ignored. Xbox 360 , PS 3 low end can be considered. Xbox 360 is the

best one if you just plan to play games other than watching movies.

Last but not least, price plays the big role in selecting the product.

[1]Andrews, J; Baker, N Xbox 360 System Architecture: Volume 26, Issue 2, March-April 2006 Page(s):25 - 37. IEEE.

[2] Ars Technica Technical Forum http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/xbox360-1.ars/2

[3] Xbox 360 specification http://hardware.teamxbox.com/articles/xbox/1144/The-Xbox-360-

System-Specifications/p1

[4] Sony Playstation portal http://www.us.playstation.com/ps3

[5] Nicholas BlanchFord – Cell Architecture http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cell/Cell0_v2.html

[6] PlayStation 3 Specification details http://playstation.about.com/od/ps3/a/PS3SpecsDetails_3.htm

[7] Wii Specification details http://www.wiiconsoles.co.uk/wii_hardware_specification.asp

[8] Roughly Drafted http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2008/01/31/video-gameconsoles-2007-wii-ps3-and-the-death-of-microsofts-xbox-360/

[9] Sales Information http://vgchartz.com/