Circle of Light
By Cornelis van den Bosch and Frederik De Breuck, Xbox Users Group
The Xbox 360™ video game and entertainment system will really place you at the center of the high definition experience. As you all know, the Xbox 360 will be available this holiday season in Europe, Japan, and North America. Xbox 360 launches a new era of digital entertainment that is always connected, always personalized, and always in high definition.
Here at Xbox Users Group it's indeed all Xbox 360 lately. What makes us love the next generation console from Microsoft is neither the technically superior interior nor the sophisticated exterior. The main reason for our growing admiration is the vision behind it, the focus on the experience, the raw power, and the unified design strategy.
Xbox 360 was formally unveiled at this year's E3 in Los Angeles. Except for the price and the exact launch date, almost every detail was revealed, thus stopping some speculation, but starting some others. The first thing that hit me was the design. I'm not only talking about the colors or the logo but just the exterior.
Jonathan Hayes, Xbox 360 Design Director, sums it up perfectly, "I think of the design's iconic gesture as the inhale of a Martial Artist before a burst of power." It just made me want to run to the nearest store.
The gamers will be amazed when they get their hands on this piece of art but the developers already are. The demand for high-definition content and deep-experience games results in increased complexity in the process of creating next-generation games. Microsoft has succeeded in creating a framework and a platform that covers the complete gaming pipeline: from developer to gamer, from cost efficient game development to an immersive and integrated consumer experience.
You could say that Xbox 360 is created to streamline development and maximize raw power. Or as Microsoft Corporate Vice President and Chief XNA Architect J Allard stated in an interview about XNA and Xbox 360, "In the HD Era the platform is bigger than the processor. New technology and emerging consumer forces will come together to enable the rock stars of game development to shake up the old establishment and redefine entertainment as we know it."
We'll go deeper in to all of that in one of our next articles here on Xbox.com.
As expected, the Xbox 360 packs a powerful technological punch. But it cannot be said enough: the next generation clash will not only be won by introducing mere powerful technology. It's all about the combination of the experience, the design, the integration, Xbox Live®, and not to forget the games.
As for that raw power, Xbox 360 has some technology incorporated that is eventually going to make its way to the PC. However, it probably will be a while before we see PC components in the market that can keep up with the new Xbox 360.
In the first Xbox®, Microsoft installed a standard X86 architecture processor. The Xbox 360 will be equipped with a custom triple-core, dual-threaded PowerPC for Xbox 360 which according to the technical specifications delivers 1 teraflop of system-level, floating-point performance.
The big difference between Xbox and Xbox 360 is that the X86 processor (Xbox) is CISC based. Processors follow two fundamental architecture categories, namely Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) and Complex Instruction Set Computing (CISC). While most 32-bit processors follow the CISC architecture, 64-bit processors and those that are used in high end computer systems such as mainframes and imaging workstations follow the RISC architecture.
The custom processor was co-designed by Microsoft and IBM and is based on their Power Architecture. Power Architecture technology is an instruction set architecture that spans applications from consumer electronics to supercomputers. But it's more than that. Power Architecture technology forms an enhanced platform for collaborative hardware innovation, with the goal of developing community specifications and supporting development tools that work together to facilitate integration and enhanced implementations.
In fact the processor you'll get with your Xbox 360 should be about the same quality they put in supercomputers. Only this fact should make you run to your preferred Xbox store
In our next articles we'll bring you more comprehensive explanations of the Xbox 360 hardware.
So what can you expect from Xbox Users Group here on Xbox.com? First of all, we will bring you an all-inclusive dossier on what Xbox 360 really means for you. It doesn't matter if you are a PC gamer, Xbox gamer or no gamer at all. Xbox 360 is more than a console, it puts you in control.
Secondly we'll bring you an interpretive overview of the news in the world of Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox Live, hardware, games and related stories as well as interviews and some editorial pieces from our staff and compiled user articles taken from our website.
