MS finally give in!

[Lt Major Burns]

3 core, no. 3 processors, seperate

3.2ghz - yes

G5, no - PowerPc, on which the G5 has been developed from, as has the xbox processors.

EDIT it's like morphine and cocaine are both derived from the same opium, but are quite drastically different

[lnoelstorr]

Ah, OK, I'd seen it stated as "3 core" in quite a few places (I'd also thought it was 3-processor until then), and also as a G5 (or "G5 based").

Still, if IBM can get Microsoft a PowerPC chip running at 3.2GHz, what's holding them up on the 3GHz G5?

[Captain Code]

MS *says* they'll be releasing "more powerful" dev kits in the future. I don't know what that really means, like if they'll produce their own G5 based machines for development.

It would really be easy for MS to release DirectX for the G5 because it obviously exists already, but for their own market domination of PC games they won't.

[Captain Code]

There's nothing posted that I've seen that says it's really 3 CPUs and not 3 cores on one die. All it says is 3 symmetric cores.

It would make sense if it was 3 cores on one die as it would reduce the size which is needed to pack such power in a small case as with the XBox 360.

It must be pretty similar to the G5 chips because otherwise they wouldn't use them for developing games. It looks like it could be a PPC970FX derived minus 1 VMX unit and crammed 3 on one CPU die.

[Lycander]

Originally Posted by Captain Code

MS *says* they'll be releasing "more powerful" dev kits in the future. I don't know what that really means, like if they'll produce their own G5 based machines for development.

Well it's quite simple, the ATI GPU in the XBox 360 isn't out for PC/Mac yet, which impacts developers more so than the main CPU. I believe the biggest difference is Shader Model 3.0 which prior ATI chips did not support, hence the need for PowerMac G5's with Nvidia's 6800 for the initial dev kit.