Chipworks Dismantles Xbox

If you actually forked out the money for an Xbox, you're probably not taking it apart to see what makes it go, but several other hardware sites have done that dirty deed along with a company called Chipworks Inc., a company that does reverse engineering for the semiconductor and electronics market. The company just put out a press release with comments on the lack of technical innovations in the console. By now, you probably know that the XBox is built around an Intel Pentium III processor running at 733 MHz, but Chipworks goes as far as saying that "The whole console is in fact a stripped down medium end PC with high end graphics." Here are the details Chipworks uncovered (some of which you also probably know). Produced by nVIDIA, the graphics processor is a custom chip starting from a GeForce3 core running at 250 MHz. The system memory consists of 64 MB DDR-SDRAM running at 200MHz. nVIDIA's graphic chip performance is 125 Mpolygon/sec with a memory bandwidth of 6.4 GB/sec, which Chipworks says is better than both Sony Playstation2 and Nintendo Game Cube and is the only significant difference between Xbox and its competitors. The second chip from nVIDIA's chipset has an IDE interface capable of Ultra DMA 100, a serial interface for 4 USB ports (the controller ports) and an Ethernet 10/100 interface. The 8MB memory cards share the USB bus with the controllers. The IDE bus connects a 10GB hard disk and a DVD reader. The disk contains a modified version of Microsoft's XP OS but cannot be read if hooked to a regular PC IDE interface. An additional PIC microcontroller produced by Microchip handles the front panel and some control signals for the IDE drive and DVD. The highest video resolution is 1920x1080 with HDTV capabilities and 64 audio channels with 3D support. The Xbox does not have a shared bus since it's a system with a strong interaction between only two chips: the Intel processor and the XGPU nVIDIA chip (as a North bridge chip). Bear in mind that we here at THG haven't taken one of the things apart, but that this particular company did and may have uncovered a few details you weren't aware of. This account makes it sound like the Xbox is just a wimpy PC that's been purposely set up to keep you from loading and playing other PC games you already own.