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The PowerPC instruction set is RISC - this is a good thing, as it's got a fairly small set of instructions (relative to x86) - it doesn't make things much easier, though. ~96GFLOPS single-precision, ~58GFLOPS double-precision, ~9.6GFLOPS dot product L1: 32KB instruction/32KB data, L2: 1MB (shared)Įach core has 32 integer, 32 floating-point, and 128 vector registersĪltivec/VMX128 instructions for SIMD floating-point math They'll cover the CPU, GPU, and operating system.Ħ4-bit PowerPC w/ in-order execution and running big-endian The next few posts will investigate each core component of the system and try to answer the two questions above. Although it's not going to be a piece of cake and there are some significant differences that may cause problems, this actually isn't the worst situation. The hardware is all totally custom (CPU/GPU/memory system/etc), but roughly equivalent to mainstream hardware with a 64-bit PPC chip like those shipped in Macs for awhile and an ATI video chipset not too far removed from a desktop card. The Xbox 360 is an embedded system, geared towards gaming and fairly specialized - but at the end of the day it's derived from the Windows NT kernel and draws with DirectX 9.
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