Guts vs Guts - What's Running Your Console?

Posters Name: Kagato
Posters Email: kagato@mwgl.org
Subject: Guts vs Guts - What's Running Your Console?

News:
There's an article at EDN which explores the internals to your favorite console systems on the market today. Here's a snip:

Xbox's multimedia-processing architecture differs from that of its competitors in several key areas. Unlike both PS2 and GameCube, the graphics accelerator in Xbox's Nvidia-designed graphics-processing unit doesn't employ separate DRAM arrays for main memory and for the frame buffer, Z-buffer, and texture-buffer graphics functions. Instead, the 233-MHz graphics-processing unit employs a unified, or shared, memory array in which the DDR SDRAM handles all of these tasks. Unified-memory-array architectures have economic appeal but have until recent years achieved limited success, primarily due to low memory bandwidth. Xbox's 400-Mbps-per-pin DDR SDRAM speed neatly solves the performance problem, further aided by Nvidia's TwinBank crossbar memory controller, whose dual 64-bit banks enable the CPU and graphics subsystem to simultaneously access the memory array for higher sustained bandwidth usage.