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The Xenos is a custom
graphics processing unit A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed for digital image processing and to accelerate computer graphics, being present either as a discrete video card or embedded on motherboards, mobile phones, personal ...
(GPU) designed by ATI (now taken over by
AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California and maintains significant operations in Austin, Texas. AMD is a hardware and fabless company that de ...
), used in the
Xbox 360 The Xbox 360 is a home video game console developed by Microsoft. As the successor to the Xbox (console), original Xbox, it is the second console in the Xbox#Consoles, Xbox series. It was officially unveiled on MTV on May 12, 2005, with detail ...
video game console A video game console is an electronic device that Input/output, outputs a video signal or image to display a video game that can typically be played with a game controller. These may be home video game console, home consoles, which are generally ...
developed and produced for
Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...
. Developed under the codename "C1", it is in many ways related to the R520 architecture and therefore very similar to an ATI Radeon X1800 XT series of PC
graphics card A graphics card (also called a video card, display card, graphics accelerator, graphics adapter, VGA card/VGA, video adapter, display adapter, or colloquially GPU) is a computer expansion card that generates a feed of graphics output to a displa ...
s as far as features and performance are concerned. However, the Xenos introduced new design ideas that were later adopted in the TeraScale microarchitecture, such as the unified shader architecture. The package contains two separate dies, the GPU and an
eDRAM Embedded DRAM (eDRAM) is dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) integrated on the same die or multi-chip module (MCM) of an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) or microprocessor. eDRAM's cost-per-bit is higher when compared to equivale ...
(manufactured by
NEC is a Japanese multinational information technology and electronics corporation, headquartered at the NEC Supertower in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. It provides IT and network solutions, including cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), Inte ...
), featuring a total of 337 million transistors.


Specifications

The TeraScale microarchitecture is based on this chip, the shader units are organized in three
SIMD Single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) is a type of parallel computer, parallel processing in Flynn's taxonomy. SIMD describes computers with multiple processing elements that perform the same operation on multiple data points simultaneousl ...
groups with 16 processors per group, for a total of 48 processors. Each of these processors is composed of a 5-wide vector unit (total 5 FP32 ALUs), resulting in 240 units, that can serially execute up to two instructions per cycle (a multiply and an addition). All processors in a SIMD group execute the same instruction, so in total up to three instruction threads can be simultaneously under execution. * 500 MHz parent GPU on 90 nm, 65 nm (since 2008, codename Gunga)
TSMC Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSMC or Taiwan Semiconductor) is a Taiwanese multinational semiconductor contract manufacturing and design company. It is one of the world's most valuable semiconductor companies, the world' ...
process or 45 nm
GlobalFoundries GlobalFoundries Inc. is a multinational semiconductor contract manufacturing and design company located in the Cayman Islands and headquartered in Malta, New York. Created by the divestiture of the manufacturing arm of AMD in March 2009, the ...
process (since 2010, with CPU on same die) of total 232 million transistors, 32 nm process (since 2014, with eDRAM integrated into the same die) ** 240 vector units
floating-point In computing, floating-point arithmetic (FP) is arithmetic on subsets of real numbers formed by a ''significand'' (a Sign (mathematics), signed sequence of a fixed number of digits in some Radix, base) multiplied by an integer power of that ba ...
vector processors for
shader In computer graphics, a shader is a computer program that calculates the appropriate levels of light, darkness, and color during the rendering of a 3D scene—a process known as '' shading''. Shaders have evolved to perform a variety of s ...
execution, divided in three dynamically scheduled SIMD groups of 80 units each.Xbox 360 hardware specifications
*** Unified shading architecture (each pipeline is capable of running either pixel or
vertex shader In computer graphics, a shader is a computer program that calculates the appropriate levels of light, darkness, and color during the rendering of a 3D scene—a process known as '' shading''. Shaders have evolved to perform a variety of s ...
s) *** 10 FP ops per vector processor per cycle (5 fused multiply-add) *** Maximum vertex count: 1.21 billion vertices per second *** Maximum
polygon In geometry, a polygon () is a plane figure made up of line segments connected to form a closed polygonal chain. The segments of a closed polygonal chain are called its '' edges'' or ''sides''. The points where two edges meet are the polygon ...
count: ~500 million polygons per second *** Maximum shader operations: 240 billion shader operations per second (3 shader pipelines × 80 units × 2 ALUs × 0.5 GHz (500 MHz)) *** 240 
GFLOPS Floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance in computing, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate measu ...
*** MEMEXPORT shader function ** 16 texture filtering units (TF) and 16 texture addressing units (TA) *** 16 filtered samples per clock **** Maximum pixel fillrate: 4.00 gigapixels per second **** Maximum texel fillrate: 8.00 gigatexels per second (16 textures × 500 MHz) *** 16 unfiltered texture samples per clock ** Maximum
dot product In mathematics, the dot product or scalar productThe term ''scalar product'' means literally "product with a Scalar (mathematics), scalar as a result". It is also used for other symmetric bilinear forms, for example in a pseudo-Euclidean space. N ...
operations: 24 billion per second ** Support for a superset of
DirectX Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with "Direct" ...
9.0c API DirectX Xbox 360, and Shader Model 3.0+ * 500 MHz, 10  MB daughter embedded DRAM
framebuffer A framebuffer (frame buffer, or sometimes framestore) is a portion of random-access memory (RAM) containing a bitmap that drives a video display. It is a memory buffer containing data representing all the pixels in a complete video frame. Mode ...
(at 256 Gbit/s) on 90 nm, 80 nm (since 2008) or 65 nm (since 2010) **
NEC is a Japanese multinational information technology and electronics corporation, headquartered at the NEC Supertower in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. It provides IT and network solutions, including cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), Inte ...
designed eDRAM die includes additional logic (192 parallel pixel processors) for color,
alpha compositing In computer graphics, alpha compositing or alpha blending is the process of combining one image with a background to create the appearance of partial or full transparency. It is often useful to render picture elements (pixels) in separate pass ...
, alpha blending, Z/
stencil Stencilling produces an image or pattern on a surface by applying pigment to a surface through an intermediate object, with designed holes in the intermediate object. The holes allow the pigment to reach only some parts of the surface creatin ...
buffering, and anti-aliasing called "Intelligent Memory", giving developers 4-sample anti-aliasing at very little performance cost. ** Procedural Synthesis Technology (XPS): During read streaming into the CPU, a custom prefetch instruction, extended data cache block touch (xDCBT) prefetches data directly to the L1 data cache of the intended core, which skips putting the data in the L2 cache to avoid thrashing the L2 cache. Writes streaming from each core skip the L1 cache, due to its no-write allocation (avoids thrashing of high-bandwidth, transient, write-only data streams on the L1 cache), and goes directly to the L2 cache. The system allows for the GPU to directly read data produced by the CPU without going to main memory. In this specific case of data streaming, called Xbox procedural synthesis (XPS), the CPU is effectively a data decompressor, generating geometry on-the-fly for consumption by the GPU 3D core. ** 105 million transistorsATI engineers by way of Beyond 3D's Dave Baumann. ** 8 render output units *** Maximum
pixel In digital imaging, a pixel (abbreviated px), pel, or picture element is the smallest addressable element in a Raster graphics, raster image, or the smallest addressable element in a dot matrix display device. In most digital display devices, p ...
fillrate: 16 gigasamples per second fillrate using 4X multisample anti aliasing (MSAA), or 32 gigasamples using Z-only operation; 4 gigapixels per second without MSAA (8 ROPs × 500 MHz) *** Maximum Z sample rate: 8 gigasamples per second (2 Z samples × 8 ROPs × 500 MHz), 32 gigasamples per second using 4X anti aliasing (2 Z samples × 8 ROPs × 4X AA × 500 MHz) *** Maximum anti-aliasing sample rate: 16 gigasamples per second (4 AA samples × 8 ROPs × 500 MHz) *** Support for bilinear, trilinear, anisotropic filtering, Alpha to Coverage, hardware Tessellation and Predicated Tiling. *
Cooling Cooling is removal of heat, usually resulting in a lower temperature and/or Phase transition, phase change. Temperature lowering achieved by any other means may also be called cooling. The Heat transfer, transfer of Internal energy, thermal energ ...
: Both the GPU and CPU of the console have heatsinks. The GPU's heatsink uses heatpipe technology, to conduct heat from the GPU and eDRAM die to the fins of the heatsink. The heatsinks are actively cooled by a pair of 60 mm exhaust fans. The new XCGPU chipset redesign is featured in both the Xbox 360 S and the Xbox 360 E and integrates the CPU (
Xenon Xenon is a chemical element; it has symbol Xe and atomic number 54. It is a dense, colorless, odorless noble gas found in Earth's atmosphere in trace amounts. Although generally unreactive, it can undergo a few chemical reactions such as the ...
) and GPU (Xenos) in one package and is actively cooled by a single heatsink rather than two.


See also

* TeraScale hardware tesselator * GCN hardware tesselator * RSX 'Reality Synthesizer' - GPU used in the
PlayStation 3 The PlayStation 3 (PS3) is a home video game console developed and marketed by Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE). It is the successor to the PlayStation 2, and both are part of the PlayStation brand of consoles. The PS3 was first released on ...
* Latte (graphics chip) GPU used in the
Wii U The Wii U ( ) is a home video game console developed by Nintendo as the successor to the Wii. Released in late 2012, it is the first eighth-generation video game console and competed with Microsoft's Xbox One and Sony's PlayStation 4. The W ...


References

{{Microsoft ATI Technologies products Graphics processing units Xbox 360 hardware