xBox2 Development Kit is Power Mac G5?

I got the pictures from here.
The article is not in english can sombody translate it?
Anyway what do you think if these are real?

The next-generation Xbox is apparently to have PowerPC-derived processor cores, so it's not too surprising that the Alpha developer kits - long before production hardware is finalized and available - use a commercially-available PowerPC platform.

The Mac G5 is about as close as you can get with currently-shipping hardware. The next Xbox is reportedly to have three cores running at a higher clock speed than the G5 runs its two processors, so if the code runs well on the G5, it should run really well on the final hardware.

I believe the dev kits are running an updated Xbox kernel, though, which is derived from Windows 2000's kernel in the current Xbox. Recompiling that for PowerPC isn't especially hard, I would imagine - MS did most of the work to port to PowerPC back in NT 3.51, which was carried forward into NT 4.0. Of course that support was based on the so-called Common Hardware Reference Platform, of which I'm not aware that there were any commercial, shipping implementations. Unsurprisingly support was dropped for Windows 2000.

Yeh, Mac G5s with ATi video cards were issued to game developers last year. Something a bit closer to the actual xbox2 spec is expected before the console ships.

It's real... yes, I've known about this for years.

As Mike said, it's because the NeXtBox is based on the PowerPC.

One thing I do want to know, however...

How are the devs developing for the platform? Are they just going to compile to x86 for testing purposes, or code entirely on the Mac, complete with Codewarrior over VS?

i would guess the mac is just the closest they could get to the blue playstation I imagine they will code on a seperate machine, and squirt the exes on to the mac. Chances are its not even running macos.

Compilation is apparently done on a pc using a 'special' version of vs.net that includes a ppc cross compiler. The Mac runs a special OS. The set up even supports remote debugging. Which is nice.

W3bbo wrote:

How are the devs developing for the platform? Are they just going to compile to x86 for testing purposes, or code entirely on the Mac, complete with Codewarrior over VS?

My understanding is that the dev kit is just for running the code, with remote debugging from another system.

Again, Microsoft did the work to produce cross-compilers for NT-on-PowerPC back in the Windows NT 3.51 to 4.0 generation. It was possible to obtain a processor pack for VC6, containing the cross-compilers, at the time. The Visual C++ environment still ran on your x86 machine but the compiler output PowerPC machine code.

The PowerPC port was maintained for a while for the Windows CE platform and development tools, but PowerPC support was dropped as of Windows CE 4.0. I'd expect that it's been picked up and maintained again now for this new role.

The Mac uses a very different executable format from Windows, so it's not surprising that MacBU use Metrowerks rather than a Microsoft compiler (source: Rick Schaut, a Mac Office developer). Xbox, reflecting its Windows heritage, uses the Microsoft PE/COFF format, I believe.

I'm surprised Microsoft didn't go with AMDs 64bit chip, that with its new registers is a lot closer to a PowerPC than the original x86 and would still run X-Box 1 games in 32bit mode... :o

Manip wrote:

I'm surprised Microsoft didn't go with AMDs 64bit chip, that with its new registers is a lot closer to a PowerPC than the original x86 and would still run X-Box 1 games in 32bit mode...

I am lost on this one too...

I have as yet to hear any real good tech details on why dump x86 for ppc cpu's

I even wonder if it was driven in part by an idea to slow down the "Hack the Xbox" stuff where folks mod-chip them.

thats just a wild guess.... I hope it's a wrong one.

perhaps a deal was made to get the cpu's really cheap?

Or because the XBox2 was planned back in 2003, before the Athlon64 was even announced?

Announced to you? Are you open to the possiblity that Microsoft find out about stuff like this before you?

Tensor wrote:

Announced to you? Are you open to the possiblity that Microsoft find out about stuff like this before you?

Well if thats the case why didn't they build it on X64 or better yet if use PowerPc why not use Cell if they have such information before us?

Shmuelpro wrote:

Well if thats the case why didn't they build it on X64 or better yet if use PowerPc why not use Cell if they have such information before us?

The X-Box 1 didn't use the best CPU either. It had the P3 when P4 was already available. I suspect CPU power isn't as important as graphics power. And the X-Box 1 did have the best graphics hardware at the time, and X-Box 2 will also have the best graphics hardware.

PS, Cell is being developed by Sony --> PS3 -- I don't think they wanna share technologies.

figuerres wrote:

I even wonder if it was driven in part by an idea to slow down the "Hack the Xbox" stuff where folks mod-chip them.

It wouldn't slow it down at all... There is a PowerPC Linux out and about (Linus himself uses it!) and other things aren't really x86 based either so I can't see it helping piracy or hacking. Also nobody has been able to emulate the X-Box on a PC yet anyway so muh...

Shmuelpro wrote:

Well if thats the case why didn't they build it on X64 or better yet if use PowerPc why not use Cell if they have such information before us?

Similar to as Minh points out - its not about what is the best processor available. These are consoles. They have to be relatively cheap. Its about whats the best processing power/$ ratio can I get.

I suspect a power issue. Electrical power. And emitted heat power. One of the main complaints about the current Xbox is that it's so damn big - this cost a lot of sales in Japan. Although actually it's not that much bigger than a first-generation PS2 - it's only a couple of centimetres taller - Sony managed to fool-the-eye with their split-level front panel, hiding about half the height. It also weighs a ton - because there's a damn steel chassis underneath the plastic skin.

See for example the Crystal Xbox:



By contrast the PS2 is all plastic, and pretty flimsy at that. This is a common trend in consumer electronics actually - we just bought a LaserJet 3030 at work, which is an all-in-one document-fed-scanner/copier/fax/printer. A few years ago that would have had a steel chassis. Now it's almost entirely plastic. I digress.

Anyway, RISC processors, designed with a smaller instruction set than x86, have tended to be generally more power-efficient than their x86 cousins. Another requirement this time round, I believe, is that Microsoft have had a hand in the specs for the processor rather than simply buying an off-the-shelf component (IIRC the current Xbox simply uses a stock Pentium III at 733MHz). MS were looking for a partner who would license their processor core design. This might not have been acceptable to Intel or AMD.

Remember also that Intel and AMD have only just started doing dual-core CPUs, whereas IIRC IBM have already shipped 4-core POWER processors. They certainly shipped dual-core POWER4 chips in 2001.

I can't recall the general rule-of-thumb for emulation - I think it used to be that you needed about three times as much processing power to emulate a system at full speed. The new Xbox is supposed to have three cores at over 3GHz, which should be easily enough power to emulate the PIII-733.

Rather than stick with the XBox Chassis... if I had one myself, I'd strip it out and shove it all in a nice Chieftec Dragon case, along with the practically required mods of upgrading the HDD, changing the CD drive, putting a wifi interface in there, converting the controller ports to IR, and stuff

W3bbo wrote:

Rather than stick with the XBox Chassis... if I had one myself, I'd strip it out and shove it all in a nice Chieftec Dragon case, along with the practically required mods of upgrading the HDD, changing the CD drive, putting a wifi interface in there, converting the controller ports to IR, and stuff

Do you then dremel a bit off the motherboard and sell the old case on e-bay?