Xbox 360 System Architecture

This article covers the Xbox 360's high-level technical requirements, a short system overview, and details of the CPU and the GPU. The Xbox 360 contains an aggressive hardware architecture and implementation targeted at game console workloads. The core silicon implements the product designers' goal of providing game developers a hardware platform to implement their next-generation game ambitions. The core chips include the standard conceptual blocks of CPU, graphics processing unit (GPU), memory, and I/O. Each of these components and their interconnections are customized to provide a user-friendly game console product. The authors describe their architectural trade-offs and summarize the system's software programming support

Design Principles

One of the Xbox 360's main design principles is the next-generation gaming principle—that is, a new game console must provide value to customers for five to seven years. Thus, as for any true next-generation game console hardware, the Xbox 360 delivers a huge discrete jump in hardware performance for gaming.