Xbox 360/Hardware information

The Xbox 360 continues Microsoft's trend of PC-like architectures for their consoles. While the x86 CPU used in the previous and next two generations is replaced with a PowerPC CPU, many of the same characteristics carry over from other consoles, including unified memory, an NT-based kernel, and forward looking GPU. While there are still some proprietary aspects to the hardware, they are far fewer than competing consoles.

Sub-pages

Xenos (GPU) Has a lot of quirks

General

CPU

• 3c6t PPC Xenon @ 3.2GHz
  • Derived from Cell PPE/PowerPC 970
  • SPEs replaced with SIMD extensions and larger vector registers, known as VMX128

Things to note: Lacks out of order execution. Very long pipeline, manual branch predictor, making it terrible at code that requires CPU "agility". Clock speed and core count gives deceptively high on paper performance.

Useful Links

General

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_technical_specifications

https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/xbox-360/

Xenon

https://github.com/xenia-project/xenia/blob/master/docs/ppc/core_instructions.pdf

https://github.com/xenia-project/xenia/blob/master/docs/ppc/altivec_instructions.pdf

https://github.com/xenia-project/xenia/blob/master/docs/ppc/vmx128.txt

https://wiki.raptorcs.com/w/images/f/f5/PowerISA_public.v3.1.pdf - Ghidra XEX loader processor manual