Chipworks Inc., a world-class leading supplier of reverse engineering services for the semiconductor and electronics market, today comments on the technical innovations, or lack of, in the Microsoft Xbox.
Almost a year after the introduction of Sony's Playstation 2, Microsoft has entered the game console market with its' much anticipated Xbox. ``The Microsoft XBox game console is built around an Intel Pentium III processor running at 733 MHz,'' stated Julia Elvidge, vice president, marketing and sales for Chipworks. ``The whole console is in fact a stripped down medium end PC with high end graphics.''
Produced by nVIDIA, the graphics processor is a custom chip starting from a GeForce3 core running at 250 MHz. The system memory consists of 64 MB DDR-SDRAM (Double-Data-Rate) running at 200MHz. nVIDIA's graphic chip performance is 125 Mpolygon/sec with a memory bandwidth of 6.4 GB/sec. These values are notably better than both Sony Playstation2 and Nintendo Game Cube. According to Ms. Elvidge, ``this is the only significant difference of the Xbox from its competitors.''
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