| yo_john117 said: Geez 16 core processor?!? How much is this thing going to cost?! I'm not sure if I believe that rumor though TBH because 16 core processors are all over $500 (all the one's I could find at least). I'm sure MS could get them for much cheaper than that but even if they manage 50-60% off of those prices we're still looking at over $200 for the processor alone. |
Depends, Microsoft will be the one in control of the manufacturing.
PowerPC is generally a small and efficient microarchietcture, if say the CPU cores were similar to that of the XBox 360 ...
It ended up costing 165 million transisters for 3 cores or 55 million transisters per core, Multiply 55 by 16 and you get 880 million transisters which is actually smaller than the Intel Core i7 and AMD processors in transister budget, so manufacturing costs wise it won't be that expensive if they go with a 40nm or smaller node.
For example the Phenom 2 x6's sold for about $150 here in Australia at one point, built at 45nm with 904 million transisters for a die-size of 346mm2.
And that's with AMD's profit included in that price, if Microsoft releases it at 32nm or 28nm it could be cheap as chips to manufacture even if it's 1 billion transisters.
However, you have to take into account that PowerPC doesn't have to waste transister budget on legacy backwards compatability and being RISC and not CISC based is naturally more efficient.
Plus PowerPC cores in the likes of the PS3 and XBox 360 were in-order, which is very similar to the likes of the Intel Atom of today, this saves a fairly large amount of transister budget at a cost of performance, don't expect Per Core performance to be higher than x86, but do expect allot more of them. :)
Hopefully this means that console ports to PC's will start utilising my 8 core processor more extensively.
The bright side is that, because emulating the CPU between different architectures is difficult... More so than the GPU, hopefully this means that the next Xbox will be compatible with the Xbox 360's games library as they are using the same PowerPC architecture.
--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--
