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SvennoJ on 10 April 2012
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selnor said:
smbu2000 said:
selnor said:
Just also thought about this.
Xbox 360 came out in 2005. The 360 has a 6 threaded 3 core PowerPC based Processor running at 3.2ghz. When the 360 was first announced PC's were still using single core processors. In fact when the 360 released only 1 or 2 PC's actually had a dual core processor.

Looking at this rumour it looks perfectly feasible. Basically we have 8 core CPUS on the market. By xmas 2013 there will be 16 core CPUS here.

When the 360 launched a dual core Pentium at 2.4ghz costed around $350. But yet the 3 core Xbox 360 was fantasticly priced for its power at the time. $479.99.

1 or 2? Well AMD had their Athlon 64 X2 dual core cpu out in May 2005. I remember I really wanted one although I just had an Athlon 64 at the time. On the Apple side, IBM released their dual core PowerPC G5 chip in October 2005. Prior to these "dual core" were just SMP systems, having 2 (or more) single core cpu's on one board working together.

In January 2006, Intel released their Core Duo dual core cpu. (which is also when Apple switched from PowerPC to Intel cpu's)


I got a 360 in December  2nd 2005. US got theirs November 21st.

Like I said only 1 or 2. Apple dont count due to them charging through the roof for hardware.

When 360 released, dual core CPUs for PCs were rediculous prices.

360 launched in Novemeber 2005 US. In US August 2005 Athlon dual core was roughly $400. The 360 released at $479.

Like I said. 360 having 16 core CPU in 18 months time is actually 80% likely and the Durango will likely cost $450 - $500 with a very noce 16 core CPU setup.

It could happen, there's not much room to go up clockspeed wise so the increase of performance needs to come from more cores. From 3x3.2 Ghz cores to 16x4.0 Ghz cores is still only half as big a jump as XBox to Xbox 360 in pure available clockspeed.

And you're right that multi cores weren't as popular yet amongst pc's. But the Xenon is also not the same as a full general purpose x86 cpu. There's no reason this new 16 core cpu could be a specialized cheaper version again.

I do find it hard to believe that Kinect 2.0 will need 50% more processing power then the entire xbox 360. It could need priority on 4 cores to get things done quickly in parallel but I don't think it will need 100% of 4 cores. Unless it's going to poll the device at 240fps.

When ps3 and 360 go to 16 cores it will be a while though until developers can max out the hardware. Making efficient use of 16 cores isn't going to be easy. We could have a situation that early games even perform slightly worse as the engines are optimized to use 2 or 3 cores and suddenly have to manipulate 8x the memory. (Please let 4gb be true!)