Leaked Xenon spec looks genuine, say experts

By Games Industry.biz Published 23 June, 2004

Latest leak from Microsoft's ATG looks like the real deal, according to developers.

A document purporting to be the currently planned specification for Microsoft's next-generation console has been leaked onto the Internet, and information in it tallies with what the company has told development partners, gi.biz has learned.

Although the document, which claims to have been authored by Pete Isensee at the Xbox Advanced Technology Group, admits that many of its figures are subject to change, developers working on Xenon technology have confirmed to us today that the details it contains are genuine.

The hardware overview outlines a system with three 3.5Ghz PowerPC G5 CPU cores, built onto one silicon die, a 500Mhz ATI graphics unit with a 10Mb on-board framebuffer and 256Mb of main RAM shared between the graphics unit and CPU system.

The document notes that the speed of the CPU cores, the graphics core and the amount of RAM are subject to change in the final specification for the system - so aside from being unsurprising in themselves, they are only an indication of Microsoft's current thinking on the console, rather than a set in stone specification.

However, a number of interesting additional features are revealed for the first time in the document - and it is these which our development sources have fingered as confirming the veracity of the leak.

The ATI graphics unit will have the ability to read directly from the Level 2 cache on the CPU cores - effectively providing a 1Mb shared "scratch pad" which can be accessed from all three CPU cores and the GPU, a unique feature of the system which has not been widely known outside the development community until now.

The document also reveals that the GPU will implement a number of unique and powerful extensions to the pixel and vertex shader systems in DirectX 9.0 - including the ability for shaders to fetch directly from the console's main memory, which should open up the possibility of implementing many previously impossible features in shader code.

Xenon is set to ship with a 100mb network socket (compared with a 10mb socket in the Xbox) and USB2 sockets for connecting storage devices, cameras, microphones and other such devices, according to the outline, and will once again support four controllers.

The document does not answer the questions being posed about the inclusion of a hard-drive in the system - stating only that no decision has yet been taken, but that if one does not ship as standard, it will certainly be available as an integrated extra. This certainly seems to imply that the decision is being made on a cost basis - with the hard drive being a non-essential component that could potentially drive the manufacture cost of the console up drastically.

Interestingly, the outline acknowledges that developing games which take advantage of the system will be "a daunting task," going on to explain that "writing multithreaded games is not trivial." A number of elements of the Xenon system software (a Windows NT based operating system) will be designed to take advantage of the multiprocessor nature of the system, it claims, while the Xbox ATG is working on ways of offloading graphics work to the CPUs of the machine.

Developers working on Xenon technology to whom we showed the document today confirmed that it tallies with what they have been told by Microsoft about the specification of the new console - even down to the continuing procrastination over making a decision on RAM size and the inclusion of a hard drive, both issues which have not been solved as yet.

"I've not actually seen this specific document coming from Microsoft," one developer told us this afternoon, "but there's certainly nothing in there which doesn't fit with what they've been telling us. If this is a hoax, which I doubt, it's a hoax so close to the truth that it hardly makes any odds."

The document itself goes into far more detail about the processing, graphics and audio systems on the Xenon console. It can be found in its entirety on the Xbox-Scene forum, where we believe it originated.

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Comments (30) Latest comment 8 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • Royal Fool #1 8 years ago

    One thing I've been wondering about regarding backwards compatability, is that Microsoft could do something really smart: Release an emulator disc.

    See, this document states that even if the hard-drive is not included in the retail box, you can definitely buy one as an add-on component. Going by that, Microsoft could develop an emulator that you buy (For a modest fee) and then install onto the hard-drive, effectively allowing you to run Xbox games. After all, backwards compatability would require a working hard-drive, and then you could just copy over your save games with a memory card.

    That's the solution I suggest, anyway.
    Edited by 1 at 23/06/04 @ 18:46

  • Nemesis #2 8 years ago

    Christ, I'd love to see the cooling on this thing.

    Whilst the 3.5ghz are on a single die, that things going to put out some serious heat. The current dual 2.5s in the Power Macs are liquid-cooled just to keep the temperature down. Add a nice fast video card to be cooled, plus PSU, plus the main board....

    Small footprint on this one ? I get the feeling....no.

  • Lutz #3 8 years ago

    That's... that's friggin powerful!

    Aye, and like Nem I'd like to see the cooling on that thing!

  • tiddles #4 8 years ago

    I prophesy they'll try and make it look like a posh DVD player - large, flat, silver, sparkly lights...

    No, that's a UFO, isn't it.

  • st3ph3n #5 8 years ago

    I thought he PS2 netwok card was 100mbit already. Mine seems to transfer at 100mbit from Xbox to PC, and about half that the other way.

  • st3ph3n #6 8 years ago

    Was just thinking. I imagine some sort of entire case is a heatsink situation.

    Nem is right, those 3 cores are going to really pump out the Watts.

  • penhalion #7 8 years ago

    Yea...hmmm...sounds great.....But seriously Ram will be the major issue here. The processor and graphics will be next to useless with only 256Mb of ram and what is the point of a cpu with 3 g5 cores? Especially if they are all sharing a 1mb on board cache. To manage that they would have to be synchronised via a memory bus and that makes having 3 cores a bit stupid as they will still access the cache in serial to avoid problems with instruction fetching and don't get me started on just how the hell a game will synchronise what runs on which core!

    Let me spell it out to any non programmers. Currently games run as a loop. This loop does more or less the following things one after the other:-

    1. get user input
    2. process user input
    3. update enemy AI based on 2. or preset routines (patrol routes etc)
    4. sound processing
    5. graphical tasks such as deciding visibility sets, scene graph stuff etc, again based on player position, sso based on results of 2.
    6. rendering scene

    and then loop and repeat the process again. In a multithreaded (three cores no less!) environment, the loop could be.

    1. get user input
    2. process user input
    3. spawn a thread to do this after 2 completes -> update enemy AI based on 2. or preset routines (patrol routes etc)
    4. spawn a thread to do this after 2 completes-> sound processing
    5. spawn a thread to do this after 2 + 3 complete -> graphical tasks such as deciding visibility sets, scene graph stuff etc, again based on player position, but also on AI results for enemy movement.
    6. rendering scene can be done while sound processes but that's what sound chips do currently anyway!

    Are Microsoft a bunch of bloody morons or what!

  • Khab #8 8 years ago

    That there's a whole lotta computing power... but I must add to the critics - the G5 isn't terribly geared towards graphics, now is it? Wouldn't it make more sense to just have two or three GPUs instead of three CPUs and do like that Alienware thing and render one half of the screen each?

    Or maybe MS is just doing it like this to make ABSOLUTELY sure that their console will be the "most powerful" again. :)

    It'll make for a console with one hell of a longevity, too. Maybe five years after release there'll actually be a game that'll push it.

  • mcmonkeyplc #9 8 years ago

    Is it really going to be called the Xenon?

    /does not understand technobable

  • BLACKSHEEP #10 8 years ago

    Ok SCEI, beat that! :D

  • Shinji #11 8 years ago

    I don't think that MS will suffer worse than Sony because of this parallelism, especially taking into account that they have a lot more experience with software development.

    Yeah, I don't think anyone is arguing that PS3 (or N5 for that matter) is going to be easier to develop for than Xbox 2. Although, I think it's fair to say that all three systems are going to be characterised by extremely well-implemented libraries and heavy use of middleware style tools. Sony is already migrating that way with PSP, Microsoft is pushing its development platform in that direction under the XNA banner, and Nintendo has always vaguely followed that model anyway.

    Problem is, Microsoft are going to be asking people to solve these technical problems - and more important, to start creating assets for next-gen - well over a year before they'd have to start thinking about doing so for PS3. There's the crux really. It's not a question of how hard development will be - at the end of the day, if there's money to be made on a platform, people will develop on it - it's a question of when it's going to be worth investing those resources.... Economics, not technology.

  • silentbob #12 8 years ago

    Erm, my XBox is 100mb - Full Duplex as well I believe.

    Can whoever said "Why don't they include Gigabit?" explain why on earth you'd need such speed outside of a heavy loaded server?

  • Bill Gates is Evil #13 8 years ago

    Ahab is my favorite Eurogamer of all time.

  • Nause #14 8 years ago

    um to all you doubters about the ram, as you should know by now, it's likely to be of the highest quality having 256 ram Pc 3200 will still be miles faster than 1gb of pc 133. And a console doesn't need a huge amount of ram because it is just running the game and not an operating system behind it allow it to work in a way in which it uses all of it's ram on the game which I assure you doesn't ever happen on a PC. An example I can give you is try playing Halo at the level of quality on the pc with the same specs as the xbox or a game similar in level to riddick. Basically you can't.

  • jumpdeveraux #15 8 years ago

    I think Mr Sony is right to wait MS out, let Xenon be first off the starting line...

    Wait 12 months then launch PS3, mass market will have the common misconception that PS3 will naturally be more advanced as it launched later...

    Having both an Xbox and PS2 and being an early adopter I thought I would be more excited thinking of getting my hands on a Xenon and PS3...

    However horsepower even today does not a good game make, given the franchise milking and swathe of low quality titles out there now for the current platforms I hold little hope that these new boxes will bring with them a utopia of quality software titles that are not rushed out to make the accountants happy... *cough*Driv3r*cough*

  • aabyssx #16 8 years ago

    Theese specs point to a very similar architecture to the PS2. Looks like M$ is learning. ;)

    edit: I am an anti-M$ fan, but this looks very good!
    Edited by 1 at 24/06/04 @ 09:30

  • Razz #17 8 years ago

    Smells like hype to me...


    #D-D-Don't believe the hype!

  • Tiger_Walts #18 8 years ago

    No, that's a UFO, isn't it.

    8U7 C@N 17 FLY @ 5PAC35H1P???????

  • UncleLou #19 8 years ago

    So what is all the CPU power for? After all, the Xbox delivers pretty convincing results with a rather humble processor.

    I thought the GPU was much more important. And doesn't a 500Mhz GPU seem underpowered compared to the CPU power? To a non-techhead like me it seems like they will increase the CPU tenfold, while the specs of the GPU will just be doubled.

  • Tiger_Walts #20 8 years ago

    From an artistic point of view, GPU technology is reaching a plateau, all that's left is to squeeze a few thousand more polys and add some handy shaders. What developers really want at the moment is more processing power to run AI and physics. They also want the extra memory to hold the data for numerous NPCs and the giant environments to house them.

  • UncleLou #21 8 years ago

    Well, it'd be extremely nice if developers finally started to catch up in terms of AI, but that's a pretty optimistic view, no?

    Besides, I can't quite see the "plateau". Just look at the shots of the new Unreal engine, for instance (edit: alright, you wrote artistic plateau). I can't imagine Microsoft "sacrificing" further advancement in graphics, if only technically, for AI/physics etc. though.

    And I remember the specs of the Xbox GPU were quite impressive (compared to PC cards) when it was launched, while a 500 MHz GPU looks, to an amateur like me, not really impressive compared to the new generation of GPUs for PCs now, let alone when the Xbox 2 will be launched.
    Edited by 2 at 24/06/04 @ 10:26

  • aabyssx #22 8 years ago

    BTW Nintendo is somwhere right quiting the HW performance race. Because where will this lead to? For an example: Kojima said that almost nothing will change. A big macho like guy still blows up everything until he's life gauge reaches zero. ;)
    $ony and M$ is investing tons of money into a new high tech console, but will games change, too?
    I mean a little more realistic and smooth shadow effect isn't worth all this investment, is it?
    Edited by 1 at 24/06/04 @ 14:46

  • Tweakmonkey #23 8 years ago

    How much will this cost? I'm sure those 3 GPUs won't be cheap. Anyway, specs are not very useful for comparison because each console uses a different architecture. Xbox and Xbox2 can't even be compared easily.

  • Philip Gumm #24 8 years ago

    I think Nintendo's philosphy isnt launch as early as possible its launch as near to PS3 and whipped up with all the hype. If MS launch this beast too early I think punters will be left cold and await Nintendos and Sony's doings, after all the next gen battle doenst offically start until Sony enters from a publics point of view.

  • bluebird #25 8 years ago

    Ahab, MS is not the only one making nice software tools though, since Sony and IBM are a powerful combination and IBM has a lot of experience in making software development tools for high-end systems.

    For example they seem to be making content creation tools for Cell:

    Sony and IBM take on digital content creation with Cell workstation

    Edit: link clickable :-)
    Edited by 1 at 24/06/04 @ 18:07

  • MikeD #26 8 years ago

    That's a great article :-)

  • aabyssx #27 8 years ago

    Ahab:

    > and refined in a highly competitive environment

    Wrong! This environment is not competitive.

    Intel rules the personal computer sector and IBM rules the mainframe sector. Both of them are just making money without developing in new directions (making a little faster clones of x86 based and rs6000 based architectures) . Even Mac and Sun has a so small install base compared to their's.
    Theese days backward compatibility (caused by software) and "why risking, when you can make money with little development to" approach holds back HW evolution.
    A new x86 with 200 MHz more is no evolution at all. ;)

    So I hope Cell will change things.

    edit:
    Well, this is interesting, but when looking at games (and gameplay)...
    ...I don't care about HW. ;)
    Edited by 1 at 25/06/04 @ 08:45

  • ssuellid #28 8 years ago

    aabyssx, RE competitive - I think Ahab was refering to the high performance CPU not the desktop CPU

    And the Cell being a massive leap forward in performance? Not a chance.

  • Blerk #29 8 years ago

    Sounds cool. Although I dread to think how big it'll be and/or how much it's going to cost at launch.

    Nice to see 'em addressing other areas of the system that lack compared to current PC technology rather than just focussing on the graphics - that's a bastard lot of processing power under the hood. Should make for some tasty improvements in AI, etc.

  • aabyssx #30 8 years ago

    ssuellid: Rumors talk about terraflops in case of Cell. If only the half (fourth) of it is true...

    Well, already a rumor, so let it grow a little: ;)
    Don't forget that IBM is going to use Cell in servers, too. And $ony and IBM (and Toshiba) is an unusual ~alliance~. Something must be behind...