Mike Ricciuti
IBM on Tuesday said it has begun production of a new microprocessor for Microsoft's Xbox 360 gaming console, due out in the UK on 2 December.The company said the custom-designed microprocessor is in production at the company's factory in East Fishkill, New York and at Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing in Singapore.
The specialised chip was designed and developed by IBM and Microsoft. The companies announced the initial agreement to build the new chip two years ago.
IBM said it is being delivered to Microsoft less than 24 months since the original contract signing, in the autumn of 2003 -- in time to meet Microsoft's worldwide product launch this Christmas.
IBM said the chip features a customised version of IBM's 64-bit PowerPC core. The chip includes three of these cores, each with two simultaneous threads and clock speeds greater than 3GHz.
The chip features 165 million transistors and is fabricated using IBM's 90-nanometre technology to reduce heat and improve performance. The chip's 21.6GB-per-second front side bus architecture was customised to meet the demanding throughput and latency requirements of the Xbox 360 gaming platform software, IBM said.
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