Next gen XBox chip gets a name and date
No, not XBox 361, just the SoC
Aug 15, 2011 in Chips, Consoles, Finance, Gaming, Microprocessors, Rumors
It is mating season for the singing moles of Redmond, fresh off their migration back from Mountain View, and they are singing about the XBox Next chip. What’s more, they have a name and a date.
The moles are cooing the name softly while they think up new ways to transition Microsoft’s business model from monopoly abuse to patent trolling. The name they are singing in their tunnels sounds like “Obed”, but the spelling might be a bit off due to echoing in the tunnels.
Obed it seems is SoC, CPU + GPU, and of course eDRAM, it sounds an awful lot like an evolutionary version of the current XBox 360 chip. Some say it is an x86/Bulldozer part, but everything we have been hearing for a long time says that the chip is going to be a PPC variant. In any case, the GPU is definitely made by AMD/ATI, and IBM has a big hand in the SoC design.
The moles all say that production is set for late 2012, possibly the early days of 2013. basically once the moles get settled in to Mountain View for the winter. They will give the thumps up or down on silicon based on parts they get back in Q1 of 2012. If all goes well that is. That puts production of the XBox Next in the late spring or early summer of 2013, just in time for singing mole mating season. Nothing gets a sow’s attention like a new SoC.S|A
Note: Doesn’t this make a lot more sense now?
57 Responses to “Next gen XBox chip gets a name and date”
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Nov 1, 2011
[...] Semi Accurate believes the new chip will actually be called Obed and incorporate elements of IBM design – however it seems AMD is nailed on as the manufacturer. [...]
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Sep 5, 2011
[...] semiaccurate.com Tweet [...]
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Aug 28, 2011
[...] Semi Accurate believes the new chip will actually be called Obed and incorporate elements of IBM design – however it seems AMD is nailed on as the manufacturer. [...]
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Aug 27, 2011
[...] betting on the DX11-capable Krishna APU (Accelerated Processing Unit), due for release late 2012.Semi Accurate believes the new chip will actually be called Obed and incorporate elements of IBM design – [...]
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Aug 24, 2011
[...] Angaben zufolge wird im Xbox 360-Nachfolger, der gern als Xbox 720 bezeichnet wird, ein Chip namens Obed die [...]
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Aug 22, 2011
[...] Obed. That’s what Microsoft is allegedly calling the next Xbox chip. Rumors are swirling outside of Redmond that they’ve finalized a design of the next Xbox 360 [...]
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Aug 21, 2011
[...] quanto riferito dal sito SemiAccurate.com (il nome non depone certo bene) il chip della console che sostituirà l’XBOX360 ha già un [...]
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Aug 20, 2011
[...] new chip is allegedly called “Obed”, and according to rumor site Semi Accurate: “Obed it seems is SoC, CPU + GPU, and of course eDRAM, it sounds [...]
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Aug 20, 2011
[...] bitching for new consoles. 2013 is the latest I want to wait for the next Xbox and from the recent Semiaccurate mole, it looks like that's how long I'll have to wait. Reply With Quote [...]
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Aug 20, 2011
[...] [...]
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Aug 19, 2011
[...] [...]
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Aug 19, 2011
[...] to a report on SemiAccurate, the chip for the Xbox 360′s successor already has a name and tentative production date, [...]
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Aug 15, 2011
[...] here: Next gen XBox chip gets a name аnԁ date | SemiAccurate (function(){var [...]
I.don’t get the part where you call Ms patent trolls. A patent troll has no product. Ms has licensed patents yes but they use said patents in actual products. They have every right to license tech they invented. Its those BS patent mills with no products that are trolls
Next Xbox will have x86 and Kepler with fill 3Dvision support. Mark my words.
No rest for the wicked? “0bed” HaHa
Drashek.newLSI.CEO
http://translate.google.com/
Rus –> Eng
обед
Read phonetically
Lunch?
console is really boring, not popular in China and focused for children, really console sale are much smaller than sale of portable device…AMD graphics division with post more revenue loss, AMD really needs to get priority straight
….Nvidia make right choice with Tegra focusing on portable SoC, something everybody wants, more profit for Nvidia
The only reason nVidia is still in business is because they cornered the discreet graphics market in a few shady ways over the past decade.
Now that many OEMs are pissed at NV, they are finding themselves with fewer friends out there. After being kicked to the bucked by many PC manufacturers, and now being kicked out of the consoles for good, what makes you think they wont screw things up in their mobile department? They even pissed on their own board makers in the last couple years, ending up with XFX (and others?) making Radeons now.
The mobile sector is much more fierce with competition than the GPU market NV has been used to, AND they’re showing up late to the game. Kudos to NV for trying to find an out, but it aint gonna work with the likes of Qualcomm, Samsung, Apple, etc, all producing their own ARM flavor.
Who knows how soon its going to happen, but NV will fall the wayside just like their 3dfx acquisition. The real question is who will drag away the corpse to be looted. Intel, Apple, or Google?
You can bet Intel is watching and waiting for Nvidia… Just look what ATI did for AMD! They are AMD’s lifeline, they’re the ones making the AMD CPUs sell. Intel knows graphics will take them far, and you can bet they’ll eat up Nvidia if the company starts tanking.
Microsoft has final say on who can acquire nV
http://www.informationweek.com/news/windows/microsoft_news/229900137
Kudos to the previous post!
It may be the CREDITORS that end up with the corpse of nV if Tegra2, Kal-El, etc. are found to be wanting, in any substantial way.
I am not a nV-hater. Competition is good for consumers. Shipping known-to-be faulty chips to unaware consumers is just wrong on so many levels.
They have “sown the wind”, now they are reaping the whirlwind. Here’s hoping Tegra works out.
Don’t burst his bubble, poor little chap
For the first time in laptops(AMD side, up to now only 45w max), AMD will provide a 60w Trinity chip (intel has them now), so that means Trinity will also gun at the high end mobile market.
For Q2 2012 they can use an improved Trinity design @28nm, either more frequency on the cpu, more shaders on the gpu or both.
Trinity is expected to have 560-800SP (Llano 400SP).
Xbox Orbit? Is Obed a way to catch out other sites that copy the article using Obed without giving their source as SA?
julips, theres new imbedded ssd internationale’ standard, out few days ago. seems up till noe imbeded forgot to drop part of controler that controls sata plug in. now thats’ gone. ppc or xyz, faster by 20R% is rumor mill. X box, something very pci-e3.0. something fast & docsys 3 be nice readiness, so more than 100 Mb/s as Topper Lan. FAST DDR3. ssd imbeded, maybe fanless, usb3, no spreadsheet, maybe blu.
vondrashek X Champion….
It’d be interesting if it turned out to be some sort of high-end Trinity or something. I’d probably buy more console games if I could play Xbox games on my PC (I already have the controller…).
It would be great if they made it so you can play the games on your PC, or better yet make a consol that can give those kids a fighting chance against PC gamers.
Still remember when quake 3 came to the dreamcast, how easy they where to kill… and how fast cross platform died after.
yet to see a game that gives a consol player a fighting chance without dumbing down controlls, and throwing in heavy aim assist.
I own Quake 3 on the Dreamcast (along with Half Life and a couple other shooters) and it’s practically unplayable without two sticks. Hard to imagine that games have improved so much, but they definitely have. It’s kind of like going back and playing Tomb Raider (which I’ll occasionally play on my Saturn) and thinking “How the hell did I actually enjoy playing this game back in the day?”
I don’t see why MS didn’t do it already. Sure, a PPC based Xbox 720 would be the safe way to go, but some sort of high end x86 AMD APU would be perfect for a new console. The low prices and a low TDP of an APU are perfect for consoles. More importantly, microsoft can exploit both markets. Suddenly, the public can view Windows PCs as nice gaming machines instead of normal office machines, meaning more PC sales. The same games can run on either platform, giving Microsoft a gigantic new market for selling thier games. It just makes sense… I hope Microsoft isn’t blunt enough not to pursue the idea.
Yeah, only problem is then there’s not much reason left for developers to develop on PC, if they’re doing the game on 720 (or whatever) anyway.
It’s a lot easier to write one x86 game with two alternative control modes (mouse+keyboard and console controller) than write the same game on two totally different systems.
if they startproducing it in 2012 than it will probably have 7xxx grpahics
otherwise they will be 1 generation and major achitecture change behind before launch-. and than the pc has to wait again before graphics inprove
They are typically about a generation or so behind general PC technology, with the exception maybe of the Cell processor. Look at the “new” Wii. ATi 4000 series graphics? Simply cost effective, plus you can coax out better visuals with everyone running on the same hardware.
Except, that is the wii. Sadly (for gamers and developers) the PS3 was behind with the RSX, however, with a little hard work the cell can be leveraged to make up for the shortcomings of a mid-range second rate GPU (at launch).
However, that hasn’t been the MS way. The XBox was ahead of the PC generation, the XBox360 was ahead significantly too (the Xenon is pretty much a DX10 part). The question is, will the XNext be? Will MS change their business model and try to make money from hardware, as Nintendo do? The market has clearly shifted in the past few years.
I’m not so surprised that PPC is in the mix, nor that ATi is again there. NVidia burned MS on the original XBox and they won’t forget it.
The current generation consoles are in-order PPC designs, I suspect the next gen XBox will again be in-order with fat Altivec units and lots of cache. They’ll clock above 3Ghz and will probably be more cores than the six on the 360. I don’t know how easy it would be for AMD to roll an in-order chip optimized for that kind of purpose. The other advantage, is backward compatibility is much easier.
There again, with the 360, the ATi/IBM partnership nailed it (bar RROD problems) their tech is better than the competition, easier to develop for and much earlier to market. Why change what worked so well?
Xbox 360′s CPU has 3 cores, not 6.
He probably meant threads. 3 cores handling 2 threads each.
Yeah I supposed I did overlook the unified shaders in the 360 and the fast RAM for anti-aliasing.
I also wonder if MS will attempt to make some money off their hardware. It seems that the cost of games has to be near a tipping point where you can’t just increase the cost of games to make up the difference. You either use cheaper hardware or increase the number of required games sold to break even.
You don’t even know what you’re talking about. Xenon is the CPU. Xenos is the GPU. Also, Xenos is DX9 class GPU and not a DX10. You’re summation of the RSX is also incorrect, but your message is a train wreck and I’ll leave it at that.
Xenon, Xenos…. whatever! It still does have most DX10 features, including tessellation, the unified shader architecture and such that never made it to DX10. No geometry shader as such, however, it’s pretty easy to do similar techniques by writing for CPU cache to GPU input on the 360. I stand by my summation that it’s ‘pretty much’ a DX10 class chip.
RSX is basically a stock 7600.
Note, I recall from back when I was a the cross platform graphics developer for an AAA XBox360/PS3/PC game. So I do, in-fact, know what I’m talking about.
I think that better graphics can be made as consoles don’t use a general API like DX10/DX11 etc. That’s why consoles don’t look much worse than their PC counterparts. Current PC’s are 10 times more powerful and yet, graphics don’t look 10 times better. Using their propietary API which is a Close To Metal API type, means that they can create much better graphics on the HD 4000 chip that it could ever be done using the DX10 API with the same chip. DX API has a huge overhead which has been reduced with DX10 and above.
SoC = less than cutting edge performance versus dedicated chip design. Limits of the process will limit the maximum performance of the console. Cost effective for sure, but it opens the door for a much more powerful rival using dedicated chips. Roll on 2013.
o/t – Your site Javascript has started throwing up enough red flags (Flash trying to access general storage? Pop-ups asking if I want to buy a license?) that I’ve blocked everything on your site. I like you guys and normally don’t mind seeing your ads, but stuff like this makes me put my browser into ultra-paraniod “block everything” mode.
Ten to one your machine has an infection.
If you’ve not noticed they’ve had copyright licenses offered when you try to scrape text and so you get an javascript license offer. So maybe you might want to pay them for their time instead of stealing. :D
Well, as it happens, I tend to select text when I read. Trust me, that copyright license is a real PITA. Like it’s gonna stop actual copiers…
Heh, never noticed that before. I just tried it here on the comments and got the popup. Are they claiming to own the copyright to the comments too?
I have absolutely no idea what you guys are talking about. Maybe you should stop running scripts from icopyright.net on your browser.
You can just click on “Quite asking me”.
this same stuff happens when selecting the chinese text here:
http://semiaccurate.com/2011/08/16/ultrabook-vendors-unhappy-with-intel%E2%80%99s-pricing/
Buy a license for what? so i can have text translated? WTF?
I also winder why based on PPC .
then what happened to win 8 can run console
games . hope they don’t go and use some emulation trick .
An Xbox 720 release prediction? This is going to get re-reported and copied all over the internet. Give your moles a cookie Charlie, they deserve it.
I was expecting something cost and power effective like an AMD fusion part. While PowerPC is the obvious choice, the rumors of future Windows support of Xbox games makes me wonder if Microsoft will start using X86 in consoles. They have the console gaming an desktop market: why not capitalize and bring them together?
Start using? You mean return to using. The original Xbox was x86.