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Apple Hardware

Bill Gates must hate Xbox right now

Reading this article made me really chuckle. Just so happens, the Xbox is really a sister of the Mac Mini. We knew that for some time when they announced IBM was developing the processor for the new system, but it’s much more enjoyable seeing them use G5’s with OS X to emulate their new product. At least for the time they don’t have to worry about a Blue Screen of Death.

Btw: Playstation III will feature a PowerPC sister as well. Nintendo’s Game Cube has been for some time.

Yet some still say Mac hardware isn’t powerful enough for even the most basic games. All 3 gaming systems are moving towards the PowerPC chip.

6 replies on “Bill Gates must hate Xbox right now”

I don’t think Gates cares whether M$ products run on PPC, Pentium or AMD cpu’s. Further to that misconception, the PowerPC is not Mac hardware; it is IBM and Motorola hardware. Mac gaming is not limited by the hardware Apple uses in it’s machines (that hardware is often top end); Mac gaming is limited by the MacOS.

Actually, the PowerPC is created by the AIM alliance. Apple is a core part of that. They don’t manufacture the chips at this time though.

The mac gaming limitations are by the vendors, not the MacOS. There’s nothing specific to Windows as a gaming platform. Things like the Unreal Engine do exist on other platforms (look at Americas Army for example).

The Xbox 360 is a nice machine no doubt with 512 MB of GDDR3 Main RAM @ 700 MHz However the PS3 with 256MB XDR Main RAM @3.2GHz moves graphing Data streams roughly over 2.28 times faster than the Xbox console would…. if we do the math for the Xbox on MB per Mhz rate we get 512MB/700MHz, and for the PS3 we get 256MB/3,200MHz (reminder 1 GHz equals 1000Mhz). Now we can compare rates, the PS3 Data stream is 256MB/3200MHz which is equivalent to 512MB/1,600MHz. So from comparing the data rate of the xbox of 512MB/700MHz to the PS3 data rate of 512MB/1600MHz it can be concluded that the playstation cell chip moves data at more than twice the rate that the Xbox chip would.

does anyone realize that the guts of the new consoles are intentionally crippling decnt AI? It has to do with the fact that both the XBox 360 and the PS3’s Cell CPU use “in-order” processing, which, to greatly simplify, means they’ve destroyed the ability to make clever A.I. and dynamic, unpredictable, wide-open games in favor of beautiful water reflections and explosion debris that flies through the air prettily.

That means the next generation of games will likely play just like this generation. Only shiny.

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