To read the marketing specs put out by MS you'd think the Xbox was a $300
supercomputer.
Mainly marketing BS.
On another note, how does MS calculate xfer rates to/from their memory? Is
the 128-bit wide memory bus actually running at 700Mhz (non-DDR)? I didn't
even know they HAD DDR memory that would run that fast?
Yup, it's GDDR3 memory, the same stuff you find on high-end video
cards. This is actually slightly slower than the 750MHz (1.5GT/s)
data rate of ATI's top-end Radeon X1800 XT video card.
I'd love to some SpecINT figures for the Xbox360.
They would probably be rather ho-hum to say the least. The main CPU
runs at 3.2GHz and has 3 cores, but they are rather simplistic cores
(more similar to the original Pentium than to most other current
chips). The performance per-core of each of those chips is likely to
be pretty weak, and that's all that SpecINT is going to show you.
SpecInt Rate might be a bit of a different story as there are 3 cores
and each core can execute two threads at once.
For certain tasks the chip might do rather well, but as a general CPU
it's nothing special. I think it will actually struggle quite a bit
as a gaming CPU for at least the first year while Microsoft's SDK
matures and game developers really adapt to the new paradigm of
multithreaded game programming (traditionally games have been
predominantly single-threaded).
