Xbox One processor power gated down to 2.5%

Microsoft has recently been talking up the insides of the Xbox One at the Hot Chips conference at Stamford University.

Executives from the tech giant went through the “speeds and feeds” of the main XB1 processor in detail according to reports from PC World.

Basically, the system-on-a-chip at the heart of the next-gen console is 363 square mm with the main bonus the amount of integrated logic built in: 5 Billion transistors.

The XB1 processor is most likely the largest chip ever manufactured, easily beating Intel’s 8-core “Poulsen” Itanium from 2012.

Apparently Microsoft wouldn’t disclose how much power the chip will consume, but Hardware Architect John Sell confirmed the chip will be power gated down to 2.5%. He said the processor will be manufactured in 28-nm process technology by TSMC, who are Microsoft’s foundry partner.

Microsoft failed to reveal how fast the XB1 chip will run however. The system contains 500GB of storage, 8GB DDR3 memory and 47MB of on-die storage that will be used as cache memory.

AMD Jaguar architecture is used for the system CPU and it uses 8 cores, with 32KB of data and instruction cache. Four of the cores will be connected to shared 2MB level-2 cache.

During the Hot Chips presentation Sell went on to say that “the Xbox One chips are highly customised. One significant change from the previous-generation Xbox 360 is that the graphics core is integrated with the CPU, as are most of today’s PC chips”.

According to reports Sell referred to the GPU chip as a “Direct 11.1+ chip”, as it has optimised graphics unique to the Xbox One, with Sell stating “There’s moe than a CPU’s worth of Processing in there”.

Are you excited by the specs released by Microsoft? Or is this another marketing ploy to repair their damaged image? Tell us your thoughts below