Microsoft officially announced the Xbox One in May, with a single chip hardware solution that was co-designed by AMD. Today, Microsoft offered some more details on the chip design as part of a presentation at a technology conference, including the fact that the chip contains 5 billion transistors.
According to VentureBeat, Microsoft"s head chip architect John Sell said that the Xbox One processor is 363 square millimeters in size. That may sound small but in fact the dimensions make the processor quite large compared with others. As we have reported before, the chip, which has eight 64-bit cores, combines the CPU and GPU in one system. It also has 47 MB of storage and is made by a 28 nm manufacturing process via Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.
Because it is such a large physical chip. there is a risk that flaws could occur in the manufacturing stage. Sell told the audience today that the Xbox One chip has been designed so that if one section goes down, it won"t shut down the entire chip. Also, the processor has power islands and clock gating that helps with energy conservation.
The Xbox One"s chip has 15 special processors inside for graphical and game physics features, according to Sell; the chip can transfer data bits at a rate of 200 GBs per second.
Source: VentureBeat | Image via VentureBeat