Ars Technica has a fascinating, in-depth look (Part 1, Part 2) at the core architecture of the Xbox 360’s Xenon processor and the system’s use of “procedural synthesis.” If you’ve been poking around the geekosphere recently, you’ve probably heard this term. The article explains the technology and what it means to next-gen computing. Here’s an interesting quote from the piece. I wonder how this will differ from the Cell processor?:
Xenon will be a streaming media monster, but the parts of the game engine that have to do with making the game fun to play (and not just pretty to look at) are probably going to suffer. Even if the PPE’s branch prediction is significantly better than I think it is, the relatively meager 1MB L2 cache that the game control, AI, and physics code will have to share with procedural synthesis and other graphics code will ensure that programmers have a hard time getting good performance out of non-graphics parts of the game.
[Via Evil Avatar]