Oh admit it! Just like myself, you too must be wondering how the new Xbox CPU stands up to the famed Sony Cell processor. Well as you can see below, the details are begging to spill forth.

IBM has been posting papers from the recent Fall Processor Forum 2005, and the papers include plenty of info on the hardware inside of two of the three next-gen consoles: the Xbox 360’s Xenon CPU and the Playstation 3’s Cell. The paper on Xenon by Jeffery Brown, “Application-customized CPU design: The Microsoft Xbox 360 CPU story,” was the one that I was most interested in. There was a lot of speculation on the nature of the processor core design that IBM used in the Xenon—was it from the POWER4/970 lineage, or was it a tweaked version of the Cell’s PowerPC Processing Element (PPE)? [Read the rest]