So, what OS actually does power the Xbox? Is it something that has been created by Microsoft? You will have to read on to find out…

When the Xbox 360 was launched two weeks ago amid much brouhaha over its custom-designed IBM PowerPC-based CPU with 3 symmetrical cores running at 3.2GHz each, WindowsForDevices.com wondered aloud, “What OS runs inside the Xbox 360?”

We offered a few alternatives and called on our readers for their ideas on the subject. Now, we think we have the answer to our question.

But first, a bit of background.

As we stated in our previous story on this topic, the earlier Xbox (shown at right) was based on a Pentium-family processor and was said to run a variant of Windows 2000. But the new Xbox 360 has a completely different architecture, based on a custom triple-core IBM PowerPC processor along with other specialty silicon including a custom graphics processor made by ATI, plus 512MB of system DRAM (see table of specs at the bottom of this article). [Read the rest]