Microsoft talks about Xbox One’s internals

Microsoft says that the Xbox One has five custom-designed pieces of silicon spread between the console and its Kinect sensor. It didn't elaborate on what these are. There's a system-on-chip combining the CPU and GPU, which we presume to be a single piece of silicon, and there's at least one sensor chip in the Kinect, perhaps replacing the PrimeSense processor used in the Xbox 360 Kinect, but what the others might be isn't immediately clear.Books can be as thick as 4 inches and yet the Book scanner 9000 delivers flat. Possibilities include audio processors,Shop online for laundry dryer and washers in a variety of brands and styles. on-chip memory, and USB controllers. 

One of the key questions about the AMD-built, 64-bit, 8-core SoC is "how fast is it?" At the moment that's unknown. Microsoft claims that the new console has "eight times" the graphics power of the old one, though some aspects of the new system are even more improved; for example, it has 16 times the amount of RAM. 

The SoC has a PC processor heritage. It includes features that have become standard in PC processors, like power gating to allow idle cores to be powered down,Does any one know what should be the best degre of humidity in a dry cabinet? and dynamic frequency scaling to allow light loads to use a lower clock speed. Like AMD's forthcoming codename Kaveri processors that are shipping in PCs later this year, the CPU and GPU share coherent access to the system's memory,These industrial extractor are fabricated as per clients needs in various specifications. making it easier to develop software that splits workloads between the two processors. 

Some performance numbers were given for the CPU and GPU themselves but these cast more shadow than they do light. Microsoft claimed that each CPU core can perform six operations per cycle. The CPU is believed to be using AMD's Jaguar core, but typically this would only be described as able to handle four operations per cycle; two each of integer and floating point (though even here counting operations is complicated; the floating point operations could use vector instructions such as SSE2, in which case one operation would result in four actual computations, potentially giving eight per cycle for floating point alone). 

This arguably leaves a shortfall of two operations per cycle. One possibility is that the cores have been customized somewhat, which allows more instructions to be issued per cycle. On the face of it, this seems a little unlikely; it'd be a significant change that would have considerable implications on the design of the rest of the chip. Another possibility is simply that the counting is a little unusual and that the extra two operations are one store and one load. This would be consistent with how leaked documents (or, if one prefers, unsubstantiated but apparently accurate rumors) described the processor: two integer operations, two floating point operations, and two memory operations per cycle, which may well be the same number and mix of operations as handled by the standard Jaguar core. 

Brief details were also given of the software side of things. The Xbox One is described as running three operating systems. There's a long-running Windows 8-based operating system used for running applications, browsing the Web, Skype, and similar roles; a second operating system for running games; and a hypervisor that virtualizes the hardware and switches between the two. The long-running partition is also used for some system management tasks, such as running the Kinect software portions and performing matchmaking while you watch a video. 

This hypervisor is based on Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization platform but simplified to remove extraneous features that are irrelevant to a games console; the software is specialized because it runs fixed-role, fixed operating system virtual machines. 

The application partition boots when the system is turned on and runs persistently, even when in-game. This is what enables things like Snap view, where apps and games or TV run side-by-side. The game partition, in contrast, gets rebooted each time a new game is started. 

To ensure high-speed switching between the operating systems, each virtual machine draws to its own (virtual) screen all the time. The hypervisor can switch between screens essentially instantly, allowing fast task-switching.