A distance of about two months after the debut of Xbox 360 Slim in the market. Microsoft has reveal the details of the new System-on-chip ( SoC ).
The new SoC is developed by Microsoft in collaboration with IBM to integrate its internal CPU, GPU, memory controller and 10MB memory EDRAM. For two companies this challenge was far from easy, as it was obviously necessary to implement a solution perfectly compatible with the same performance of the previous system.
The new SoC Xbox 360 Slim is in fact composed of 372 million transistor, that number seems quite small by today’s standards. As a yardstick just think that an old Intel Pentium D 900 to 65 nanometers in 2006 has about 376 million transistors, while an Intel i5 -760 core has almost twice as much, or 774 million.
The new SoC has an area of less than 50% and reduces energy consumption by 60% in the console as compare to the Xbox 360 released in 2005. This reduction in consumption has also enabled Microsoft to use only one fan heat sink.
The use of this new SoC should also have eliminated Red Ring of Death the worst nightmare of Xbox 360 holders. In the past the overheating of some hardware had in fact caused the rupture of many console and estimate that Microsoft has faced a charge of about 1.05 to 1.15 billion dollars to replace the damaged console.
