The company’s engineers created a chip that combined the machine’s microprocessor and its graphics chip on a single piece of silicon. In the past, different versions of the console have all used two separate chips for those tasks. The code name for the project was Vejle, named after a city in Denmark (It’s not Valhalla, as we all thought?).
The new 3.2-gigahertz, three-core microprocessor, and 500-megahertz graphics chip design is on one chip. In order to create this, Microsoft and IBM engineers had to work together to build the necessary connectivity within the chip to route electrical signals in and out of the chip. IBM had to get rid of its main communications channel between the chips, (FSB), and build a substitute for it.
The GPU side is packaged with a separate 10-megabyte embedded memory chip. So the two chips are packaged in a single module. The combined chip uses 60 percent less power than the original 2005 pair of chips, and it uses 50 percent less space. Robert Drehmel, senior technical engineer at IBM, said that one of the big challenges was to marry two chips that were built by different companies, designed by different engineering teams, and created with different chip design tools. IBM had to learn more about the unfamiliar ATI design, design specific tools to adapt it, and then recreate an overall design that did the same thin.
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