What is a XBOX 360?

Created to be the successor to the quite popular Xbox, Microsoft released in 2005 the Xbox 360. Microsoft developed the new game console through the cooperation of IBM, ATI, Samsung and SiS. The launching of the new game console was a great success, with sales numbering to more than 10.4 million worldwide before the end of 2006. The Xbox 360 is the seventh generation of game consoles from Microsoft and is a direct competitor of Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Wii.

The new game console first developed and named as Xenon, then Xbox 2, then Xbox Next or NextBox until it was aptly launched as the Xbox 360. Microsoft experimented with a lot of hardware manufacturers and systems before settling with Xenon-CPU (also known as "Waternoose" at IBM) which is a custom triple-core PowerPC-based design by IBM. The CPU highlights high floating point performance via multiple FPU and SIMD vector processing units present in each core. Theoretically, the CPU's performance can peak up to 115.2 gigaflops and is capable of 9.6 billion dot products per second. Each core also has simultaneous multithreading capability which was reportedly clocked at 3.2 gigahertz. However, in order to CPU die size, complexity, cost, and power demands, the processor uses in-order execution. This was a big contrast to the Intel Coppermine128-based Mobile Celeron previously installed in the older Xbox series which integrates more advanced out-of-order execution.

The new console also sports a 512 MB of 700 megahertz GDDR3 RAM on a 128-bit bus. The CPU and the GPU share the memory via the unified memory architecture. The 360 also has bigger bandwidth than any of its competitor. But, the number includes the eDram logic to memory bandwidth, and not internal CPU bandwidths.

When it comes to audio, all games for Xbox 360 are required to support at least 5.1-channel Dolby Digital surround sound. The game console is able to work with over 256 audio channels and 320 independent decompression channels. It uses 32-bit processing for audio and supports 48 kHz 16-bit sound. Microsoft's XMA audio format is used to encode sound files. Meanwhile, an MPEG-2 decoder is used for DVD video playback. And this time around, voice communication is managed by the game console unlike in the older Xbox where voice communication is handles by the game code. No digital video outputs are present but the Xbox 360 uses the HD-quality output which can be sent over component video. Also available is a wide array of SDTV and HDTV resolutions.

The Xbox 360 is now outfitted with 12x DVD drive making it capable of reading a maximum rate of 15.9 MB/s. It is reported that the Playstation 3 has only 8.6 MB/s maximum read rate. Storage is on a standard dual-layered-DVD-ROM which is made up of 7 GB of usable space. The Xbox 360's drive can read both DVD±R and DVD±RW. It could also play DVD-Video, a new innovation from the old Xbox. The system also plays CD-R/RW, CD-DA, CD-ROM XA, CD-Extra, WMA-CD, MP3-CD, and JPEG Photo CD.

When the new Xbox was first released in the United States and Canada in November 2005, it was wholly embraced by the consumers. A month later the unit was officially released in Europe and Japan. Later on the game console was introduced in the countries of Mexico, Colombia, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Chile, India, Brazil, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Philippines and Slovakia. All in all, during the first year of its introduction into the market, the Xbox 360 was launched in 36 countries.