The Scoop on the Xbox 360's Embedded OS? 504
An anonymous reader writes "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?' Now, the website thinks it has found the answer to its question. No, it's not Linux or BSD, nor a derivative of Longhorn or Windows CE."
PowerPC vs Intel (Score:3, Interesting)
What OS? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:My question is. . . (Score:5, Interesting)
Mac! (Score:2, Interesting)
Could you imagine Microsoft getting in bed with Apple. ewww...
DevKits (Score:5, Interesting)
From a hackability POV, it's the BIOS that really matters. The original xbox had the BIOS hidden in the VGA chip (or was it the Southbridge? Can't remember) but once Bunnie Huang scoped the buses everything was lost. I think we can expect to see some fairly high grade encryption at work in both the POST and code signing arenas.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What a letdown! (Score:2, Interesting)
I *was* watching Citizen Kane...now, what's the point?
Win 2k Is already ppc ported (Score:3, Interesting)
Windows NT existed on a number of different architectures other than Intel x86, Including MIPS, Alpha, and PowerPC, in versions 3.5 3.51 and 4.0.
The final point to make is that when the work began on Windows 2000, the entire OS was done. The full NT5 beta available from the MSDN when it was released. Did indeed include a PowerPC version as well as the others. ( at least one beta did as far as i can confirm from my discourses with other "wisened veterans" (no mater what their age) of the MS oses. )
The effort involved in MS porting the NT 5 kernel and other systems to the Xbox 360 would have been totaly comparable to the effort needed to strip and optimise the nt 5 core for the Xbox. Which is in fact a very impressive degree of refinement over the original os when you examine the finer details.
( My other boxes are FreeBSD and Solaris so dont dare call me a MS fan, XP is for my games only case wine isnt good enough and i pray it catches up sooner. )
Re:My question is. . . (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, Microsoft probably didn't profit from the sale of that Xbox, and in fact renting the titles probably did contribute something to the vendors.
DUH. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:My question is. . . (Score:5, Interesting)
I guess my point is : if the dev kits are using G4's PowerPC, does it make the console easier to crack ?
Re:What OS? (Score:5, Interesting)
That's why, as long as they keep on reading your ATM card and spitting out money properly, most people don't care a whole lot which OS their ATM machine runs.
The only reason we really have "OS wars" today is because people have differing opinions on the way things should be presented on the screen to them as an interactive user of said OS. (And secondarily, technical debates on such things as security
Most of the time, when someone expresses a strong preference for Mac OS X, they're really expressing a fondness for the overall look and feel of the GUI.... Perhaps they favor the drap and drop nature of everything, with file management being done by symbolic folders that automatically open up when you hold the mouse button down while pointing at one? Maybe OS X Tiger users just fell in love with the Dashboard widgets or the Spotlight search feature, or who knows?
Same with any other OS I can think of. Even MS-DOS users argued for it because of it's stark simplicity. "Only one exact way to do a specific task... no confusion of "What does the picture on my screen do that looks like *this*?" Easy to write down a step-by-step instruction sheet so anyone who can type can get a task done in it.
None of these things really matter on a system that nobody interfaces with directly very often. If it just serves up web pages or files or acts as a back-end to a database, or whatever
Re:PowerPC vs Intel (Score:5, Interesting)
OSX core is open source Darwin, which already runs on Intel processors. I would bet that deep inside Apple, they maintain a fully functional OSX on typical Wintel hardware (speculation only but why wouldn't Apple make the effort? Sort of a hedge against CPU lock-in).
I think a more interesting line of speculation is: Is Apple developing, or thinking of developing, an OSX version for the new CELL processor? After all, IBM surely thinks that CELL will eventually replace conventional CPUs. IBM and Apple usually work pretty close together when it comes to future CPUs for Apple's OS. I can't imagine that Apple hasn't at least discussed it with IBM.
Re:PowerPC vs Intel (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, one thing I've seen speculated is that it might be another hedge against people hacking the system to run software not licenced to run on the machine. This is plausible if they obfuscate the code, although I really don't buy this argument.
Re:My question is. . . (Score:5, Interesting)
On the other hand, security has been a big thing with MS in the last few years. I'll rephrase that - managing public perception of security has been a big thing for MS lately. I can't imagine that they'd deliberately build in security flaws... well, not as a matter of marketing policy... well, I still don't believe it, anyway.
So that leaves the question as to whether they have learned enough from the original XBox to make XBox2 impossible to hack. I have problems with "impossible" in this context. The harder they lock it down, the harder they make it for partners to port to their platform. Since MS' in house games studios still lack the output to satisfy demand solo, they're somewhat dependant on goodwill to get ports of cool games from other platforms. And where they make those allowances, that's where the next generation of hacks will come.
The online game thing? Well yes, that's unavoidable. On the other hand, I think there's a backlash brewing against these subscription games. I'm old enough to remember the first wave of computer moderated play-by-mail games and they dirty tricks some of them used to extort money from the players once they had invested deeply enough. From what I've read of most of the MMOGs, it's the same sort of scam, and people seem to be becoming aware of that.
I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be a fad. Just like video arcade games largely died off when home computers got good enough graphics to compete, so will the online ones when some free alternative gets good enough.
Re:My question is. . . (Score:2, Interesting)
This protects me from the horrible sensitivity that xbox drives are known for. I've lost about $200 on scratched games that my xbox won't recognize.
These added features were what made me choose the xbox over a playstation, and are what will affect my decision on which of the next generation game consoles to purchase.
I'm not ripping people off, and not everyone who has a hacked xbox is. So please stop flashing your misconceptions around like they're some sort of a badge.
Re:Wow (Score:4, Interesting)
64/32 Questions... (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm assuming that the PowerPC cores being used in the new XBox are based on IBM's 970 or 970MP designs. Although I haven't seen any source positively put that theory to rest, it seems to make sense.
That said, the 970 core is a fully 64-bit processor with a 32-bit bridge mode.
I'm wondering... will the 2000 variant Microsoft is deploying be pure 64-bit, or 32-bit? Microsoft's AMD64 offering supports both ABI's, but I'm not seeing the need to do so for their new console. 64-bit seems excessive, seeing as how no games will never see more than 512MB of memory and the PowerPC offers 64-bit math instructions for added FLOP precision without all the overhead of 64-bit pointers.
And before anyone points out that AMD64 code is faster than x86 code, please remember that this is because AMD64 code isn't just 64-bit x86 code - it adds additional register and intstructions IIRC. The PowerPC, on the other hand, was always designed for 64-bit operation, and as a result, the instrucitons and register counts are the same in both modes - the 64-bit mode just adds the overhead of extra data on the bus and actually degrades performances slightly over equivelent 32-bit operation.
Will definately be interesting. It's pretty much assumed that they'll be having to run the XBox1 games they plan to support in emulation, so I can't see how that would effect their choice.
Re:My question is. . . (Score:1, Interesting)
If someone can get xbox360 running OS X it will KILL apple
Re:Disinformation (Score:3, Interesting)
Modding your X-Box going forward isn't going to be much of an issue for Microsoft. You can't use X-Box Live with a modded XBox and Microsoft wants to ensure that everyone is online. So all their games with be Live enabled. Microsoft is going to use Live to distribute levels and authenticate games, even if you're not playing online at the time. Modding your XBox to pirate games will make it useless. Media-Center mods? Well, Microsoft already supports that for XB1. To that end, there's no need to dissuade would-be modders. Ancillary mods, like upgrades to video cards, etc.. will most likely be supported by Microsoft, and they'll benefit from the secondary market that arises because of it. There's just no need for obfuscation as far as an OS is concerned.
By the time XBox 720 debuts, we won't be buying discs anymore. We'll be downloading our games onto our 2TB hard drives. Oh, the Xbox 720 will have nine cores instead of the three it has now, and the extra cores will run the thin clients and tablets on the local network. It will be backwards compatible with all previous XBox games, but since there likely won't be a media drive, you'll need the "Classic" subscription (several tiers, of course) in order to play them. Oh yeah, and they would have nicely sidestepped the death of the PC in the first world.
If you think they're evil now... *shrugs*
I'm gonna buy a Nintendo Revolution.
Re:My question is. . . (Score:2, Interesting)
So this nugget is purely hearsay? (Score:1, Interesting)
Hardly newsworthy if you ask me.
MacOSX (Score:3, Interesting)