“…the X-box uses only a skeleton of the Windows 2000 codebase
– “a surprisingly small amount”, according to Bachus. The OS as
such, which is burned into EEPROM, is involved in initialising the
device and thereafter, for minimal I/O. There’s no need for power
management, for PCI Plug and Play support, so the system is pretty
lean. And all applications run in Ring 0 (Intel-speak for kernel
mode) – for better performance.”
“Nor has X-box been obliged to squeeze the PCI/AGP architecture
into the new case. X-box uses a UMA (unified memory architecture)
model in which the graphics processor and CPU share the same
address space. That’s the SGI approach, and one adopted by Nintendo
in its earlier SGI collaboration, and also in its forthcoming
Dolphin console. The expense, of course, is getting someone to
build a custom graphics chip. And although Bachus wouldn’t confirm
that Microsoft paid NVidia somewhere in the region of $200 million
to cook this up, he did say that a payment was made that reflected
the work involved.”
“Now for those of you who’ve been hoping that the games console
will gradually morph into The Computer For The Rest Of Us – don’t
look here. PCs are in about 45 per cent of US homes, a figure that
hasn’t risen that much over the past few years. But X-box isn’t a
punt at the internet appliance business. Yes, it will be
Net-enabled, there’ll be no browser or email client. Microsoft
thinks that mostly the same folk who buy PCs also buy consoles –
it’s about an 80 per cent overlap, according to Bachus. For now
anyway. Given that it’s got a hard disk and an Ethernet
connection, and given that the hardware will be subsidised by the
services its runs, it’ll take some seriously crippling now if it
isn’t going morph into an Internet Appliance. But for now,
Microsoft has given it far more of a chance at the console business
than we could possibly have suspected six months ago.”