Xbox
Here's some info that might help end this discussion.
An Xbox block diagram from an August 2000 article at Dr Dobb's.
ddj.com
Note that it confirms all of the published spec's. From what I've read, Nvidia has been working on the GPU and memory controller since at least last April. Note also that the FSB bus to the PIII appears standard, so I would assume Intel is doing nothing special. (The Nvidia controller and Memory Bus may be what Forbes was alluding to in the article). It appears the memory bus is 16 bytes wide, which gives 6.4GBps with 200MHz DDR.
Also of interest, a press release from Nvidia.
SANTA CLARA, CA. — April 18, 2000 — NVIDIA™ Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA) today announced that it has received $200
million from Microsoft® Corporation, which is a contractual advance payment against NVIDIA's future supply of its graphics
processing units (GPUs) that will be included in Microsoft's X-Box. The X-Box is a new videogame console that is currently
under development by Microsoft. In early March, NVIDIA agreed to develop and sell custom-designed GPUs for the X-Box
and to license certain technology to Microsoft and its licensees for use in X-Box. The agreement between Microsoft and
NVIDIA was announced on March 10, 2000, by Bill Gates, Microsoft's chief software architect, at the Game Developer's
Conference in San Jose, California.
nvidia.com
IMO this information, in combination with the Micron press release, should clear things up. |
