Rumor: Xbox Next CPU Clocked at 1.6 GHz

Published on December 3, 2012, by 11Posted in Hardware, Microsoft, News, Xbox 360

xbox-next-cpu-clock-speed

A lot of people freaked out when Wii U’s clock speed was revealed to be about half that of last gen’s HD platforms. I remember reading a lot of people proclaiming Nintendo to be doomed, behind the times, and all that nonsense. But according to the same hacker that delivered us the Wii U CPU clock speed report, the next-gen Xbox is going to be clocked at 1.6 GHz – not all that much higher than Wii U’s 1.24 GHz.

“If you want more evidence that MHz isn’t everything, a little birdie points out that Durango (Xbox 720) is specc’ed to have a 1.6GHz CPU. Food for thought. (And don’t bother asking me who that little birdie is.)”

Looks like “modern engineering” now means more than just higher clock speeds – it also means better use of hardware components, better hardware architecture, and so on.

Source: @marcan42 on Twitter via Gimme Gimme Games

  • ……..

    Reason: CPU is not needed for Next-Gen’s GPGPU, which is exactly the same thing WiiU uses.

    • http://www.gengame.net/ Alex Plant

      Ding ding ding, we have a winner.

    • truth

      Yeah, I find it stupid when people attack the wiiU for only using the 1.24 ghz

      • Terrak

        You have to laugh at the misinformed fanboys that look at the low Wii U clock speed and concluded its 7 year old technology. If this is true i wonder what those clueless fanboys will say now lol

        • tipoo2

          People saying GPGPU can solve everything are almost as uninformed though.

          • http://www.gengame.net/ Alex Plant

            It can’t JUST involve slapping in a GPGPU. That’s largely similar to adding more MHz to the processing speed anyway. There’s going to have to be multiple layers of improvements to make it so the CPU doesn’t have to work as hard. Effective use of memory, efficient layout of components, actual competency with the hardware on the development side.

    • tipoo2

      GPGPU isn’t some end all be all computational savior. Not all tasks lend themselves well to GPU computing. Take it from a programmer, the bulk of game code will still have to run on a CPU. The GPU could do highly parallel work, it could take on some physics, even some AI if developers put a lot of effort into it, but unfortunately those two things are in the single digits of what processors do while gaming, AI is often only 1-3% of the load. The wireframes and everything still have to be done by the CPU.

      • Booboo

        Physics and Graphics (Not only the rendering…) are what’s CPU intensive. Being able to shift part of the workload to the GPU should help a lot. Most matricial/repetitive calculations can gain speed improvement when done on the GPU. That said, it’s true you won’t do much without CPU

  • http://wii4everybody.com/ Oziel

    I think that those power whores of pseudo developers just love the PC so much that they only think of developing without them having to do extra work after having so many years with xbox 360, they have complete dominion of the dev kits for xbox that they believe that anything else would be a waste of time, now that they work with a just a little better hardware what will be their excuse? power and graphics is not important this gen? lol

  • tipoo2

    But how big will it be, on which fabrication process, and how many cores will it have? It’s true that clock speed can’t tell you everything, not even close to it, but generally the more transistors you can throw into a processor the higher its instructions per clock will be. The Wii U CPU is only 30mm2 on 45nm, smaller than the PS360 CPUs on the same 45nm process, which are over 100mm2 each, so is a Core 2 Duo on 45.

    The Wii U CPU size is about comparable to a SINGLE core Atom also on 45nm, in addition to being clocked at 1.2GHz, which means its transistor budget is similar (derived from density and size). The clock speed can’t tell us everything, but the clock speed, die size, and developer comments together can point us in a general direction.

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