among the big-name game consoles Microsoft's Xbox brand has been around
the least amount of time despite not making game consoles in the eighties and
nineties Microsoft is still come a very long way and the story of Microsoft
hardware is a very interesting one with that in mind is happy to bring you
pollution of the Xbox hardware
all the way back in 1998 Microsoft had just finished collaborating with Sega to
create the Dreamcast
Microsoft provided a Windows CE development environment and the DirectX
API to make development on the Dreamcast easier than ever before but just as the
Nintendo PlayStation brought Sony a heavy hitter into the console market in
a completely unintended fashion Sega's Dreamcast did the exact same thing with
Microsoft almost immediately after finished working on Dreamcast or
engineers from Microsoft's DirectX team which included Seamus Blackley Kevin
Baucus and ted hayes under the direction of team leader auto berkes quite simply
done by the game console bug whether it was working on the Dreamcast and seen
how games can be fun on a console that did it or even purely business motives I
don't know the Sony PlayStation 2 was luring developers away from windows and
was kind of a threat and being all these people were on the Direct X team which
essentially is the thing that powers most of Windows gaining one might
understand why they might want people not to be lured away from the computer
or at least Direct X technologies will need that job security so they all
thought it would be good if Microsoft made a game console so how do you do
that when you don't have a console engineering team well believe it or not
these are actually disassembled some Dell laptop computers and reassemble
them together to create their prototype but I sincerely doubt this small team
had any idea that this frankenstein's monster of a console was about to take
the world by storm this team of were approached at brides who was the leader
of Microsoft's game publishing division at the time in showed him their vision
for a direct Xbox now think about that this was a game console for people made
out of mass-market components without authorization without asking anyone
probably not on company time given it was a private project to start with and
really if you consider other similar projects to that in other companies by
all accounts really shouldn't have been made but at Frys was not a dummy he saw
some serious potential and said let's do this during development the direct Xbox
team decided that they should shorten
name to Xbox the marketing department thought that name was released and when
I say that I don't mean I'm exaggerating that I need during focus testing they
put the Xbox name on the list of possible names literally to prove a
point out of spite they kept their name on there to try to tell the development
team that this was a bad name it was looked pretty stupid in the end when the
focus testing revealed that consumers much grouper the name Xbox to literally
anything else they came up with which probably resulted in a great big laugh
from the four original team members especially so after a great many delays
on November 15 2001 the Microsoft Xbox debutante consumer market the first Xbox
ran on a custom version of the Intel Pentium 3 copper mine base processor
running at seven hundred thirty three megahertz ran on a shared graphics
memory subsystem with 64 megabytes of DDR SDRAM at two hundred megahertz and
had a GPU that Microsoft co-developed with NVIDIA called the env2 a two
hundred thirty three megahertz ASIC chip had an old-school hard drive in it which
can either eight or 10 gigabytes pretty big for the time actually that ran at
5400 rpms it ran on The X Files system which you actually don't really
typically see a lot of then or now it did take 32 megabyte memory cards even
have to because it could save your game to the hard drive and unless you want to
take a safe to a friend's house or something I can't really see why you
would have used it although the times were very different and none of us
really thought about this and that's probably one of the best reasons to have
a hard drive with the PlayStation 2 needed a network adapter in order to
plug into even Ethernet Xbox headed built in which considering everything at
the time was pretty amazing and is actually one of the biggest reasons why
the Xbox console became so big you know how the very first Halo was the
quote-unquote killer and for the first Xbox part of the reason for that
was because you could put a bunch of Xboxes on a land and have much larger
scale multiplayer matches than previous consoles were capable of like the
Nintendo 64 with its four players with screen multiplayer on anything that had
it this not only treated a level of fairness that really wasn't present in a
split screen situation nobody else could see what you were doing at the time if
indeed you were on a separate TV that nobody else can see but it also created
the console and PC gamers did finally showed itself in console game in many
people believe that this was kind of the reason why the Xbox became successful
because United a lot of people that really liked console games together for
parties or get togethers and just created an environment that allowed
people to go wow I really like Xbox this is great I haven't done anything like
this before the game console it actually had four USB ports for controllers so if
you really wanted to you could play four player split screen and believe me I did
but man land parties if that's not a direct example of how gaming hardware
progressed exactly what gaming is I don't know what to give you on top of
that the Xbox could run at a resolution up to 1080p I am NOT saying every single
game RAM and HDD or anything
most of them didn't seriously Xbox was such a big jump for so many things even
if you didn't really love the kinds of games that came out on Xbox which were
primarily shooters in kind of western style video games and a lot of video
games was based around Japanese at the time
look how that changed there was some experiences that you just could not get
on another game console and that's why the Xbox thrive
well the first Xbox was kind of success for very specific set of reasons
probably the biggest of which being a low as we talked about it was also only
a woman as time went by and hardware got better obviously the next generation of
consoles was going to follow in about 2003 Microsoft started working on what
was going to become the Xbox 360 the thing that's cool about the Xbox 360 is
where the Xbox kind of came out of nowhere and was a surprise hit in its
own right
the Xbox 360 was a calculated and very planned out
intelligent launch process one fairly interesting thing about it though where
the original Xbox was created to keep people on the Windows platform for
development the Xbox 360 ran on PowerPC architecture which is what Apple
PowerMac g5 ran on and believe it or not some of the development kits actually
were Power Mac g5 hardware another little tidbit was Xeon processors that
was developed by both IBM Microsoft in tandem was really a slightly modified
version of the Cell processor that IBM developed in tandem with Sony if you
think about this kind of stuff
Microsoft was super Sneaky about the Xbox 360 and was really playing a team
from the start
probably knowing what they had with the Xbox brand to be expanded to something
that really just took over video games but in order to achieve something like
that
needed a console that was going to be a definite difference not only from Xbox
but also from the next PlayStation so as I said with the Xeon processor the bomb
that Microsoft dropped on the gaming community as well as Sony is a triple
core 64 bit PowerPC processor designed by IBM each of the three quarters is
clocked at 3.2 gigahertz and is capable of a lot of simultaneous multithreading
where the CPU was a processor developed by IBM Caldas
seen on the GPU was developed by a TI and called xenos is probably the big
reason why the Xbox was easier to develop for them the PlayStation 3 and
therefore probably a big reason why the Xbox 360 was able to attract a lot of
developers that were originally planning just exclusive PlayStation three titles
well it was a 500 megahertz GPU which is pretty comparable to the PlayStation 3
GPU the big thing was it was compatible with the version of the DirectX 9.0 C
API
you don't know what that means the API is essentially the language that you use
to talk to the hardware while Sony's was completely proprietary the Xbox 360
using a compatible version of DirectX meant almost every PC developer was also
an Xbox developer which again was kind of the same strategy that they used by
the original Xbox now if you compare it to the reality synthesizer in the
PlayStation 3 you'll see a lot of the numbers are almost the same so what we
were just talking about is probably more important than the actual hardware
specifications on the GPU itself and that's exactly why support for DirectX
being integrated into the chip is far more important than any specifications
you can imagine the console has 512 megabytes of GB ddr3 RAM slot at 700
megahertz which essentially ran at one point four gigahertz 128 the bus the
Xbox 360 shares this memory between the CPU and GPU because it uses unified
memory architecture now the original configuration system came with a twenty
gigabyte hard drive which is actually very easy to swap out because it was
kind of in a little case that had a weird plug it was just a SATA hard drive
which is very standard but at the same time the custom enclosure made it seem
like it was kind of its own divides the thing that was need about that was that
you could easily swap out the hard drive or just bring a hard drive along with
you and take all of your saved games and everything to another console would
really talk that much about the original Xbox controller because it was terrible
that the Xbox 360 thought you know likes let's not have another terrible
controller and so they created basically the best controller for video games
since the Sega Genesis controller and also made it so that you could connect
wirelessly using any proprietary or licensed controller which was very cool
you could turn the damn console on from the controller
one of the cool things these advances enable digital media distribution
another piece of hardware introduced this generation was the Xbox Kinect
which is essentially a 3d camera that allowed just your basic scamming as well
as controlling of the user interface again by gestures and also by voice
commands general the Kinect was kind of looked at as a bit of a novelty with a
few games but not really widespread adoption where everybody needed to have
one still it was neat after the last two generations of the console wars revolves
around proprietary hardware the next generation would revolve around creating
something that people could make stuff the absolute easiest and retain some
degree of control over their intellectual property over the last two
generations Microsoft knew the people were using their consoles as media
centers and really wanted to expand upon those features in fact they wanted to
make the Xbox one the center of all of your living room entertainment hence the
name 1 720 or 1080 or some other multiple of 360 they wanted it to be the
one device that you needed to do everything in the living room and gamers
you know there's primary market that stoked about it
so when the year after announcement Xbox spent a lot of time refocusing
everything toward gaming and obviously to handle then you need some good
hardware going back to the more simplified x86 architecture that the
original Xbox used who would have thought it would be that ahead of its
time that we would literally be back to that for both major named current
consoles with AMD manufacturing and APU rather than a CPU called Jaguar
APU is a series of 64 bit microprocessors that can be designed to
act as both a CPU and graphics accelerator chip now being system runs
on an APU the GPU is actually integrated and is based on the AMD GCN architecture
with 12 units and has a total of seven hundred and sixty eight cores it runs at
853 megahertz and pretty much trances the Xbox 360 graphics capabilities now
computer hardware is getting very different nowadays and that reflects
very much in the Xbox ones aren't sure the Xbox one has 8 gigabytes of RAM
which is essentially use for all functions just like with the PlayStation
4 now with all of this integrated technology everything is kind of
accessible by everything which is great by the way the controller now connects
using Bluetooth instead of a proprietary radio frequency and also the hard work
pretty decently powerful on account as of this very month backward
compatibility for Xbox 360 games is being rolled out and that brings us to
today who would have thought that a console for people made out of a few
laptops would eventually become what we know today as one of the biggest brands
in gaming Xbox isn't just synonymous with a console it it's frankly
synonymous with the culture and though as I said before we never really saw in
time
where the Xbox with such a technologically primitive machine like
the Nintendo Entertainment System the amount we've seen the Xbox grow from the
original console to the Xbox one is pretty amazing are you an Xbox one fan
or maybe you're just interested in the evolution of console hardware one way or
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