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Nick Baker: Xbox 360 Architecture

Another great movie at Channel 9 Forum. This time is from Microsoft Nick Baker, the managing architect for Xbox 360 hardware. The movie covers the interesting motivations behind putting PowerPC technology at the core of the console. Though it shouldn’t be a big surprise, the architecture was constrained by schedule and final cost, which drove most of the decisions on Nick’s team. Nick and Charles also talk through the issues around compatibility, operating system design, and plenty of other nitty gritty details about that gorgeous white box.

What is the XBox 360, exactly? How do you go about designing and building a game console that meets the high standards of today’s gamers and handles the computational pressures of today’s highly realistic games (think real time physics computation, incredibly rich graphics, etc)? Did you know the XBox 360 team saw into the multi-core future before most anybody else?

Well, who better to talk to about all of this (and more) than Nick Baker. Nick is a hardware engineer and Director who leads the team that thought up the XBox 360 hardware architecture. It’s an impressive piece of machinery. In fact, Nick recently won the Outstanding Technical Leadership award for the effort. Here, Nick takes us through the design history and some of the implementation details of the XBox 360. What were some of the design trade-offs? How different is the XBox 360 that you can buy today from what you, Nick and his team were initially thinking?

It’s a very interesting story.

We get pretty geeky here, so be prepared to learn a thing or two about game console hardware architecture, the future of XBox 360 as it relates to multi-core, game programming language evolution in the multi-core, and more.