Technophiles have no doubt been anxious to traverse that final frontier of Xbox 360 S technology: the shared CPU/GPU, dubbed Vejle after the city in Denmark. This 45nm system-on-chip (SoC) trims much of the fat of its predecessor, slimming down to 372 million transistors (it is summer -- gotta look your best out there!), requiring a mere 40 percent of the power and less than 50 percent of the die space used by the original Xbox 360 chipset.

It's actually the first desktop-class processor to combine a CPU, GPU, memory and I/O logic onto a single slice of silicon, which cuts down manufacturing costs dramatically. But perhaps one of its best features is how the chip will actually self-induce lag so as not to run faster than the previous chip -- a necessity of the architecture of the Xbox 360, since the new console must perform exactly as the previous hardware has.

The rest of it is probably too technical for us to try and explain, so hit up the source links below for additional info. If you need help breaking it all down, call up Tom, that smart friend of yours -- he's probably just sitting around, watching Star Trek or something.

http://www.joystiq.com/2010/08/24/vejle-bares-all-xbox-360-slims-system-on-chip-exposed/#comments

Posted: Aug 24, 2010 10:23 pm