Inside Microsoft's Xbox 360
by Anand Lal Shimpi, Kristopher Kubicki & Tuan Nguyen on November 16, 2005 5:09 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
The Xbox 360 Chipset
As we mentioned before, the Xbox 360's North Bridge is integrated into the GPU, similar to most PC chipsets with integrated graphics. The North Bridge is on the main die of the GPU and shares the same 128-bit GDDR3 memory controller that the graphics core uses to access the Xbox 360's 512MB of memory. This bus runs at 1.4GHz offering just over 22GB/s of bandwidth to main memory.
On the other side of the North Bridge there's the CPU's FSB interface, which offers 10.8GB/s of bandwidth in each direction (21.6GB/s total). You can see the serial FSB laid out in the image below:
The North Bridge also features a 500MB/s interface to the Xbox 360's South Bridge, which was designed by SiS (pictured below).
Once again, you don't see any non-Microsoft logos on any of these chips. It's clear this time around who the IP belongs to. The South Bridge is responsible for communication with the audio codec, storage devices, USB ports, controllers, and any other I/O devices.
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ghxost - Wednesday, January 28, 2015 - link
Just signed up to say this fixed my 360. Had the RROD with 3 lights one day and nothing worked at all although the power brick and its lights seemed fine.After tearing in I found all the thermal grease was not on the chips for the cooling but all around them all over the surrounding board, nice job (it was a refurb from Gamestop...) and it still had the original x-clamp so I'm not sure if the bad grease job was from Microsoft or Gamestop, either should have used less though...
Anywho, once cleaned and properly secured, works like a champ :)