Another Reason to buy an xBox 360

At the In-Stat Fall Processor Forum 2005 in San Jose yesterday, IBM unveiled the custom microprocessor that Microsoft will use in its upcoming Xbox 360 game console. Based on the Power PC architecture, the new 64-bit chip uses a whopping three processor cores, each of which runs at 3.2GHz. By comparison, the fastest Power PC chips used in Apple Computer's Power Mac G5 systems are dual-core designs running at 2.5GHz; such systems retail for $3300, more than 10 times the cost of the Xbox 360 console.

According to IBM, Microsoft engineers were involved in every step during the design of the new processor, which still does not have an official name. The chip is quite a bit faster than even the fastest desktop PC chip, and it makes the Xbox's current 733MHz Pentium III processor look sick by comparison.