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Vejle bares all: Xbox 360 Slim's system-on-chip exposed
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.
Microsoft details Vejle, the new Xbox 360's system-on-chip architecture
There aren't many unresolved mysteries with Microsoft's new console by this point -- apart from perhaps why it wasn't named the Stealthbox, like we were suggesting -- but one thing that hasn't been covered in excruciating detail yet is the new 360's splicing of the CPU and GPU into the same chip. Microsoft has remedied that today, informing us that the 45nm system-on-chip (codenamed Vejle; sorry, Valhalla fans) inside the refreshed Xbox makes do with a relatively minimal 372 million transistors, requiring only 40 percent of the power and less than 50 percent of the die space of its 2005 ancestor. A somewhat bemusing addition, noted by Ars, is the FSB Replacement sector you see in the image above. It's designed to induce lag in the system so that the Vejle chip doesn't run faster than the old stuff, something Microsoft couldn't allow to happen. Facepalm away, good people, facepalm away.
