XBOX360 Cluster in-game dev demo

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sdinet

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I recently received a demo of the XBOX360 cluster capability during a visit to the development center (brother works out there). They clustered 2 XBOX360's together via the broadband connector (and appeared to also be using a dual A/V connector).

While in clustered mode the XBOX360's displayed a development demo with in-game footage comparable to the photo-realistic preview’s you have all seen of the pre-rendered footage of Call-of-duty and Gears of War, and the sound was simply amazing. Wow! I can't wait until games start coming out which support this clustered feature.

While I am not sure why Microsoft hasn’t released any press information about this feature, I can only assume it is due to its lack of reliability (the systems crash several time during the demo). It has come to my attention, the XBOX360 is already suffering from reliability issues, it may be some time before we see this cluster feature =(

I will keep you posted with updates. I will try to get some screenshots posted in the next several weeks.
 
umm how is the sound any better than with 1 audio processor?

as for the cluster.. well the OS always had that capability. The only concern is bottlenecking of the broadband connector. That is not that high a throughput to keep everything in sync especially if doing parallel processing on both systems.
 
What kind of broadband connector? RJ45 or some type of fiber?
I'd imagine latency would be a problem with the former...
 
The demo was given using the gigabit RJ45 port, no fiber. Latency did not appear to be a problem: I was looking for tears in the picture and latency issues at the time =). As for the sound being much better, I was told it can handle twice the amount of voices, this was very apparent during the demo (almost an overload of sound!).
 
sdinet said:
The demo was given using the gigabit RJ45 port, no fiber. Latency did not appear to be a problem: I was looking for tears in the picture and latency issues at the time =). As for the sound being much better, I was told it can handle twice the amount of voices, this was very apparent during the demo (almost an overload of sound!).
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Gigabit?

and that can handle keeping frame buffer image in check and split between the two system along with audio?

hmmm. Perhaps that is why it broke ;)
 
as I mentioned prior, the A/V connectors were attached. I can only assume the gigabit helps keep the two XBOX's in sync, and the A/V port splits the processing (much like SLI) this would let each XBOX process half of the screen and therefore theoretically perform twice the amount of rendering power. I assume the same would be true with the sound.
 
sdinet said:
as I mentioned prior, the A/V connectors were attached. I can only assume the gigabit helps keep the two XBOX's in sync, and the A/V port splits the processing (much like SLI) this would let each XBOX process half of the screen and therefore theoretically perform twice the amount of rendering power.
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yes but to do that each vid processor AND CPU must know what the other is doing. Just like a threaded application in a multiple cpu server. All that is kept in check internally (see athlon X2 and the intel variant) or via a "northbridge like" cpu.

That why i can see clustering but live video rendering. If they can do this then forget HP with their render farms. this will be a cheaper solution ;)
 
I assume you would be correct on why it kept freezing up then =) Hopefully Microsoft can remedy this, the demo was simply amazing I would love to see that type of gaming in the near future. Can you image linking 4 of the 360's up =)
 
sdinet said:
I assume you would be correct on why it kept freezing up then =) Hopefully Microsoft can remedy this, the demo was simply amazing I would love to see that type of gaming in the near future. Can you image linking 4 of the 360's up =)
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wild guess

they would limit it to two.

At four you start encroaching in territory of the $20,000 4 way cpu server. And we know that it will be a matter of tie before someone figures out how to use the xbox360 like a pc :)
 
sdinet said:
4 XBOX360's = 16x3.2ghz = 51.2ghz! self goes crosseyed :eek:
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well yes and no

the rule of thumb

for every processor you add...75% the speed of the additional processory. The beast of parallel processing. Of course this is dependant on the chip that controlls Paralell multi processor directing.

Powerpc has always been a 64 bit CPU. I remember when NT 4.0 supported it but then Windows 2000 came out and that was the end of that. Perhaps this was the reason why. This is defintely intresting from a architectual standpoint.
 
I've seen Microsoft and Sony claim 1+1=3 lol, either way this would make one hell of a cluster. I will keep you all posted as I get updates =)
 
At work we have a few multi-proc systems (IBM POWER based as well)

One 16 way POWER4 box and one 12 way POWER5 box

I am going to guess that the Xbox360 POWERPC proc is based off (not exactly like as the P5 has 1.9MB L2 and 36MB L3 cache) but for SMP it uses a Fabric bus that runs at twice the CPU clock rate.

Also if you do clustering, thats usually based on the concept of either backup/redundancy or load balancing (usually in the form of work units, ie: cluster unit 1 hosts 255 websites, cluster unit 2 hosts another 255 websites, if one cluster node dies, the cluster commander reassigns the failed nodes workload to the rest of the cluster) which I can't imagine working on the Xbox. GigE isn't enough, you would so easily saturate the link doing anything complicated like rendering.

Lets just say ok, you have your two xboxes, you set them up to talk via GigE, one is to render 30 frames a second, the other the alternate 30 frames per second. Now, you need something to time this, ethernet is in no way reliable enough to handle this with the kind of accuracy you are looking at.

Still, sounds nice in theory.
 
Kristo said:
At work we have a few multi-proc systems (IBM POWER based as well)

One 16 way POWER4 box and one 12 way POWER5 box

I am going to guess that the Xbox360 POWERPC proc is based off (not exactly like as the P5 has 1.9MB L2 and 36MB L3 cache) but for SMP it uses a Fabric bus that runs at twice the CPU clock rate.

Also if you do clustering, thats usually based on the concept of either backup/redundancy or load balancing (usually in the form of work units, ie: cluster unit 1 hosts 255 websites, cluster unit 2 hosts another 255 websites, if one cluster node dies, the cluster commander reassigns the failed nodes workload to the rest of the cluster) which I can't imagine working on the Xbox. GigE isn't enough, you would so easily saturate the link doing anything complicated like rendering.

Lets just say ok, you have your two xboxes, you set them up to talk via GigE, one is to render 30 frames a second, the other the alternate 30 frames per second. Now, you need something to time this, ethernet is in no way reliable enough to handle this with the kind of accuracy you are looking at.

Still, sounds nice in theory.
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agreed

when i heard about this first thing that came to mind was Fiber. But then he said over rj45 and i was like.. hmmm...
 
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