According to this C|NET article, IBM has begun production on a custom chip that was designed in partnership with Microsoft to power the XBox 360 Consoles.

IBM said the chip features a customized version of IBM’s 64-bit PowerPC core. The chip includes three of these cores, each with two simultaneous threads and clock speeds greater than 3GHz.

The chip features 165 million transistors and is fabricated using IBM’s 90 nanometer technology to reduce heat and improve performance. The chip’s 21.6GB-per-second front side bus architecture was customized to meet the demanding throughput and latency requirements of the Xbox 360 gaming platform software, IBM said.

Now, call me crazy, but if I was providing a chip for one of the most anticipated gaming consoles of the Holiday season, I would have started on production a little sooner than a month before the console hits the market. But that is just me, I guess.

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