Microsoft's Xbox One has a problem: you, and your family.
One of the problems that Microsoft had to solve when developing the Xbox One game console was a simple one: how to tell apart the player using the interactive gaming console from his friends, the lamp, the couch, and the coffee table. To solve that issue, Microsoft developed its own light sensor that can figure out what it's seeing by a variety of calculations.
In talking up the innards of its upcoming gaming console, Microsoft didn't reveal any new capabilities of the One—due this November—during a presentation at the Hot Chips conference Monday at Stanford University. But company executives discussed the so-called "speeds and feeds" of the main Xbox One processor in detail, as well as the problems that the new Kinect team had to overcome.
MicrosoftThe Xbox One system diagram.
One massive chip
Physically, the system-on-a-chip at the heart of the Xbox One is 363 square millimeters. But the real whopper is the amount of logic integrated within it: 5 billion transistors. Although Wikipedia isn't necessarily the final arbiter, the Xbox One is possibly the largest chip manufactured to date, with a comparable number to Intel's 64-core Xeon Phi coprocessor for supercomputers, and easily topping Intel's 8-core "Poulsen" Itanium that the chip maker launched in 2012.
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