The AnandTech Linux XBOX PC Experiment
by Kristopher Kubicki on November 10, 2004 4:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Linux
Advantages and Drawbacks of the Design
The XBOX PC is just a 733MHz Pentium III with 64MB of RAM. 733MHz is extremely weak by today's expectations. 733MHz is not enough to run PC games today, barely enough to run Windows XP and certainly not enough to do anything practical, but play XBOX, or is it? Say what you want about Microsoft, they were onto something when they thought of the XBOX. The USB controllers, built-in hard drive and Ethernet all make for a surprisingly good platform to run basic computing: email, word processing, internet, etc.There are also a lot of features that make the XBOX an intuitive design for a media center PC. XBOX has an integrated DVD player and a reasonably efficient controller (the game pad). The machine ships by default with composite cabling, but $20 at any video game outlet will get you a component cable package instead. With the exception of PVR functionality, the XBOX would also make a pretty good media center as well. Spending a few dollars on an IR kit for the USB ports adds even more creature comfort.
Keep in mind, the Pentium III Coppermine used in the XBOX is a little different than a normal Pentium III. In fact, the XBOX Pentium only has half the L2 cache of a normal Pentium III, but the 8-way associative paths are left on the processor whereas on the Celeron variant, these paths are disabled. This puts expected performance between a Coppermine Pentium III and a Coppermine Celeron. You may wish to read up on Anand's analysis of the entire XBOX architecture from 2001. The P3 is old architecture - don't expect any miraculous performance out of this processor.
One of the better features of the XBOX is its small footprint in a "stackable" design. So many things about the XBOX just scream, "turn me into my own server rack".
With any distributed cluster, the importance of network latency becomes an issue. Our XBOXes only support a 10/100Mbps network adaptor, and that is far too slow for some serious cluster computation. With only eight nodes, we do not expect to see large latency issues, but maybe we are in for a surprise. Below, you can see a network transfer of a few hundred megabytes:
226 Transfer complete.
779669036 bytes received in 83.35 secs (9135.0 kB/s)
Furthermore the single, dual channel PATA interface limits our ability to use the XBOXes as a high availability network attached storage (NAS) solution; there are not enough interfaces for us to run more than two hard drives - that assumes we take the DVD player out. The 100Mbps limitation on the network interface also dampens our thoughts of any NAS as well. The default XBOX hard drive only runs at 5400RPM; somewhat slow if we plan on doing a lot of disk access. There also seems to be an issue as to how effectively we can replace the 40-pin DMA33 cable with something a little more capable. We are mostly bogged down by network IO for most clustering applications, but the hard drive limitations could come back and bite us later on. As a small indicator of hard drive speed, we ran a few tests to see if it was worth replacing the hard drives in our XBOX cluster.
Unfortunately, getting UDMA100 to work does not seem possible with our configuration. Although we have seen various techniques in forums in order to squeeze that last bit of performance out of the hard drive by hacking your own cable, all of the methods that we attempted did not yield faster bus speeds. The difference between the 5400RPM and 7200RPM drive looks too insignificant for us to continue using the 7200RPM drives in the cluster.
Thus far, we have decided our XBOX has the right configuration to run a very cheap, simple desktop/email PC, a stripped down media center or a distributed cluster that does not rely too heavily on network latency.
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Nepsir - Thursday, November 11, 2004 - link
I was just wondering if you will do a test with mental ray on the cluster (I think you mentioned something about Mental Ray in the article). It would be really interesting to see the results of that since me and a couple of friends got modded X-Boxes and I have a 3dsMax6 license (Mental Ray is included).gibson042 - Thursday, November 11, 2004 - link
You might want to look at the "mini-cluster" project (http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/cluster/) when planning/designing/building your EPIA cluster. It's a 12-node (originally 6) cluster developed by Glen Gardner, and appears to be the same size or a little smaller than a stack of an equal number of XBOXes. Of course, the frame is custom built and the hardware is exposed to the world.Aikouka - Thursday, November 11, 2004 - link
I can say that I love having a modded xbox, because the capabilities are so much greater. As discussed earlier, a software mod can be a great way to do it (although it usually requires a game unless you want to take your HDD out, which is NOT a fun method unless you love swapping IDE cables.)It's also good to note that you should be careful when modding these or even make a backup of the hdd on your system, because things can go wrong, and if you like to fiddle with things, then your chances will be a lot higher. I know at one point I was stuck in error 16 and had to pull the HDD out and unlock it using the IDE swap method.
Are there plans for an article on modding something such as the PS2? I just recently tried a no-solder modchip in the PS2, and it doesn't seem to be going along too well. Maybe it's time for a flip-top.
Scarceas - Thursday, November 11, 2004 - link
"We crimped our own cabling as you can see in the image below."I'm still looking for the image, I know its there somewhere!
bleugh - Thursday, November 11, 2004 - link
If anyone wants their xbox motherboards upgraded to 128 megabytes of memory, I can do itI'm UK based and use BRAND NEW samsung memory chips
I can upgrade your existing motherboards, sell you ready upgraded boards, or even just the chips!
if one of the anandtech team wants their xboxes upgraded i'll happily do it at cost, please contact me to discuss
Dean
LotoBak - Thursday, November 11, 2004 - link
First, XBox live banning....Basically this is how it used to work. When your on live it does a hash of your bios. A mod replaces your bios. If you bios is not the retail ms bios the serial (eeprom) is blacklisted. NOW since halo2 has been released it appears that MS has changed a while bunch of shit on us. Preliminary information indicates that MS is banning by hard drive serial+model numbers, xbox serial, and flagging the gamertag as 'potential pirate'. Thus to unban the xbox both a new hdd and eeprom are needed. Then you must cancel and create a new xbox live account. There are more details about how it all works but bottom line is we dont know how it works now. They can throw new stuff at us anytime now. Rumors are flying that hdd capacities are being scanned as well. For all intents and perposes xbox + modded xbox's do not mix.
Yes there is a PS1 emu for xbox. That said xbox DVD drives do not read cd-r (or retail ps1 games) Therefor all games must be transfered to the xbox hdd in bin/cue or iso format
When comparing mods remember, the mod contains no modded bios stuff. They are useless in them selves. You will need to aquire a modded bios for your xbox (online, free). What this means is that every mod can contain the same bios's. Therefor they all contain the same base features (mostly booting unsigned code). Hardware features and support is where you want to base your decision on. If you want cheap + no manufacterer support there are 10$ solutions around for you(enabled/disables with power button). If you want support with a mod with a few extra hardware features (2 bios's, external switch) that'll cost around 30-40. Fancy Shamcy lcd support, 8 bios banks, blah blah blah fancy external thing thoes are up to 75ish. But in the end they all allow you to run the same software on the xbox.
if you want to learn read some beginner tutorials at http://tutorials.xbox-scene.com
Omega215D - Thursday, November 11, 2004 - link
After seeing Halo 2, it makes me wonder if they really need Pixel Shader 2.0. Its pretty cool that I can play old games on the XBOx through emulators though but i wanna see when the next XBOX kicks off before spending $200.ViRGE - Wednesday, November 10, 2004 - link
#12, probably not. The Xbox's GPU is a GeForce 4 class GPU - the lack of Pixel Shader 2.0 features can really be limiting.euph - Wednesday, November 10, 2004 - link
is there any way to use the gpu for the pov-ray rendering?ukDave - Wednesday, November 10, 2004 - link
Little quote that sums up the SmartXX XBL saga:Q: just bought a Smart XX mod and I still don't know if i'll be able to play xbox live so please somebody tell me if i'll be able to play it.
A: There is no easy way to answer this question. First of all, it all depends on circumstance. Have you upgraded your hard drive? Has your Xbox ever been banned before? And, for newbs, are you thinking about playing on live while using a bios from the chip.
If you answered yes to any of these questions you've won a lifetime ban from Microsoft!
Sleep time :) And i don't even use XBL :D