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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
30 Comments
View All Comments
ukDave - Wednesday, November 10, 2004 - link
Yes the xbox has a PS1 emulator, only one that i know of. Its called "PCSXbox". Good place for emulator info: http://xport.xbox-scene.com/ , obviosuly a subsection of xbox-scene.And before anyone asks, no there are none for the PS2 (nor will there ever be).
ukDave - Wednesday, November 10, 2004 - link
I'm not 100% sure about the SmartXX, as i have the well known Xecuter 2.3b chip which has DIP switches mountable on the outsode of the xbox so that youc an disable it in order to play X-Box live and whatnot.From what i've just read over on the forums at xbox-scene, SmartXX is fully X-BoX Live compliant. You simply (as you say Kris) boot back into the MS BIOS. This can be done by turning the xbox on by pressing the EJECT button. To enable the modchip, turn on with the POWER button. (source: http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showtopic=3...
SmartXX section of the forums: http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showforum=6...
ksherman - Wednesday, November 10, 2004 - link
#3, you said there is mulators for n64 and down. Is there an emulator for PSone games? would love to be able to play FF7 againKristopherKubicki - Wednesday, November 10, 2004 - link
Jeff7181: I think with the SmartXX chip you can actually boot back into the normal MS BIOS and have no problems with X-Link and such. If you install Linux on the last 2 unpartitioned GB of your 10GB drive, your XBOX should basically have no idea that the machine is modded at all.LotoBak, ukDave, am I correct on that statement?
Kristopher
ukDave - Wednesday, November 10, 2004 - link
Oh and Jeff, i believe many mod chips have the facility to simply turn them off with a flick of a switch, so you can continue to use XBOX Live. But as LotoBak says, there is the free X-Link service available too.ukDave - Wednesday, November 10, 2004 - link
http://www.xbox-scene.com is really the only place to go for XBOX related discussion, tutorials, really anything you need to know that isn't covered in this article.I bought a bodged XBOX mod from someone in the UK, got it professionally fixed and re-modded. It now has a 120GB disk for all my games, its connected to my LAN. With the excellent XBMC i can play literally any media file from any PC over the network, be it standard files such as MP3's or AVI's, or images such as .bins/cue's.
Well worth looking into if you have an XBOX that is currently un-modded.
Also, /me wants 8 XBOX's :D Although, those 'leccy costs, eek!
Jeff7181 - Wednesday, November 10, 2004 - link
I've been thinking about modding mine to use to play video over the network... but I don't want to lose normal Xbox (and Xbox Live) functionality. Wish that was covered here, but I guess it's not really a "mod your Xbox" article as much as it's a "mod an Xbox to make a cheap PC" article.LotoBak - Wednesday, November 10, 2004 - link
Nice guys... besides your linking problemKnowing a little more about the xbox scene a few things your might consider...
1) Mods go for as cheap as 10USD retail.
2) Software exploiting the xbox is always an option which results in a 'free' modchip
3) http://tutorials.xbox-scene.com to learn about most anything
4) XBMC dvd menu support is comming!
5) XBMC irc channel on irc.efnet.info #xbmc
6) Online gaming is free through Xlink www.teamxlink.com
7) Emulators for n64 and 'down' are available
8) This is the cheapest htpc with 480p 720 and 1080i available
9) xbmc supports many formats
Audio : wav, aac, ac3, mp3, flac, ra, vorbis
Video : ogg avi mkv rm, mov containers
Codec : xivd, divx, mpeg2, mpeg1, quicktime, realvideo and realaudio (limited) and many others. The video engine is based apon mplayer open source project
Networking :
Shares :Supports ccx, samba (windows file sharing), and replaytv shares.
Streaming : Supports a multitude of video and audio streaming formats. webradio is included which has a 'channel' browser for online shoutcast streams. There is also a apple movie trailer browser.
Scripting :
XBMC has python scripting language implimented so its open to many possibilities
XBMC does have some rough edges but it is maturing quickly. If you are interested in contributing to the project check out www.xboxmediacenter.com and the 'XBMC' project on sourceforge
Feel free to ask questions about xbox stuff here... ill watch it for a while
Marlin1975 - Wednesday, November 10, 2004 - link
http://www.anandtech.com/linux/showdoc.aspx?i=2271...Marlin1975 - Wednesday, November 10, 2004 - link
Page 6 has HOME instead of page 7 link