ATI Xbox 360 Xenos works at 500MHz

MICROSOFT KNOWS that it can get its chip running at 500 MHz and is heavily preparing for an October/November launch. The Xbox 360 should be available worldwide and ship in hundreds of thousands, if not millions.

Developers have G5 machines with the right hardware and we can confirm that those top "launch titles" and important developer guys have the cards with the real R500 chip working at 500MHz.

This is the final clock speed of the chip, but we learned that this 90 nanometre chip could work at higher rates. If boffins find a way, there will be headroom for overclocking the graphics element of the Xbox 360 subsystem.

Its very clear why Microsoft decided to go for 500MHz as we can imagine that yields are very good at this speed, but even if some of these chips could work at much higher speeds, the Vole would be unable to deliver in enough quantities, and you would end up with very fast graphic but heavily affecting the console availability and the cost too.

We've already reported that the Playstation 3 RSX developed by Nvidia should work at 550MHz, but it's hard to compare the two chips due to the totally different marchitecture. We know that the Vole's console comes first but Sony Playstation 3s will also gain market acceptance. µ