Xenos (graphics chip)

The Xenos is a custom graphics processing unit (GPU) designed by ATI (now taken over by AMD), used in the Xbox 360 video game console developed and produced for Microsoft.

Developed under the codename "C1",[1] it is in many ways related to the R520 architecture and therefore very similar to an ATI Radeon X1800 XT series of PC graphics cards as far as features and performance are concerned.

However, the Xenos introduced new design ideas that were later adopted in the TeraScale microarchitecture, such as the unified shader architecture.

[2] The package contains two separate dies, the GPU and an eDRAM (manufactured by NEC), featuring a total of 337 million transistors.

Each of these processors is composed of a 5-wide vector unit (total 5 FP32 ALUs), resulting in 240 units, that can serially execute up to two instructions per cycle (a multiply and an addition).