It’s hip2b2

In this Slashdot article, it mentioned that the Xbox 360 has been hacked. Again. This means that we can finally install other systems and software (including Linux) on it. Again. In the xboxhacker.net forum, there are discussions about the recent hack on the Xbox 360.

Here is a short description of the hack:

A little more about the hack: it’s a firmware hack that circumvents some disc security mechanisms. Executables must still be signed; the hack does not allow code that hasn’t been signed by Microsoft to run, so no custom software or Linux yet. The door has now been cracked open though.

We now have a low cost personal computer for our miscellaneous computing needs. How long will it take before we can have Linux installed in the Xbox 360? Will somebody build an Xbox 360 computing cluster? Maybe an Xbox 360 PVR with no DRM?

A machine the following specs would be pretty powerful (from a CNET article):

• Custom IBM Triple-core 3.2 GHz PowerPC (1 Mb L1 Cache and 128 128-bit registers) capable of 9 billion dot product operations per second
• Custom ATI 500 MHz graphics card with 10 Mb capable of processing 500 triangles per second and 48 billion shader operations per second
• Custom 48KHz 16-bit audio with 320 independent decompression channels
• 512 Mb of 700MHz DDR-SDRAM
• 20 Gb Hard drive (Upgradable and detachable)
• USB, Ethernet, WiFi, Video-in, DVD/CD-RW

The system is techincally capable of a processing performance of 1 teraflop. With processing power like this, we can build a pretty powerful supercomputing with a bunch of these. Also, with graphics and audio capabilities like these, we can build a pretty high performance PVR.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 19th, 2006 at 4:22 am and is filed under Open source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.