December 13 last year as part of the ceremony The Game Awards 2019 company Microsoft first showed Xbox Series X. In addition to the name, the first games and the brand development strategy, the platform holder introduced the form factor of the new console. To tell you the truth, it was completely different from what we saw before. Perhaps its sharpened rectangular body with a stretch resembled the GameCube, released by Nintendo in 2001. Nevertheless, eyewitnesses agreed that this is the most original design of the home console in the last twenty years.
To specialists Digital foundry fortunate enough to make a trip to the Microsoft campus, which is located in Redmond, Washington, where they met with key members of the engineering team. After talking with the developers, employees of the technical department Eurogamer got an excellent idea of why the Xbox Series X hardware was wrapped in such an unconventional wrapper.
The main of the voluminous story of journalists read below.
“When we just started thinking about how we will design it, everything was only on paper,” says Chris Kuyavsky, chief designer of Microsoft. “We didn’t have the hardware for the tests, there were no measurements that we had, we only knew that it would be powerful, and we knew that this would require a completely different approach to console design.”
The key objective of the designers was to provide an increase in power and productivity. The architects of the system initially set themselves the goal of providing at least a double increase in graphic performance in relation to the Xbox One X, i.e. 12 teraflops of the GPU. However, the car was supposed to make noise comparable to the same Xbox One X. And this with a significantly increased power level!
The Xbox Series X is content with a 315W power supply integrated into the chassis. In general, all of the company’s consoles, starting with the Xbox Series S, have a built-in power supply, so the Xbox Series X should not be an exception.
According to engineers, just a huge amount of energy passes through the processor, literally up to 100 W per square inch, which provides power up to 190 A. It is the desire to somehow differentiate this heating that turned the console into what we are seeing now.
The creators of the Xbox Series X took an unprecedented step, deciding to split the motherboard into two parts. One of them contains components such as a processor, GDDR6 RAM, and power regulators. On the other, there is a south bridge board, mainly created for processing input / output information (I / O). The boards are located on either side of the huge aluminum block. Its main purpose is to control the heat of the hottest components.
“We call it the parallel cooling architecture, with the help of the cold air that enters the inside of the console,” says Jbox Wall Director of Mechanical Engineering Xbox Iron.
The constructed architecture actually distributes air flows from the built-in cooler. Creating uniform cooling is the main goal that the system architects have set themselves. According to Wal, they literally played three-dimensional Tetris, trying to figure out where the components should be located and how to better place them.
Everyone who has ever taken apart an old Xbox 360 remembers that after removing the plastic case, an aluminum crawled out, which served as an electromagnetic screen like a Faraday cage. In the Xbox Series X, engineers were forced to abandon this solution because the console had to dissipate a lot of heat. As a result, along with an optical Blu-ray 4K UHD drive and a 315 W power supply, electrical shielding was added to the design.
“This time we had to think a little out of the ordinary,” says Andres Hernandez, director of electrical engineering at Xbox. “We still have case shields, but we localized the shielding instead of pushing all the iron into a sort of huge metal screen.”
Another hot spot on the console is the integrated solid state drive. In size, it is very tiny, but it heats up so much that the engineers had to rethink most of the heat-removing structure. In addition, SSD PC NVMe often lose performance due to overheating, so the developers should not have discounted chip heating. To cool this element, they used a special set of springs or, as they call it, thermal displacement springs. The latter move the card to the upper thick radiator, so through it it removes heat, receiving in return cooled air.
To cool the entire structure, a well-known Xbox One X steam chamber was used, as well as a heat pipe system. The aluminum radiator mentioned above is large enough to cover most of the motherboard, but it not only removes heat from the processor, but also cools the GDDR6 memory, whose heated chips have a high temperature, as well as regulators – one of the most powerful parts of the system.
To ensure the same noise level as on the Xbox One X, the developers placed as many as 64 sensors on the board. Data is constantly read from them, which helps to control the cooler noise level. The system firmware, which calculates the algorithm of its operation, is responsible for this.
In addition to the main design decisions, the developers had to face a number of minor difficulties, such as choosing the surface and type of bearings, which ensure the cooler is quiet during the entire service life, and the curvature of the corners of the case. Even the most insignificant at first glance details increase the efficiency of cooling, namely the movement of air inside and out.
“In order to drive cold air into the case, we placed ventilation grills and large openings everywhere,” explains Wal. “We have a huge hood from above, but the overall effect is achieved by combining all this, as well as the presence of a really powerful and quiet fan on top. With it, 70 percent more air flow passes through the console than in the previous generation system, and 20 percent more air flow passes through the radiator. ”
Designers had to try, choosing the thickness and curvature of the plastic sheets in order to achieve an interesting effect when looking at the console from above. For example, when a user looks at the top panel, the latter changes its appearance as it approaches the console and shimmers when the viewer raises or lowers his gaze. This effect was well worked out, and then enhanced by an additional green layer, which also has its own depth – it is thicker in the middle and thinner at the edges.
Finally, Kuyavsky told one funny incident from his life, noting the restriction of free space inside the case. It is so small that during the assembly of the production prototype on the line, the robots constructing the Xbox Series X got stuck at some point and were unable to leave the case. Designers urgently had to come up with a non-standard solution, adding another additional element to the design.
The Xbox Series X goes on sale during the 2023 Christmas holidays.
Read also: Inside the PlayStation 5: specifications and technology used by Sony in the new generation
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