How Does The Xbox 360 Work?

An Xbox 360 works in a way similar to a computer. The component that makes it "work" is the Xenon hard drive, which, by standard, has a 10 MB RAM drive. RAM stands for Random Access Memory, and it defines how quickly a machine can find a file anywhere in the memory unit.



The Xenon hard drive is located in the console, not the memory hard drive (attachable by the top in 20 GB, 60 GB, or 120 GB). How fast any console works is limited by two things, the technology provided to function, and the heat generated. A "heat pool" is the response to overheating in a hard drive. It has several metal walls which flow the heat electrons through each cell until the heat is evenly sifted through the air, and released in the console's vents.



The hard drive uses three sources for processing, a disc in the console, the memory drive, or a memory card. It takes information provided, and already in the console is a chip which executes proper functions. A game disc has hundreds and hundreds of functions. When put in the Xbox, this list is provided through the console to the hard drive. When the controller pushes a button, the chip which executes the proper function from the list of functions. New games run faster because the functions are listed in menus, and go as little as twenty. The amount of functions drastically increase when in gameplay, as the amount of rotations in an analog stick are very high, and each make a different thing happen.



Crashes occur for two reasons, the game disc is scratched and unreadable (the Xbox 360 ejects the disc and prompts the user this information when such occurs), or too many processes are trying to be executed at one time, i.e. Music playing while a game is trying to open several menus while simulating combat at the same time. Too many pending functions can cause the console to freeze.



The controllers which are wireless work in the same way, however, the RAM device built in is much more smaller, and only covers executions able to be done by buttons. When a button is held down, the controller tells the machine so, and the hard drive finds what function occurs when this button is pressed.

The Xbox 360 works the same way as a DVD player and uses HD technology to display the images. It come playable right out of the box and you only have to connect the green red yellow white and blue cables which are colour coded then connect the power box to the outlet and to the 360. Then just add a game and you can start playing. A PC uses the same technology but uses 40 million lines of code compared to the 360s 4.7 million lines of code.
The Xbox 360 also has a custom IBM PowerPC-based Central Processing Unit. Hope that helps