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A comment on Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on? by strken on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @12:54PM (#21325903)
Not sure what more recent xboxes are like, but the original xbox was a cut down windows 2000 running on Intel and Nvidia. It was really close to commodity hardware and software.
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Re:Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on? by MrFlynn on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @04:37PM (#21328254)
In terms of hardware, they're running on AMD x86 CPUs. AFAIK there isn't anything special about them, other than having a wider memory bus (they use GDDR5 as opposed to DDR4).
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Re:Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on? by ip26 on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @06:54PM (#21329293)
But it had a really thin OS layer, and everybody had virtually exactly the same box, so you could micro-optimize to the exact architecture. IMO it does fit the concept of "domain specific stack", it's just that homogeneity is one of the important properties of the stack instead of unbridled performance.
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Re:Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on? by luch on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @01:10PM (#21326095)
the current Xbox is running a Windows 10 (one kernel design) while the PS4 run a patched up FreeBSD.

Only Nintendo bothers with writing custom kernels, and historically Sony with the PS2 having exotic "Cell" processor units.

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Re:Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on? by StreamBright on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @01:48PM (#21326595)
You mean PS3? It had the CBE.
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Re:Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on? by diesal11 on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @08:21PM (#21340461)
The Switch also runs on FreeBSD, not custom.
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