Take an Elevator to the Stars (AP)

IBM has been working with Microsoft since 2003 to develop one of the microprocessors found in the upcoming Xbox 360, the console gaming system expected to deliver a significant boost in graphics power to enthusiasts.

Production of that chip is under way at IBM's facility in Fishkill, N.Y., and at Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing in Singapore, officials said Tuesday.

IBM also unveiled some of the details behind the chip's architecture at the Fall Processor Forum in San Jose, Calif.

The chip is built with three cores, each with a customized version of IBM's 64-bit PowerPC core and capable of clock speeds greater than 3GHz. In addition to the three cores, the chip has a 21.6Gbps front side bus (FSB) and 1MB shared L2 cache helps the cores process the computations needed to deliver the next-generation console graphics and applications.

The alliance with IBM is hardly the first time IBM and Microsoft have worked together, though this particular pairing is ironic. Back in the early 1980s, it was IBM that looked to Microsoft to supply the first operating system, PC-DOS, for the original IBM PC.

Almost 25 years later it is Microsoft looking to IBM to help design and supply processors for its computer, the Xbox 360 game system. (Full Story)