Unlike the first Xbox, which used an NVIDIA graphics chip, the Xbox 360 uses a GPU known as Xenos, designed by ATI, and developed under the names 'C1' and 'R500'. The Xenos chip contains 48 unified shader units, which are capable of both pixel and vertex shading operations, unlike older designs that use separate specialised units for these tasks.
The Graphics Processing Unit package contains two separate silicon dies, each on a 90 nm chip manufactured by TSMC (the GPU proper) with a clock speed of 500 MHz and a 10 MB eDRAM daughter-die, manufactured by NEC. The daughter die enables the Xenos to carry out z-buffering, 4x FSAA and alpha blending with no appreciable performance penalty on the GPU.
The GPU also houses additional capabilities that are normally separated into a motherboard chipset in PC systems, effectively replacing the northbridge chip. An aluminium heat sink is also implemented to cool the GPU; this is shorter and wider than the CPU heat sink.
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