7 ms·

I would have thought there was some onboard CPU on the kinect, based on the power requirements (it can't be powered by a USB port alone.) If so, I suspect that

by joshu 16y ago

I would have thought there was some onboard CPU on the kinect, based on the power requirements (it can't be powered by a USB port alone.) If so, I suspect that any heavy lifting the unit does is probably by software that uploaded to the camera via USB at startup. Anyone have further details?

icegreentea 16y ago
There is an onboard CPU on the kinect, but it doesn't do all the work. It still needs the 360s CPU to finish the processing and such. As a result, Kinect games will suffer a bit visually compared to normal 360 games. It's outlined in the ars technica review (and I'm sure in other places) http://arstechnica.com/gaming/reviews/2010/11/buy-a-house-clean-your-floor-move-your-butt-ars-reviews-kinect.ars http://arstechnica.com/gaming/reviews/2010/11/buy-a-house-cl...
wmf 16y ago
Yes, there's at least one CPU. It looks like the Kinect performs depth extraction on-board and the 360 performs gesture recognition. http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Microsoft-Kinect-Teardown/4066/1 http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Microsoft-Kinect-Teardown/406...
- mattmanser 16y ago
  Which, as stated elsewhere in the comments, is the really interesting bit of this tech. On the otherhand, it's still an impressive hack in terms of speed.
sparky 16y ago
Certainly there's some post-processing going on on the Kinect; whether it's via CPU, ASIC, DSP, or FPGA I have no idea. I'd imagine there's some signed code image that is factory-installed to some Flash or EEPROM on the Kinect; it's probably upgradeable via USB, but I don't think it can rely on the code being transferred over every time, since the posted driver gets depth images off the Kinect without doing so. EDIT: The link posted by another commenter http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Microsoft-Kinect-Teardown/4066/2 http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Microsoft-Kinect-Teardown/406... (Step 11) shows that the Prime Sense reference platform has Flash storage, almost certainly for code and calibration data.
- sparky 16y ago
  For posterity: it was revealed that the Kinect has a Marvell PXA168 (1GHz ARM + many peripherals). Source: http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4210757/Teardown--Kinect-has-processor-after-all http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4210757/Teardown--Ki...

by joshu 16y ago

icegreentea 16y ago

There is an onboard CPU on the kinect, but it doesn't do all the work. It still needs the 360s CPU to finish the processing and such. As a result, Kinect games will suffer a bit visually compared to normal 360 games. It's outlined in the ars technica review (and I'm sure in other places) http://arstechnica.com/gaming/reviews/2010/11/buy-a-house-clean-your-floor-move-your-butt-ars-reviews-kinect.ars http://arstechnica.com/gaming/reviews/2010/11/buy-a-house-cl...

wmf 16y ago

Yes, there's at least one CPU. It looks like the Kinect performs depth extraction on-board and the 360 performs gesture recognition. http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Microsoft-Kinect-Teardown/4066/1 http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Microsoft-Kinect-Teardown/406...

mattmanser 16y ago
Which, as stated elsewhere in the comments, is the really interesting bit of this tech. On the otherhand, it's still an impressive hack in terms of speed.

sparky 16y ago

Certainly there's some post-processing going on on the Kinect; whether it's via CPU, ASIC, DSP, or FPGA I have no idea. I'd imagine there's some signed code image that is factory-installed to some Flash or EEPROM on the Kinect; it's probably upgradeable via USB, but I don't think it can rely on the code being transferred over every time, since the posted driver gets depth images off the Kinect without doing so. EDIT: The link posted by another commenter http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Microsoft-Kinect-Teardown/4066/2 http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Microsoft-Kinect-Teardown/406... (Step 11) shows that the Prime Sense reference platform has Flash storage, almost certainly for code and calibration data.

sparky 16y ago
For posterity: it was revealed that the Kinect has a Marvell PXA168 (1GHz ARM + many peripherals). Source: http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4210757/Teardown--Kinect-has-processor-after-all http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4210757/Teardown--Ki...