Hello forum. I've been investigating a particular dilemma I have: a broken Xbox (without a working disk drive). Do any of you have experience with the Xbox Xenos processor, and is it possible to use that processor (3.2 dual core) in a regular computer?

Much Appreciated. Wooly.

the best way to find out is to test it!

I would assume not, but I really have little experience in the matter.

No.

Most immediate issue I can think of would be socket compatibility, as I'm sure it has a proprietary format. Might even be soldered onto the Xbox motherboard.

YES, you can

However, Xenon is not intel-compatible, as it is a RISC-based POWER processor (same line as PowerPC by IBM), so you'd need a PPC-compatible OS. Many people have been successful at installing Linux on their 360s.

BTW: Xenos is the GPU, the CPU is Xenon

It was just a few years ago that you could easily buy a POWER-based PC (still can, just used...), so that's kinda harsh...

Can still get it on servers....

The most immediate issue is architecture

So you can't take it and put it into a pc, but you can install linux on the 360?

It's really semantical. What is a "PC" and how do you put something in it?

You could take a standard tower case, customize the mounting holes with tools, and mount all the 360's parts in there. Is it then a PC? You can even buy (very specific) parts for your 360-in-a-tower's-body and it'll be compatible (Microsoft used a select number of general PC parts that can be bought and is well documented). Is it a PC now?

The modern definition of a PC is generally agreed to be a general-purpose computer. a 360 is a computer, but due to the 360 OS, it isn't general purpose. By putting linux on there, it becomes general purpose and is now a PC.

So, to answer your question, you CAN take it and put it in a PC (depending on your definition of a PC) and you can install Linux on a 360 (or at least you could in the past, updates constantly change things). What you cannot do, though, is take the 360's CPU and use it with Windows or most commonly available motherboards.

Edit: Well... maybe... just maybe... it'd be possible to use qemu to emulate (not virtualize, qemu is an emulator, hence why this is is hypothetically possible) x86 on the Xenon processor running Linux, and then install Windows on there, and thus have Windows on it...

..but it'd be very slow, due to the emulation and the overheads involved in running two operating systems (though GNU/Linux can be made to have a negligible impact).

Yeah. Doing it would be 100% for bragging rights.