Xbox 360 and the Ring of Light

The XBox 360 was revealed last night, and it’s pretty exciting. It’s powerful, it’s cool, it’s better than any PC I’ve ever had. But here’s what I thought was really interesting: the “Ring of Light.”

The power button itself is unremarkable, but the LED lights that surround it, dramatically named the “Ring of Light,” are quite novel. The ring actually consists of four LED lights, each corresponding to one of the four possible controllers connected to the console, and also related to the Xbox Guide buttons on the controllers.

Here’s how it works (as far as I can tell): The Ring of Light lights up in each quadrant that is associated with a connected controller. On your controller, a light in only one of 4 quadrants of the similar “ring of light” tells you which of the 4 controllers you are.

Why is that important? Because the controllers are all wireless. You can’t trace the cord back to which slot you’re plugged in to. How many times have you had to to untangle the cords just to figure out who’s who?

A few more notes:
The Xbox 360 has a 3-core processor at 3.2 GHz each. That’s theoretically 9 times more powerful than my Powerbook.

The bus speed from the processor to the RAM is 700MHz. That’s the same speed as the processor on the Xbox sitting under my TV right now.