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It said the chip comprises three 64-bit PowerPC cores running at 3.2GHz and sharing a 1MB Level2 cache. That harnesses a newly architected front side bus with 5.4Gbps throughput per pin, rendering a total bandwidth of a massive 21.6Gbps.

The chip is capable of running two threads simultaneously supporting the high bandwidths and low latency requirements needed for high-performance gaming.

However, the company declined to detail thermal performance at the show other than that it is fabricated using IBM's 90 nanometer Silicon on Insulator (SOI) technology.

It was built from scratch in

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two years using a number of IBM's plants and is now being manufactured at the 90nm East Fishkill, New York fab and at Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing in Singapore.

'The Xbox 360 project called upon the full range of IBM's On Demand technology capabilities, including our Engineering & Technology Services unit for custom design work and our world wide manufacturing resources to meet the aggressive time-to-market demands for this advanced microprocessor,' said Jim Comfort, Strategic Client Executive, IBM Systems and Technology Group.

Microsoft's XBox 360 is due to launch next month globally.

While IBM has yet to christen the XBox 360 chip, IBM is working with Microsoft's console rival Sony on the processor destined for the PS3, named 'Cell'.

Cell is a multi-threading, multi-core 64-bit chip designed to be capable of massive floating point processing and to be optimised for 'broadband rich media applications', such as delivering movies. IBM and Sony anticipate that a one rack Cell processor-based workstation will reach a performance of 16 teraflops per second. Furthermore, the Cell processors will support clustering to act as one huge parallel processing unit.