What clock speed did the Xbox 360's three-core CPU run at?

The Xbox 360's three-core CPU ran at a clock speed of 3.2 GHz.

Microsoft developed the processor with IBM, using a customized PowerPC design known as Xenon. It contained three processing cores, and each core could handle two threads simultaneously through simultaneous multithreading. This gave developers substantial parallel-processing capacity for games released during the high-definition console generation.

The 3.2 GHz figure describes the processor's clock frequency, not the console's graphics performance or total computational output. CPU clock speed measures cycles per second, while performance also depends on architecture, cache, memory bandwidth, software, and the workload being performed.

The Xbox 360's processor is often confused with the console's ATI-designed graphics processor, which had a separate architecture and specifications. It is also distinct from the later Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S chips, which use AMD x86-64-based designs rather than the Xbox 360's customized PowerPC family.