[-tkf-]

Another argument against digital distribution..

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...ming-video.ars

Clearly the ISP´s and Content providers have issues to resolve in a "download/stream" everything world.

[AlphaWolf]

Originally Posted by -tkf-

Another argument against digital distribution..

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...ming-video.ars

Clearly the ISP´s and Content providers have issues to resolve in a "download/stream" everything world.

While there's certainly going to be an issue for digital distribution for anyone with slower connections and data caps.

That article is fucking horribly written. They lowered the default quality to preserve bandwidth for customers, but it's just a switch to turn on full quality.

[-tkf-]

Originally Posted by AlphaWolf

While there's certainly going to be an issue for digital distribution for anyone with slower connections and data caps.

That article is fucking horribly written. They lowered the default quality to preserve bandwidth for customers, but it's just a switch to turn on full quality.

From reading around the net, it seems that plenty of customers have a real issue with Caps with this ISP and they can´t pick someone else either. Perfect!

[Shifty Geezer]

My evening broadband is becoming useless. 0.69 Mbps in an evening, one tenth of what can be got in the day. I'm thinking there are just too many users. Though fibre is being rolled out across the country, my particular village, surrounded by fibre-enabled townsteads, isn't even on the list to be considered!

[JPT]

Shifty would you mind giving this one a go

http://netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/

Once when your net is good and when its bad, then send me the links to your results, either in PM or posted in this thread.

One of my bad test results is this one, due to me playing with some ULA IPv6 stuff in here.

http://n5.netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu...cdd7-44f2-98be

And on our standard guest hotspot in the office

http://n5.netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu...174c-4c35-b83c

[Shifty Geezer]

Just done a slow one. Will do a quick tomorrow. Server BW wasn't measurable in this instance.

[eastmen]

I'm back...... and so is intel and micron announcing the first 20nm mlc nand for ssd use


http://www.anandtech.com/show/4271/i...or-use-in-ssds

An 8GB 2-bit-per-cell MLC NAND device built at 20nm has a die area of 118mm2, down from 167mm2 at 25nm. A single 8GB NAND device wasn’t built at 34nm.

For consumers there’s an obvious win. We need smaller transistor geometries to reduce the cost of NAND, which ultimately reduces the cost of SSDs. The days of 50% annual price reductions are over however, expect to see a conservative 20 - 30% drop in price for SSDs that use 20nm NAND over 25nm NAND.

16GB sd cards are $20 bucks now . A nice 30% drop would mean $16 at retail. It will most likely cost less than $5 for the manufacturer to produce.


Its going to hit not in 2012 or 2013 but in 2nd half of 2011. This is a major step up and its my understanding that the reads don't hurt flash its the writes. So they can reduce the size further for consoles by going with TLC instead of MLC at 25nm it saved about 20% die space. So we can see closer to 50% drop in costs by the end of this year for what we'd want to consider for a console cart

[-tkf-]

Originally Posted by eastmen

I'm back...... and so is intel and micron announcing the first 20nm mlc nand for ssd use


http://www.anandtech.com/show/4271/i...or-use-in-ssds










16GB sd cards are $20 bucks now . A nice 30% drop would mean $16 at retail. It will most likely cost less than $5 for the manufacturer to produce.


Its going to hit not in 2012 or 2013 but in 2nd half of 2011. This is a major step up and its my understanding that the reads don't hurt flash its the writes. So they can reduce the size further for consoles by going with TLC instead of MLC at 25nm it saved about 20% die space. So we can see closer to 50% drop in costs by the end of this year for what we'd want to consider for a console cart

The new SSD disk generation didn´t really show a price drop vs capacity maybe these 20nm will help.

But maybe it would be good to have a clear idead of what you propose.

SSD disk instead of harddrives and games developed and released on flash?

Or how does it work?

[AlphaWolf]

Why do you insist on using SSD prices? What is the point?

[eastmen]

Originally Posted by -tkf-

The new SSD disk generation didn´t really show a price drop vs capacity maybe these 20nm will help.

But maybe it would be good to have a clear idead of what you propose.

SSD disk instead of harddrives and games developed and released on flash?

Or how does it work?

Why SSD prices ? You have to remember that the newest SSD disks that are faster . Prices have still come down. I bought my vertex 2 for $170 its a 128gig drive thats how much i paid for my 60 gig vertex 1


N SD card form factor should be good enough remember even cheap sd cards are at 10MB/s with some going up to close to 30MB/s . CF cards can hit a 100MB/s

I propose something slightly larget than a 3DS card.

So basicly you go to the store and but the game just like you do now , except your on flash. It allows so many benfits.

The other thing I'd do is add multiple slots so you can have multiple games in at once. I invision gears 5 being able to acess gears 4 maps for multiplayer if you have gears 4 in another slot. This will reduce the used market.

[eastmen]

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/...d-flash-memory

While Sandisk was revealing future plans, Toshiba outlined possible uses for the chips saying it can cobble together 16 65Gb chips in one package to produce 128GB drives for use in smartphones and tablets. Just like IM Flash before it, Sandisk said that shrinking NAND flash chips down to 19nm does not sacrifice reliability.

Read more: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/...#ixzz1KaqjjvJB
The Inquirer - Computer hardware news and downloads. Visit the download store today.

They said they are working on 3bits per cell units which should drive costs down further as they are smaller. Of course it kills the number of writes but we really only need it to be writen to a few times at most.

[-tkf-]

Originally Posted by eastmen

Why SSD prices ? You have to remember that the newest SSD disks that are faster . Prices have still come down. I bought my vertex 2 for $170 its a 128gig drive thats how much i paid for my 60 gig vertex 1


N SD card form factor should be good enough remember even cheap sd cards are at 10MB/s with some going up to close to 30MB/s . CF cards can hit a 100MB/s

I propose something slightly larget than a 3DS card.

So basicly you go to the store and but the game just like you do now , except your on flash. It allows so many benfits.

The other thing I'd do is add multiple slots so you can have multiple games in at once. I invision gears 5 being able to acess gears 4 maps for multiplayer if you have gears 4 in another slot. This will reduce the used market.

Ok, still trying to get the message, sorry

You want the Consoles to have SSD or Standard Harddrives?
And then deliver the games on 16GB(?) cards?

[eastmen]

Originally Posted by -tkf-

Ok, still trying to get the message, sorry

You want the Consoles to have SSD or Standard Harddrives?
And then deliver the games on 16GB(?) cards?

Yea , I figure you get rid of the optical drive and the 2.5 inch drive and instead put in a single plater 1TB 3.5inch drive. You will greatly reduce the size of the console.

Then you ship the games on 4 /8/16/32/64 GB cards depending on whats needed. Obviously some games will still fit fine in less than 8 gigs of space and some even on just 4 gigs of space. Some would need more .

[eastmen]

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...-i,2940-9.html

thought this was interesting in regards to the new class 10 cards.

Looks like access time is 1.15 ms

Random reads are hitting 50MB/s

sequential reads are able to hit the 60MB/s mark.


SD cards are getting quite fast and a custom package with a dumb raid 0 controller can really push these numbers. You can be looking at a 120MB/s

[-tkf-]

http://www.computerworld.com/s/artic...esearchers_say

Some of this was hinted earlier when intel released drives based on smaller sized nand

Basicly as size goes down, errors goes up and eats into advantage of having smaller nands.

[pcchen]

There are some possible technical advances could be done in SSD, such as better error correction codes (there's a recent paper about Error-Prediction LDPC which claims the possibility to extend SSD's lifespan by 10 times). Furthermore, there are also alternative SSD technology such as HP's memristor which may become practical in a few years.

[-tkf-]

Originally Posted by pcchen

There are some possible technical advances could be done in SSD, such as better error correction codes (there's a recent paper about Error-Prediction LDPC which claims the possibility to extend SSD's lifespan by 10 times). Furthermore, there are also alternative SSD technology such as HP's memristor which may become practical in a few years.

This discussion started out with the next gen consoles in mind. Is it feasible to use SSD in the next gen consoles and or Flash Cards.

With Vita launched we might get some more insight into this discussion, Uncharted for Vita is around 3GB

[pcchen]

Originally Posted by -tkf-

This discussion started out with the next gen consoles in mind. Is it feasible to use SSD in the next gen consoles and or Flash Cards.

With Vita launched we might get some more insight into this discussion, Uncharted for Vita is around 3GB

If you just want to talk about "next gen consoles" why did you bring up that article which talks about something extrapolated to 2024?

[-tkf-]

Originally Posted by pcchen

If you just want to talk about "next gen consoles" why did you bring up that article which talks about something extrapolated to 2024?

The article/research paper is one of the few i have found that gives good numbers to the disavantage of shrinking nand sizes. One of the main points in using SSD/Flash cards was that eventhough the need for more space for games grew, the aggressive shrinking would help reduce the price for the storage.

[pcchen]

Originally Posted by -tkf-

The article/research paper is one of the few i have found that gives good numbers to the disavantage of shrinking nand sizes. One of the main points in using SSD/Flash cards was that eventhough the need for more space for games grew, the aggressive shrinking would help reduce the price for the storage.

There are two different situations here. If you just want to use flash for "distribution," then the disadvantages are not big problems even if there's no new technologies. You don't really need to modify data on your distribution media (at least not much), so you can even use TLC for distribution, even though many TLC flash can only be erased for a few hundred times.

If you want to use SSD in a console, and distribute through internet downloading, of course the problem will be much bigger. If a next gen console has no optical drive, and solely use flash and internet downloading for distribution, you'll want to have a large internal storage to store these games. If you use a smaller SSD to store games, it won't be able to fit many games and gamers will have to delete some to make place for new games (and will have to re-download the deleted games later if they want to play them again). This is hardly an acceptable solution.

IMHO the only possible situation that a next gen console only have SSD as storage is that the storage is used as a cache, and games still are distributed through normal channels (i.e. optical discs or other physical media). It's possible to distribute games with flash, although they are still expensive (you are looking at about US$1 per GB and that's much more expensive than a Blu-ray disc).

But anyway, extrapolating to twenty years later based on current technology is, well, not a wise move. As I said, there are and will be more advances in flash storage, and it's not as bleak as that article said.

[Prophecy2k]

The notion of SSD as a possible delivery medium for games is dead for next-gen consoles. Next-gen consoles will use blu-ray/DVD drives and i wouldn't be surprised if even Sony allowed for games to be printed on DVDs with PS4 to allow for faster read/write speeds.

I can see a small pool of solid state memory included within each console, however that would entirely depend on the demographic Sony/MS are gunning for with their boxes (i.e. uber next-gen boxes or wii-ified current-gen ones).

[-tkf-]

Not to be annoying or anything, but this topic is long and most aspect were discussed. Though i can understand that reading 40 pages might be a bit much

[hoho]

Originally Posted by Prophecy2k

i wouldn't be surprised if even Sony allowed for games to be printed on DVDs with PS4 to allow for faster read/write speeds.

Can't they just use faster BD drives? PS3 used 2x BD drive while 12x should be the max. Though I admit I'm not quite sure how big is the latency difference between BD and DVD

[function]

Originally Posted by hoho

Can't they just use faster BD drives? PS3 used 2x BD drive while 12x should be the max. Though I admit I'm not quite sure how big is the latency difference between BD and DVD

A 12X BR drive would probably sound like a hair-drier in a cardboard box. It'd be spinning way faster than the 360's DVD drive, something like 10,000 rpm iirc.

[hoho]

Originally Posted by function

A 12X BR drive would probably sound like a hair-drier in a cardboard box. It'd be spinning way faster than the 360's DVD drive, something like 10,000 rpm iirc.

How loud would the "faster than BD" DVD drive be? I had XB360 and PS3 for a while and XB was horribly loud while only being relatively tiny bit faster than PS3.