[-tkf-]

Originally Posted by AlStrong

Motors suck up a lot of power.

My point is that at work we got a USB Blu-Ray-Burner, it reads and burns at 6x speed, only one USB cable is needed. So USB power is enough..

[Acert93]

Originally Posted by -tkf-

Remember Sony owns some of the licenses

There are 2 other current console manufacturers (plus supposedly companies like Apple, Valve, Google in the wind). I think everyone would agree that after the aggressive moves Sony made to get Blu Ray into the PS3 at nearly any cost the PS4 will have a Blu Ray player. But from the general perspective of the merits/lack of merits of forgoing an optical drive (which next gen really means Blu Ray for most pragmatic purposes) the home-town discount only really applies to Sony. How does Sony owning licenses help Nintendo? Microsoft? Valve? For those companies the above merit is a demerit.

[AlStrong]

Originally Posted by -tkf-

My point is that at work we got a USB Blu-Ray-Burner, it reads and burns at 6x speed, only one USB cable is needed. So USB power is enough..

Between half-height and slim drives, there are trade-offs related to spin-up time, access times, max rpm, heat, failure rate, cache size, cost etc.

Don't think you'll find a 12x BD external slim...

[Squilliam]

Originally Posted by -tkf-

Why should it require more than a USB drive?

An external USB drive would require 500ma *5V = 2.5W *2 = 5W. However that'd be different again from a full speed drive running at 8* internal as it'd be configured differently. An internal drive would use a little over 10W I was wrong by a factor of two.

You just need a harddrive, which is already included so that the content creators can earn money on DLC and Sony/Microsoft can sell you music and movies.
It removes any reason to compromise like we see today, and since a DL Blu-Ray will still cost more, there is a semi soft limit at 25GB. Harddrive prices for a 250 vs 500GB? That is going to be a small difference, but even a 250GB drive with the proposed attach rate of 10 games over a console liftetime should still be enough.

You don't need a HDD for content streamed over the internet, music and movies can be stored on an external server ala Ultraviolet or similar. It is only games which need the HDD space whether for installs or downloads. A console which has both a mechanical HDD and ODD likely has a minimum floor price added of $100 which certainly would make it difficult to cut the price of the console in the future. You probably won't make back the cost of the HDD on downloads either.

??

You can't use an optical disc to download anything from the internet. You also don't need a HDD to stream content either. If the future is more towards the internet and high speed broadband, why include features which only add cost and add little value towards that end?

[Npl]

Originally Posted by Squilliam

1. 20W of console power and greater difficulties in cooling. If the console is coming in at 120W-150W post PSU, 20W represents about 13-18% of the total power budget which could be spent on either making the system cooling quieter or making the overall system faster within the same budget.

KK.

Originally Posted by Squilliam

2. It represents an additional cost of $20-40 depending on specs of drive and whether or not media playback is enabled. Remember Blu Ray playback costs ~$9.50 on top of the physical drive costs. They have to pay this cost no matter whether someone buys very few optical disc games because they rely on digital distribution and streaming or if they buy a lot of games.

There could be an option to purchase a license, similar like wma and flash has to be activated. Do these the costs include H264/AAC/DTS licenses - if yes then part of this will be necessary for a "streamer" too (unless you really want to go the way of a philosophically "free" VP8/Vorbis/HTML5 only device)

Originally Posted by Squilliam

3. It requires extra hardware just to mitigate the performance limitations and this adds to the total size, cost and power budget. You'd need extra RAM, perhaps a HDD etc to make up for the shortfall in latency and streaming speed.

Extra RAM would be useful for way more than just buffering, and given that next-gen will have atleast an option for HDD, why not just add a (slow&cheap) flash-based HDD in your cheapest model?
its not like you are limited to mechanical drives, so your "HDDs wont get cheaper" argument wont hold.

Originally Posted by Squilliam

4. It inflates the size of games. Developers releasing 6-15GB games would be a lot more practical to distribute electronically than 12-50GB titles and to receive these titles on the console for storage you'd also need to use a much larger HDD, say 500GB instead of say 180-250GB which is an additional cost for any HDD inclusive SKU and prevents the use of solid state memory for a SKU which has a HDD.

huh, you say that hitting devs with size restrictions is a good thing? You can put as much or little on a disc, small games stay small games.
Having to work your ass off to fit the game on a cartridge certainly cant be better than having to work around drive speed limits - there are a few BD games like Uncharted that manage this nicely.
Also some people like me greatly appreciate having all languages on one disc, and space for extras - something thats not given on cartridges as that would likely be the first thing to be cut away.

Originally Posted by Squilliam

5. It gives an inferior user experience because of the noise of the spinning disc and the time it takes to stream or download any title. Many people resort to installing games on the HDD in order to improve streaming speed and reduce noise, a cartridge gives an even better use experience than this without the wait.

I really doubt we will see cheap and fast
cartridges in the near future.

Originally Posted by Squilliam

6. Publishers are concerned about used titles and the used game market. They couldn't monetize used games and rentals in nearly the same way with optical discs given the fact that they're all mass produced and stamped the same.

Already worked around with things like Online pass - of course not as flexible as having writeable memory.

Originally Posted by Squilliam

7. You gain nothing in a console from taking advantage of the power of the internet, streaming etc by including an optical drive.

the power of the internet??? man Im happy I dont have to rely on the net and services running. Sounds like you`d be served right with a tabled and onlive, I certainly aint.

Originally Posted by Squilliam

8. People just might not think it's nearly as cool.

What? show me one person who played around with flashcards the way he gazed at CDs at one point in his life.

and related to point 6: flash has the problem of being writeable, and so far every cartridge-system got some hardware that electrically emulated the cartridges - with rather cheap electronic components. Making 1:1 copies of optical disc still requires hugely expensive factories.
So either you have to add some sophisticated locks and cryptography (in every cartridge) to deny someone simply flashing the newest game over a old cartridge, reseting usercount (or whatever you use to disallow used sales) - adding to cost, possibly reducing performance.
Or you end up with quite alot more lost sales than the used market is responsible for.
(or even both if your security measures get broken)

[-tkf-]

Originally Posted by Squilliam

An external USB drive would require 500ma *5V = 2.5W *2 = 5W. However that'd be different again from a full speed drive running at 8* internal as it'd be configured differently. An internal drive would use a little over 10W I was wrong by a factor of two.

You don't need a HDD for content streamed over the internet, music and movies can be stored on an external server ala Ultraviolet or similar. It is only games which need the HDD space whether for installs or downloads. A console which has both a mechanical HDD and ODD likely has a minimum floor price added of $100 which certainly would make it difficult to cut the price of the console in the future. You probably won't make back the cost of the HDD on downloads either.

You can't use an optical disc to download anything from the internet. You also don't need a HDD to stream content either. If the future is more towards the internet and high speed broadband, why include features which only add cost and add little value towards that end?

Yep, those 10 Watt was the same i could find for a LG 12xspeed drive, i just don´t see any problem with that. The internet is not the solution to all storage problems, that is pretty much a fact since isp´s started to introduce transfer limits. And without a harddrive there is no basket to put all your internet shoppings in, so that is a no go imho. That is not adding cost, that is providing a platform where you can milk money from the customers.

[-tkf-]

From another thread:

Loading time:
HDD vs Blu-Ray
http://youtu.be/V7alhJW80Iw

DVD vs Blu-Ray (with HD-Cache i guess)
http://youtu.be/IZ5LKiaK1vc

[hoho]

One "tiny" thing to note is that the DVD in XB was nearly as fast as they get while BD in PS3 is several times slower than it could be.

[Blazkowicz]

wild idea : a 7200 rpm single platter hard drive would be the standard.

the expense would be somewhat justified by the lower latency when streaming. huge enough for games, and an order of magnitude more throughput than the 20GB hard drives of early last gen.

[Acert93]

Blazkowicz, any handy links comparing performance (read, write, access, etc) between 5400, 7200, and 10000rpm 2.5" drives with various cache (8MB, 16MB, etc) and platter configurations?

[Blazkowicz]

dunno. I've found this year-old shoot out between 500GB to 750GB 7200 rpm drives, that gives an idea of performance, those are probably dual platter drives.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...50gb,2832.html

access times are 14 to 17ms, a figure not much different than in the late 90s.

7200 vs 5400 may be rendered moot if you only look at sequential transfer rates, this gives a theoretical +33% but a drive will twice the density is faster by sqrt(2). so a slower rpm, more dense disk is equal to a faster rpm, less dense one, for simple sequential copying.

here's a little video similar to the HDD vs bluray one, but with a laptop
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9f8fKn40kk
unscientific, with different capacities.. but we can see the perf divide widen a lot in the more stressful scenario.

[eastmen]

http://semiaccurate.com/2012/02/22/s...gb-flash-chip/

it uses 19nm and comes in at 170mm2 .

Prices are going to continue to drop.

I also apologize for not being able to respond to everyones posts tonight. Way to busy of a day, prob tommorow after work

[Gubbi]

Contract price for TLC NAND is $0.50 / GB. I'd be very surprised (and disappointed) if we don't see at least 64GB of solid state storage in next gen consoles.

Cheers

[-tkf-]

Originally Posted by Gubbi

Contract price for TLC NAND is $0.50 / GB. I'd be very surprised (and disappointed) if we don't see at least 64GB of solid state storage in next gen consoles.

Cheers

This article from Anand sheds some light on why it isn´t so easy.

On the other hand, we're concerned that the cut in prices is done at the expense of endurance. One advantage often heard about buying an SSD is that SSDs are a lot more reliable than hard drives. In terms of P/E cycles, that is probably true with current MLC NAND. However, there have been quite a few widespread firmware issues, such as SF-2281 BSOD and Intel 320 Series 8MB bugs. Those have been fixed, and we may finally be looking at SSDs which have good performance, adequate endurance, and are more or less trouble-free. However, TLC will require new controller logic, and new logic may result in additional firmware issues.

Putting an unproven technology in millions of consoles is, as this gen showed us, pretty optimistic.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5067/u...nding-tlc-nand

[pcchen]

Originally Posted by -tkf-

Putting an unproven technology in millions of consoles is, as this gen showed us, pretty optimistic.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5067/u...nding-tlc-nand

TLC is not good with endurance, but if all you need is some sort of semi-permanent storage, it's probably good enough. For example, some MP3 player and mobile phones use TLC as they don't really need to write into their storage that frequently.

If a console uses TLC then I suspect that it may have to be a two tier system. That is, a large portion uses TLC but that's mainly for game installations (i.e. read-only data). A small portion is used for game save data and other temporary storage needs.

[-tkf-]

Originally Posted by pcchen

TLC is not good with endurance, but if all you need is some sort of semi-permanent storage, it's probably good enough. For example, some MP3 player and mobile phones use TLC as they don't really need to write into their storage that frequently.

If a console uses TLC then I suspect that it may have to be a two tier system. That is, a large portion uses TLC but that's mainly for game installations (i.e. read-only data). A small portion is used for game save data and other temporary storage needs.

I am sure something could be hammered out with TLC, but while price is lower it´s without any doube the least proven technology out there and even with the the known Nand solutions there is plenty of challenges..

So add to the extra cost the extra risk of screwing it up.

[Acert93]

Taking that form of risk aversion last gen would not have seen:

* Xenos. Unproven shader architecture.
* eDRAM. Sporting logic on a new process node with dense eDRAM and a discreet bus requiring things like tiling.
* Cell. Large. Hot. Heterogeneous. Totally new microarchitecture.
* XDR. Hardly a volume product.
* Blu Ray. The definition of pushing a product as fast as possible out of R&D to market.
* Motion Sensors. While older technology was it well established how these devices would survive mass production into a commodity device intended for hours-per-day abuse by children?

If a product is in mass production and can be tested designers can use it in a closed box. It is more of a question of trade-offs. Per storage there is nothing to prevent it to be on a removable drive or for it to be replaced by such in case of failure. If a device has a 5 year projected use and you get 1k writes; assuming a 64GB drive that is 50% filled by volume a smart controller would make it last how long? The projections I have seen for MLC (3k-5k) is decades iirc.

A bigger issue of TLC I would think is reduction and you likely will be looking to transitioning to MLC or another technology so there may not be much of a cost drop for a couple years on the storage, assuming we don't see some kind of tiered storage (which makes more sense IMO).

[-tkf-]

Originally Posted by Acert93

Taking that form of risk aversion last gen would not have seen:

* Xenos. Unproven shader architecture.
* eDRAM. Sporting logic on a new process node with dense eDRAM and a discreet bus requiring things like tiling.
* Cell. Large. Hot. Heterogeneous. Totally new microarchitecture.
* XDR. Hardly a volume product.
* Blu Ray. The definition of pushing a product as fast as possible out of R&D to market.
* Motion Sensors. While older technology was it well established how these devices would survive mass production into a commodity device intended for hours-per-day abuse by children?

If a product is in mass production and can be tested designers can use it in a closed box. It is more of a question of trade-offs. Per storage there is nothing to prevent it to be on a removable drive or for it to be replaced by such in case of failure. If a device has a 5 year projected use and you get 1k writes; assuming a 64GB drive that is 50% filled by volume a smart controller would make it last how long? The projections I have seen for MLC (3k-5k) is decades iirc.

A bigger issue of TLC I would think is reduction and you likely will be looking to transitioning to MLC or another technology so there may not be much of a cost drop for a couple years on the storage, assuming we don't see some kind of tiered storage (which makes more sense IMO).

A bunch of excellent points, but afaik those that designed those "risks" had great knowledge and would imho have a better chance of knowing how it would playout, HiDef war excluded. Or in other words, i don´t put them as risky as putting TLC in consoles from the get go, is there even a SSD based on that now? (i know, i should google it)

[pcchen]

Originally Posted by -tkf-

A bunch of excellent points, but afaik those that designed those "risks" had great knowledge and would imho have a better chance of knowing how it would playout, HiDef war excluded. Or in other words, i don´t put them as risky as putting TLC in consoles from the get go, is there even a SSD based on that now? (i know, i should google it)

TLC is actually not that new, so I don't know why you think it's more risky than other new technologies. The first TLC flash chip was sampled in 2010 IIRC. OCZ wanted to make SSD with TLC flash, but apparently haven't been able to do so. For a generic SSD it's really very difficult to put something with a few hundred erase cycles in actual use while maintaining a reasonable lifespan.

However, if your data usage pattern is relatively static, a few hundred erase cycles should be more than enough.

[Acert93]

The Anand article says, "Just to make this clear, TLC isn't anything new. For example Hynix had a 32Gb 48nm TLC die in 2008. This is because TLC was originally used for devices like USB flash drives, where its poor endurance would be negligible."

[-tkf-]

Originally Posted by pcchen

TLC is actually not that new, so I don't know why you think it's more risky than other new technologies. The first TLC flash chip was sampled in 2010 IIRC. OCZ wanted to make SSD with TLC flash, but apparently haven't been able to do so. For a generic SSD it's really very difficult to put something with a few hundred erase cycles in actual use while maintaining a reasonable lifespan.

However, if your data usage pattern is relatively static, a few hundred erase cycles should be more than enough.

Isn´t that a problem? You are asking the Console manufactors to bet on their users not using the storage "that much". If we are lucky and console manufactors decide to include a browser, just that usage over a few years might be enough. As a user gets more games the need for re-installs grow as the size would have to be small on the flash to keep the prices down.

Yes it´s all wild guessing since we don´t know how much endurance would be needed and how much can be delivered. But consider that just getting SSD´s reliable enough and giving them enough of a life span has been a challenge even for intel. I would consider it a expensive challenge if Sony/Microsoft were to do it themselves. They need something off the shelf which apparently isn't there. .

[-tkf-]

Originally Posted by Acert93

The Anand article says, "Just to make this clear, TLC isn't anything new. For example Hynix had a 32Gb 48nm TLC die in 2008. This is because TLC was originally used for devices like USB flash drives, where its poor endurance would be negligible."

And they still use them for that? Still makes it new in the context we are discussing.. right?

[Acert93]

It doesn't look like TLC Flash is being used in a major way right now in SSD. But I think you are creating an artificial barrier between the risks I mentioned when you noted, "those that designed those "risks" had great knowledge and would imho have a better chance of knowing how it would playout" because (a) TLC is old tech and (b) they know how a SSD based on such would play out--more so than, say, putting eDRAM and logic on a die with functional tiling and a discreet bus to a dedicated GPU (aka Xenos) or how all the Blu Ray (especially the software layer) were going to shake out looking from the perspective of a 2006 launch from sitting in 2005.

Yes, the drive still needs to be made and the concern is obviously is a $0.20-$0.40/GB savings over MLC worth the investment and tradeoffs? It would seem so much simpler to go with 16GB or the like of SSD with a better lifecycle/speed and then a large (500-750GB for the time frames we are looking at) single platter 7200rpm HDD behind it. But I wouldn't be too concerned about an TLC solution; these are closed boxes after all and a company like MS or Sony should be able to nail down their own drivers and software for such. I mean Sony was able to not only fab Cell but to get all the libraries and SDK out for a completely new microarchitecture. If Sony/MS had a storage design chosen now (which should be one of the easier parts of these consoles) they essentially have 2 years of time for a end 2013 launch to ensure it is working properly.

Edit: all that to say that if they decided that saving hundreds of millions by going with TLC fit their requirements I am sure they could make it work. It wasn't much different from MS telling AMD/IBM their chips in the 360 weren't getting discreet memory pools but a shared pool and they had to make it work with the memory controller on the GPU. Or that they wanted eDRAM but were going to have to imbed the ROP logic on the die. If it saves millions and or meets your performance criteria you make it work. TLC may not meet those standards, so I dunno. But I wouldn't count it out because it isn't in the PC space--the reasons it isn't in the PC space make a lot of sense from a marketing perspective as it would be perceived as unreliable (already an SSD concern, if not an unnecessary one for the casual user). In a closed box console you are not looking at the same concerns from a marketing perspective, just a functional one. Taking a tech that is cheaper/inferior in some ways but meets your design goals is all that matters. Same criteria why SPEs aren't a good desktop solution but were arguably a good console one. But I personally don't know, but worth keeping in mind as moving data off a slow Blu Ray into a HDD w/ SSD memory could solve a big issue.

[Blazkowicz]

they would need some way to update the firmware. would be funny if that becomes a convoluted attack vector.

no, really TLC is made as a crap-grade flash and is useless for the caching of streaming from optical we were all talking about.
your idea of small SSD + HDD may be done, it could be both devices combined i.e. what we call a hybrid hard disk.

possible SKU differenciation here, you could have a bare 500GB hard disk or a 1TB + flash one.

[eastmen]

Originally Posted by Blazkowicz

they would need some way to update the firmware. would be funny if that becomes a convoluted attack vector.

no, really TLC is made as a crap-grade flash and is useless for the caching of streaming from optical we were all talking about.
your idea of small SSD + HDD may be done, it could be both devices combined i.e. what we call a hybrid hard disk.

possible SKU differenciation here, you could have a bare 500GB hard disk or a 1TB + flash one.

which is why they should ditch optical and just go strait to flash carts .

Yes its more expensive per game than optical , but in terms of what is needed in the actual system its alot cheaper and savings are found in other parts of the supply chain also.

You should be able to do 16 gigs of TLC flash for less than $5 per 16 gigs in 2013