Predict: Next gen console tech (9th iteration and 10th iteration edition) [2014 - 2017]

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iroboto said:
Ram is relatively cheap, the scaling continually shows a downward trend in price per GB.
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Prices today are roughly where they were five years ago, see here. They are more than double that of a year ago. Historically the memory market has been a boom/bust market, with every bust we saw consolidation. Last time (2012/13) Micron absorbed Elpida. We're now down to three major memory vendors: Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron. Fewer vendors means less competition. At the same time we see a slow down in Moore's law. I don't think another collapse in memory prices is just around the corner.

Cheers
 
Gubbi said:
Prices today are roughly where they were five years ago, see here. They are more than double that of a year ago. Historically the memory market has been a boom/bust market, with every bust we saw consolidation. Last time (2012/13) Micron absorbed Elpida. We're now down to three major memory vendors: Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron. Fewer vendors means less competition. At the same time we see a slow down in Moore's law. I don't think another collapse in memory prices is just around the corner.

Cheers
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Interesting and insightful.
Demand is so much larger than before that costs are increasing.

This will probably result in some interesting changes in the graphics world if the prices continue to stay up
 
The bigger problem than deman being larger is manufacturers holding back the production in favor of (apparently even more profitable) NAND, the prices will stay around what they are or even raise at least 'till H2/18, possibly longer, until Samsung gets their new DRAM-lines up and going. The whole new factory isn't coming before 19
 
iroboto said:
Many X1X owners are reporting that X1X loads much faster than XBO. So we need to look at more than just size of the disk, we also need to take a look at what they did to improve the transfer speeds.
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Does anyone know the exact specs of the internal 1TB drive? Is it a single platter or half a platter use, meaning even higher density? Even the Seagate 8TB ARCHIVAL (Shingled) drives have amazing throughput because of platter density.
 
MS reckoned they suspended the HDD on special damper to maximise reads by reducing vibration related read errors. So that might help a bit.

But large increases may indicate that CPU rather than HDD IO was often a bottleneck. 30%+ increase in core clock, 20% reduction in latency, and other factors like that virtualisation performance boost from cache tweaks should all make for a rather bigger than 30% increase in throughput.

Double the platter density, fewer read errors (are higher density HDDs more susceptible to vibration induced read errors?) and something in the region of up to a 40% CPU boost would all add up.

Bottleneck during loading could easily move between HDD and CPU hundreds or thousands of times per loading instance, so improvements in both areas should have most games pretty well covered.
 
function said:
MS reckoned they suspended the HDD on special damper to maximise reads by reducing vibration related read errors.
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I'm unconvinced. Bolt an HDD to a solid chassis and it won't be vibrating. Attach it to some softer rubber mounts of some form and it'll have room to vibrate. Unless they mean they've used dampening mounts for both sound suppression (introducing more vibration errors) and improved reliability (reducing vibration)?
 
Shifty Geezer said:
I'm unconvinced. Bolt an HDD to a solid chassis and it won't be vibrating. Attach it to some softer rubber mounts of some form and it'll have room to vibrate. Unless they mean they've used dampening mounts for both sound suppression (introducing more vibration errors) and improved reliability (reducing vibration)?
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Most HDD mounts in PCs come with silicon or rubber grommets to isolate the HDD from the case. The idea is that they absorb vibration that can build up in the HDD and prevent vibration in the metal case (from fans, optical drives, other HDDs) from transferring into the drive. I assume MSs thinking with the X1X is the same.

From what I recall of HDDs and optical drives, you can lose performance when the drive has to repeatedly scan for data when reads initially fail. It's not a bad sector, and the drive doesn't report a fail as such, as the firmware in the drive won't just try once then give up.

Frankly I'd have though damping a HDD was design 101, so it's not that impressive, but I'd be interested to know if MS found X1 suffered from any kind of vibration issues with the BluRay drive chucking itself around.
 
function said:
Most HDD mounts in PCs come with silicon or rubber grommets to isolate the HDD from the case. The idea is that they absorb vibration that can build up in the HDD and prevent vibration in the metal case (from fans, optical drives, other HDDs) from transferring into the drive. I assume MSs thinking with the X1X is the same.
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These other components should be isolated from transferring vibrations into the box then. Stick the fan on grommets, not the HDD. The HDD should be as solidly positioned as possible, meaning an inflexible mount in an inflexible box. Otherwise its own operation will cause vibrations. So seems to me anyway.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
These other components should be isolated from transferring vibrations into the box then. Stick the fan on grommets, not the HDD. The HDD should be as solidly positioned as possible, meaning an inflexible mount in an inflexible box. Otherwise its own operation will cause vibrations. So seems to me anyway.
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Surely all these machines are “vibration proof”. My AV equipment is next to a monster sub woofer which literally shakes the floor if the volume is too high. I’d be very surprised if electronics didn’t take this kind of risk into account.
 
London-boy said:
Surely all these machines are “vibration proof”. My AV equipment is next to a monster sub woofer which literally shakes the floor if the volume is too high. I’d be very surprised if electronics didn’t take this kind of risk into account.
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HDDs are working on the most ridiculously tiny dimensions (nanometre scale) that virtually any movement can cause a head to lose a sector and have to wait for it next pass.
* That leaves us with 17.7 Million tracks per inch.
* Considering the thickness of a piece of standard letter paper is 0.004” that means you could fit 70,800 tracks on the edge of a piece of paper.
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http://www.ept.ca/features/everything-need-know-hard-drive-vibration/

You should perform an experiment loading something on your PS4Pro with and without loud music playing and see if the time is affected.
 
I can't think of anythign that would be sensitive to vibration other than the HDD, which is why you isolate the HDD vs trying to isolate everything else.
 
Is this a function of CPU? Or pure HDD? Likely a combination. CPU is 50% faster on X.
 
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