french toast
Veteran
Look I may ne out of the loop, but what makes you think those guys are all legit? I'm not saying they aren't...but you so certain?
8gb ram seems an awefull lot too me.
8gb ram seems an awefull lot too me.
Predict: The Next Generation Console Tech
- Thread starter Acert93
- Start date
- Status
it's a lot for a console that's being made for playing video games with media & other features being a side dish,
but when the console is being made with media & other features being equal or more important as the games 8GB is going to be needed to keep the console up to speed with the other PCs & media boxes that will come out over the years & still be able to play games that look good on top of all that.
x86 is used in systems that emphasize security. The usual insult about Wintel security had more to do with the Win part of the equation.
As far as having plenty of cash, Microsoft would still need to weigh the possible returns on its investment.
If AMD is the chosen provider, it probably was able to bring a whole suit of elements to the table.
The rumors make it sound like it offered main-line x86 cores, GPU tech, and other elements such as the uncore and security platform elements. There is millions to billions of dollars of inherent R&D to using cores already made by AMD for the service of a volume market.
The price of the deal would be uncertain, but AMD could be desperate enough to provide a discount, although having such a spread of options can provide a value argument of its own.
IBM's custom cores were okay for the targeted time frame and cost, but they remained one-off designs with limited tie-in to the crown jewels of IBM's microprocessor efforts. Even if IBM did opt to provide a design based on the big cores, on a per-core basis IBM isn't necessarily better than x86 for a console workload for the money a custom design would take.
Maxwell would be unproven, if it comes out in time. This sounds like a risky bet to take.
The primary objections to x86 last generation aren't as strong this time around, since AMD is offering more than just a CPU and it's desperate to justify its existence now that it has been knocked down so far in the CPU stakes by Intel.
Not really. Media functions don't need massive amounts of RAM. Films and music jsut stream data from HDD, and can operate with a very small footprint. Web browsing can consume a lot of RAM, but several gigabytes is still asking a lot. The only things I know that ever get close to consuming large amounts of RAM are productivity - video editing, development, music sequencing, hi-res photo editing. Bare in mind we have tablets with less than 1GB RAM doing all the 'other feature' things a console might be expected to do.
I'm thinking they are going to want a lot of reserved Ram for things like Whole Home DVR, Media Streaming to Tablets & other devices & more all while not interrupting the game.
Where I could see using a lot of RAM, is trying to retain the state of multiple apps and allowing you to always switch to them.
As I said earlier depending on how much OS Level functionality is "always available", and how rich these experiences are, potentially it could eat a lot of RAM.
You also have to pick a number for the OS and that number can NEVER get any bigger, so if it were me I'd be erring on the side of too much for the OS for initial releases.
Besides I'm not sure I buy into it being hard to use 8GB of RAM argument for a game. PC games don't because they can't. The issue of filling it off optical media is an interesting one.
TheWretched
Regular
Even so... looking at stuff like XBMC, where the OpenELEC variant runs (more or less well, some stuff could use optimization) on a Raspberry Pi, which has 256MB (minus GPU RAM)... and that's a FULL system, incl. the kernel etc. Also stuff like SMB, upnp, zeroconf ... it's a very elaborate system. And all that coming from an open source project. I can't imagine MS not being able to implement something like this in a closed source environment.
Streaming video isn't a big RAM user, the bigger issue with functionality like that is arbitrating access to the HDD assuming you have one. You'd be surprised how timing sensitive console titles can be and streaming in parallel would add a degree of randomness to disk accesses for the game.
I really don't imagine them doing any multitasking that would require a large OS footprint in memory. Couldn't they easily do some kind of "saved state" feature that writes to a cache on the HD? I believe that's how Apple's "Application Resume" feature works in OSX. I highly doubt the console would offer any significant multi-tasking features that would allow you to switch between a full media-center app and a game, or anything like that. At most I could see having a video stream for video chat available during gameplay, or something to that effect. Maybe picture in picture? Watch tv show while playing a game? I don't know why anyone would want to do that.
Maybe streaming a TV show to your Wife on her tablet while you are using the TV to play games.
If you REALLY had 8GB of RAM the need for timing-sensitive streaming would appear - at least to me - to be virtually zilch...
That's a LOT of RAM to buffer stuff into.Anyway, this talk about 8GB and media streaming etc, I don't buy it. AppleTV has 256MB RAM and does all that media streaming crap just fine, only reason it even has that much RAM is because it runs a cut-down version of iOS. If it was just some barebones firmware in there it could get away with less, and maybe even a lot less...
I believe it would be unlikely they'd turn the console into a media server. It would make more sense if you could just use the same account credentials stream/download multiple copies to your devices. For instance, if you have a "Xbox 720" and a Windows 8 tablet, you can log in to the same store from each and download/stream the movies you've purchased on either device. Maybe they'd allow you to copy files between them, or stream data, but I think it would be highly unlikely because of HD access interfering with game performance. I could actually see streaming from a Windows 8 PC or a Windows 8 tablet to the console being the more likely scenario.
If you REALLY had 8GB of RAM the need for timing-sensitive streaming would appear - at least to me - to be virtually zilch...
Yes but you have to get it in there in the first place you'd be looking at almost 2 minutes to fill 8GB @ optical disk speeds even with average compression ratios.
It's one of the reasons lots of memory isn't just an obvious win.
I still think it's useful to games, but I don't think you get much benefit if you just use it as a RAM cache.
Depends very much on the vision for the box. I have no insight into this, but there is a lot of reason to want it to be the center of the living room entertainment experience.
For purchased content I would imagine you are right the individual devices would use a common login and stream from the source, however if it has DVR functionality, then I would imagine playing games would not prevent it streaming to other devices. Outside the contention for the HDD I don't think the resource sync is that high, except potential cache/memory contention, though that could be minimized with additional hardware for the job.
Recording a video stream just needs a small buffer between the source and the HDD writes. Playing a stream just needs a buffer for the reverse and a framebuffer for the output. That's about 2 megabytes for a 1080p display. You could stream several HD video streams in a matter of megabytes of working space.
I agree with ERP in suggesting active application states could be kept in RAM, rather than written to/from HDD, to provide a more responsive environment. But 8 GBs is still a lot of space to do that with. Unless the new Xbox is going to have dozens of active apps sitting in RAM with big caches (thinking maps, photos), I see no rationale for lots of RAM for the OS background tasks.
There is also Kinect, and whatever improvements that it comes with. They may reserve a good chunk of memory for all of its sound, video and processing requirements. I really don't know how memory intensive Kinect is right now, or how high those requirements would go if they increased resolution, frame rate, switched to stereoscopic camera etc.
That isn't likely to amount to a lot in a system with 8 gigs of RAM. Even with 4 gigs of RAM, Kinect would be unlikely to use more than a few percent of that. I'd be blown away if the new consoles had 8 GB.
That isn't likely to amount to a lot in a system with 8 gigs of RAM. Even with 4 gigs of RAM, Kinect would be unlikely to use more than a few percent of that. I'd be blown away if the new consoles had 8 GB.
RAM is very cheap nowadays.
Making use of available RAM is usually not a problem for developers.
Edited my last post to clarify. I don't doubt they'd full use 8 GB. I meant an upgraded Kinect probably wouldn't require more than a small percentage of a total 4 GB.
- Status
Similar threads
- Locked
