NGGP: NextGen Garbage Pile (aka: No one reads the topics or stays on topic) *spawn*

[patsu]

I have been the most stoic resistor to the notion of massive OS reservations. However, if all the rumours and noises are saying that, it's time to reconsider rather than indulge in denial. What exactly is a console OS? I mentioned Orbis's significant 512 MB OS footprint, and if that includes all the features of the PS3 optional functions that consumed significant MBs (things like Friend List taking 20 MBs, Voice Chat taking 20 MBs, all on top of the OS reservation), it's not such a huge chunk relative to PS3.

So what could 3 GBs be? Maybe there's 1 GB HDD cache, handled by the OS? Maybe enough for a webpage for in-game guides? There's going to be something taken up by Kinect and voice recognition. IIRC they are more data driven than processing driven.

In short though, I think it's time to remind ourselves these are consoles are the OS will be console-centric, serving needs that we don't associate with PCs and smart-devices.

Assuming the AMD APU has an ARM core because of TrustZone. There will probably be some overhead managing and running secure OS services. This may also include disk cache, security services for PSN/XBL, HDD and BR.

Then, the device drivers for sensors, assorted controllers (natural interfaces or otherwise), and wireless/second displays.

Plus user-mode layers and apps such as the web browser, in-game XMB.

iOS fit most of these functionality + apps under 1GB. Android did so under 2GB. So most of the extra memory should be for data. Perhaps LiveWall "panoramic view" buffers. For Sony's case, whatever their OmniViewer takes.

 

[Ruskie]

Define "a bit".
These are devices that sell tens of millions of units, so a tiny change in one part adds up.
How many gamers here want to be on the hook for a decision that could amount to tens of millions of dollars?
You can try to stretch, if you think it somehow will yield additional tens of millions of dollars in return, but this is in the face of competition, shifting economics, a top-heavy software sales model, and diminishing returns.

I'm not sure what the big plan is, but it seems to imply that MS wants profitability at launch. I have nothing against that, its their money and their console, its just that I still think the consoles relay on "core" gamers the most, and not people wanting to watch netflix on it.

I'm also sure Durango will bring a nice leap forward (its been 8 yrs after all), but I'm not sure people will endorse the direction they are going with in comparison to their rivals. I guess we'll soon find out.

And bit part would be mostly about GPU which seems to be a place they surely made sure not to spend to much transistors.

 

[3dilettante]

I'm not sure what the big plan is, but it seems to imply that MS wants profitability at launch. I have nothing against that, its their money and their console, its just that I still think the consoles relay on "core" gamers the most, and not people wanting to watch netflix on it.

It implies Microsoft wants to get a net return over the whole production run for its decisions.
A design choice could lose money early on, but somehow contribute to a net gain over time.

If in the final tally a decision costs more money than it brought in, what's the justification for choosing it?

 

[Scott_Arm]

Define "a bit".
These are devices that sell tens of millions of units, so a tiny change in one part adds up.
How many gamers here want to be on the hook for a decision that could amount to tens of millions of dollars?
You can try to stretch, if you think it somehow will yield additional tens of millions of dollars in return, but this is in the face of competition, shifting economics, a top-heavy software sales model, and diminishing returns.

Exactly. Considering they've sold, what, 60 million 360s, the amount of money you'd have to throw at your BOM to make a significant upgrade to the machine would end up being probably a couple hundred million dollars. You either eat that out of your margins or raise the price of the box.

 

[Ruskie]

It implies Microsoft wants to get a net return over the whole production run for its decisions.
A design choice could lose money early on, but somehow contribute to a net gain over time.

If in the final tally a decision costs more money than it brought in, what's the justification for choosing it?

I'm just saying their direction is different, thats all. I'm not saying they should be mindlessly spend money on better hardware to cater "core" crowd.

If they are bundling Kinect 2 in every system, they are betting on it and to do it they are going to have to "cut" corners somewhere else. Their main competitor won't (or at least doesn't seem like it) and I myself think that will be decisive.

What will customers want more, what direction will be the more successful one I'm not sure, but I'm eager to find out.

 

[bkilian]

Are those budgets rigid? Rigid in the sense of what happens when engineering guys come up with a significant strategic improvement which would slightly surpass the budget...is there any chance for them to argue and discuss? Maybe zhis happened with Wuu...

They're not elastic, by any means, but they're not entirely rigid. Any change has to be justified with either "We absolutely _cannot_ achieve our goals without this", or "It will actually save us money in the long run, or provably make more profit". I saw a few changes made, and they were always completely pragmatic. "This change lowers our BOM by $10 a unit", or "It would cost twice as much to work around this problem than to just fix it, even with a higher BOM"

Its become rare thing to read such an insightful post on B3D (actually any forum for that matter). I guess you can't have it all. Power, price and versatility, but I'm not sure if they understood how much hardcore gaming actually meant to 360 and that the only reason they are still in gaming business is because of great engineering job, they would maybe stretch their budget a bit.

Still, for tech freaks and "hardcore" gamers here, this is kinda disappointing to read. Apple/Google obviously got to close to MS comfort zone and they feel the need to really take over your living room this time. Its going to be interesting match up, but I feel they won't be able to overcome hardware deficit.

Don't get me wrong, they still consider hardcore gamers in everything they do. They're just not the only market they start out aiming at. Looks like there's about 15 million hardcore gamers in the US (I'm being generous, counting all sales in the first 3 years), you know what Microsoft calls a product with an addressable market of only 15 million? A hobby. They want every one of the 100 million _households_ in the US to have not just one Microsoft device, but many. You don't get that with a product aimed squarely at only 15 million people.

Anyway, should probably take this to the next-gen chat thread, It seems a little off topic for the "which is better" thread

 

[Proelite]

So Durango suffers from:

1. Lower BOM than 360
2. BOM budget devoted to Kinect and TV
3. Significant existing RAM and CPU resources devoted to Kinect, Tv, and OS

One wonders what Durango could have been if it had the same BOM as 360, and didn't have Kinect bundled.

 

[bkilian]

So Durango suffers from:

1. Lower BOM than 360
2. BOM budget devoted to Kinect and TV
3. Significant existing RAM and CPU resources devoted to Kinect, Tv, and OS

One wonders what Durango could have been if it had the same BOM as 360, and didn't have Kinect bundled.

You don't know that. The total BOM may be the same as 360, or more, if they're willing to charge more. But I'd probably guess neither company is going to go with a BOM meeting the same level as the first revision of their previous generation.

 

[patsu]

What? PCIE has nothing to do with how quickly the GPU can acces data in it's memory pool. We're not talking about access to main system memory here, we're talking GPU <-> GDDR5 or CPU <-> DDR3. In the case of consoles that will be from GPU/CPU <-> memory pool. At no point are we dealing with the PCIE bus.

Regards,
SB

Most of the heavy lifting (number crunching, security, media processing, graphics, ...) are outsourced to specialized h/w units. The fast unified memory access or fast memory pool copy should help in delegating work to these units. The CPU cores seem to do all the OS housekeeping, manage the delegations, and run app logic.

PS3 handled most of these chores with just one 3.2GHz PPU core. The 8 1.6GHz cores in PS4 and 720 should be sufficient even if a few are stuck temporarily waiting for data. Naturally, the developers will need to manage their cache carefully to avoid stalling all of them.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

But I'd probably guess neither company is going to go with a BOM meeting the same level as the first revision of their previous generation.

Very true. Both MS and Sony are likely wanting to be profitable starting from the first year. Microsoft because they want to. And Sony because they have to.

One company doesn't want to take a large risk. The other company can't afford to take a large risk.

Regards,
SB

 

[LXFBN]

Microsoft are going to have a hard time attracting core gamers to their platform:

-Weak specs
-Less exclusive games
-Big focus on Kinect
-Monetizing every corner of their platform

It seems as though they've taken for granted what core gamers have done for their platform.

 

[Xenio]

Microsoft are going to have a hard time attracting core gamers to their platform:

-Weak specs

sony is in the same boat, sadly.

 

[Squilliam]

My guess for the large OS reservation is that Microsoft wants to make Kinect transparent to developers. Kinect has quite large libraries for voice and gesture recognition and this is about the only thing which will likely be able to soak up that much memory at launch, the whole rest of the OS could be done for less than 1GB even if they used all the features they could throw at it.

 

[Vic]

It's hilarious how devs are going to target the PS4's lower RAM, but somehow NOT the Durango's lower flops. If anything they'll do both. Go look at Xbox vs PS2 where Xbox had a massively massively better GPU, but 90% of multiplatforms basically looked like the PS2 game.

The fact is the RAM advantage for Durango (5:3.5) is 43%. Thats essentially as large as the flops advantage that everybody is rushing to bury Durango and crown Orbis king over. That and the possibility MS could reduce OS footprint over time and make it even bigger, say 6GB would seem to be a obvious target. I find the spin hilarious, I even see armchair gaffers declaring "whatever MS sets for the OS reserves cant ever be changed" wishful thinking. To which I point out how much the PS3 OS allotment was reduced over time. I dont think MS has plans to reduce os footprint currently, but I bet their plans may change if they realize they need extra visual punch vs Orbis. And say a 6GB/2GB split still leaves way more for OS than anybody seems to think reasonable.

That's not even knowing the rest of the systems. Apparently the audio DSP's in Durango are super powerful. In order to keep up with them is PS4 either going to have to downgrade audio, or suck up precious CPU cores? There are lots of caveats we dont even know about here.

I'd guess a 50% deficit in one narrow component might lead to 20% better looking games if that was the only difference. But now account Durango's more RAM, the fact most games are multiplatform, and maybe the difference will be 5%? With Durango possibly $100 cheaper if the 299 PPT is to be believed, and with Kinect packed in drawing casuals? And the fact Xbox is now the defacto brand in at least the USA and UK?

Xbox is the de facto brand in the UK? Guess you haven't been to the UK lately.

I agree with Prophecy, 3.5GB of fast ram will be enough for this gen, developers will work with what they've got. Even now 4GB is rarely demanded of PC games, and that will continue to be the case for several years yet. In a closed-box environment Orbis should shine.

 

[MrFox]

Very true. Both MS and Sony are likely wanting to be profitable starting from the first year. Microsoft because they want to. And Sony because they have to.

One company doesn't want to take a large risk. The other company can't afford to take a large risk.

Regards,
SB

Depending on what you qualify as a "large risk", I agree neither seem willing to have a big loss at launch (if rumors are true). But the CEO and CTO interviews make it clear Sony plans to have the best product in each of their 3 core markets, because it allows them to charge a premium for them, and they think they have the technological advantage to do that. They succeeded in the other 2 markets so far. Maybe they plan to have the PS4 a bit more expensive than the 720 at launch? My guess about the latest "we're waiting for MS to make their move" is probably only about pricing.

 

[ERP]

You don't know that. The total BOM may be the same as 360, or more, if they're willing to charge more. But I'd probably guess neither company is going to go with a BOM meeting the same level as the first revision of their previous generation.

Every company works to budgets, you'd be a fool to think that Sony doesn't do the exact same sort of planning, and discuss the exact same sort of tradeoffs.
What most of us don't know is what the original requirements were, and what changes were made for what reason.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

My guess about the latest "we're waiting for MS to make their more" is probably only about pricing.

That would be part of the risk avoidance. It's likely they feel they can't take the risk of being more expensive than the X360. Launching first means they'd give MS the opportunity to undercut them if they wished.

I think it's likely that Sony will attempt to match X360's price if it's low. But they are probably hoping that MS launches at a higher price point so they could potentially undercut them. But if MS prices "too" low compared to the PS4, then Sony likely won't match it if it means going into loss leader type sales.

There's a lot more risk involved for Sony than there is for Microsoft at the moment. If PS4 doesn't take off and be profitable then that is yet another unprofitable business segment for them. And while the company is slightly up for the past fiscal year, it's not so good that they can afford another loss making department.

Regards,
SB

 

[Averagejoe]

so all started with gpu orbis have 50% more flops (this not means the gpu is 50% more powerful), now we have that orbis is 50% more powerful?

source?

Sorry that is what i meant 50% more flops,other times i say 50% faster..

But you get my point theory's like this are wrong,because they count on one of the machines screwing up,the same can be say about some arguments in the PS4 favor.

 

[Averagejoe]

What? PCIE has nothing to do with how quickly the GPU can acces data in it's memory pool. We're not talking about access to main system memory here, we're talking GPU <-> GDDR5 or CPU <-> DDR3. In the case of consoles that will be from GPU/CPU <-> memory pool. At no point are we dealing with the PCIE bus.

Regards,
SB

No but you miss the point,both of this chips are on the same soc,latency will be reduce so communication will be faster and more efficient.

 

[Bagel seed]

Traditionally within the launch year of any console you're pretty much guaranteed a few game sales with accessories and now some percentage of revenue from subscriptions. So it's not completely necessary to be profitable on HW alone right away since you have a bit of buffer with the aforementioned stuff.

It just depends on the long term goals. It's like the difference between averaging out a $100-150 profit per console user lifetime with a low budget BOM vs an average of $50 with a higher one. No one has to bleed red if we're predicting at least a mild target of let's say 50 mil sold over 5-10 years. Spending "a lot" on HW isn't necessarily a foregone thing of the past. If someone does do that it's probably more from the view of a substantial investment of 3,4,5 billion to out do your competitor in some way to gain ground, for the next-next gen.