Alternative distribution to optical disks : SSD, cards, and download*

[MrFox]

No my argument is to use a bigger card. What game wouldn't fit on a nand chip ? We have sd cards up to 512 gig and micro sd cards up to 256 gigs. That's beyond bluray xl sizes which top out at 128 gigs.

 

[eastmen]

Digital is regressive ; taking away our ability to own and sell games. People always want to give up freedoms I guess. Anytime I can I buy physical I do, very rarely will I buy digital, only for the best games where I have no choice.

Your buying physical games that don't have the full game or final game on them. So your already giving up that freedom

Consoles have been regressing since the 7th generation ; patches (incomplete games), dlc, increasing emphasis on digital. 6th generation and earlier, now those were real consoles. Now we just have gimped PC's (Albeit with less software issues), but at least physical games have value unlike on PC. These things were inevitable with the rising cost and time of game development, but it still sucks.

I don't see a problem with patches since they can fix games , there were patched games since the Atari and maybe even further back. The difference is your were SOL if you bought the game with bugs and a new edition of the cart was made with the bugs fixed.

I don't know, I'm assuming the PS4 Pro is 14nm and the Xbox One S is 28nm. Simply a tiny new revision and binning of the same chip (it adds at best an output mode? is that even just wiring/support components and firmware?), shaving a few tens of millivolts here and there, a new motherboards that adds a few % efficiency on the VRMs, a design inherently less power hungry than the original PS4 (RAM and GPU specs), even shape of fan blades.

I think that about does it, even a 5% lower CPU or GPU voltage goes a long way. I might have made a bad joke in my previous post.
/edit : I guess I'm just stupid as a web search says it's built on 16FF.

For the Scorpio the thermals might be another story, sure. Quite a specs bump but if they want it quiet it's design choices about sizing the console or cooling.

I thought they were both 14nm . The xbox s also has the power supply included in it. The xbox one s also drops a good 30w of power playing games and watching blurays vs the xbox one. So I dunno

Digital is doubly stupid. There were such things as analog video games, but they predated the VCS 2600. How about some information highways, thanks.

I am a big board game player , that's what 90% of my time at pax east is spent doing

$4.5 ~$5 contract price for poxy 16GB SD, minus copying and extra security hardware. Large cards would potentially waste tens of GB of space. It's an incredibly expensive and wasteful proposition when mobile isn't a consideration. Most SD cards are not remotely in the 300 MB/s range, and the ones that are cost a lot more.

You sould tell transcend and sandisk they are doing it wrong since I can buy a 16GB SD card for $8 shipped to me from amazon in packaging. I think your prices are out of date. Also a publisher would be able to select the size of the card they want. They aren't limited. If a game fits on a 16GB card they can do that , if they need a 32gig go for that instead and so on and so forth

Nothing to stop games coming on multiple BRs, or having several tens of GB of download data, or in the future coming on multiple 100GB BR disks. SD will never get close to the distribution cost of BR in the lifetime of Scorpio, and the move is towards online distribution where there is no up front media cost.

you mean driving up costs ? thought we couldn't do that or is that only when its nand chips.

Problem with Multiple BRs is that your going to still need to install them. I believe your limited to 2TB 2.5 inch drives right now. So if your shipping a multiple 100GB disc game your going to fit just a few games on your drive. So bluray is just going to cost you else where. I guess maybe put in multiple hardrives in the console

 

[eastmen]

Console fans didn't design these machines. MS and Sony both set out to make the best, most attractive console they could. Both had the option of using cheaper, faster, better SD cards for their games as you predicted (to the point of saying there wasn't a valid argument to the contrary), yet both went with BRD.

Yet this was 4 years ago and we saw the out rage over DD and online authentication . So MS / Sony weren't really free to design the consoles as they wanted too.

If gamers had any impact on the consoles like they did with XB1's policies, you'd have seen a console announced that used cheaper, faster, better SD cards for games, then the gamers complain across the internet, and then the companies changing their minds and putting a BRD in there. Probably delaying release a year at least (redesign, change manufacturing, press launch game discs etc.). That didn't happen. The technical experts and engineers made that call, not gamers.

Or perhaps gamers would embrace the sd cards and enjoy faster loads . We can see now a subset of gamers wanting to put SSD drives into their ps4s or gamers trying to get the fastest external drives for the xbox one to squeeze seconds off load times. So there is certainly a sub set of gamers out there that want a premium experience .

Instead of blaming gamers, you need to either state MS and Sony engineers are more backward and unintelligent than you, or acknowledge that your 2011 predictions were wrong and flash wasn't a viable option.

why we already have an actual example 4 years ago of gamers over turning choices made by MS engineers. The negative backlash on their plans was a problem .

Your reply when presented with the case of wanting three 40 GB games was to install the third onto the internal SSD. And then if you wanted a download to download to the SSD. Nothing at all about using a larger card (or adding that expense on the cost of the console for the end user).

And you were definitely talking about installing on external SD cards as a user expansion as the above was a continuation of this:

If you want three 40GB games then go buy them on carts at the store , or download them to your systems internal drive and an option is an sd card. You can already do it on the xbox one. You could have also done it on the xbox 360. The last 2 options existed on MS plaforms since like 2009 on the xbox platform.

I mean its a nice road map , is there any dates at all ? Any of this avalible. I don't see 300GB discs avalible . Last year Micron announced a 768Gb nand flash memory . That's 96GB capacity per chip as TLC which is the same size as their current 384Gb TLC which is 48GB and they are saying its going to be 30% cheaper per GB. Samsung late last year talked about going from 128Gb TLC to 512Gb TLC parts and being able to 1TB of TLC flash in a single pckage. Toshiba is building a new 3D nand plant for late 2018 also . There are big investments in that area.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

why we already have an actual example 4 years ago of gamers over turning choices made by MS engineers. The negative backlash on their plans was a problem .

I explained why - the backlash was after MS announced their plans. Ergo if it was gamers holding back SD adoption, it would have happened after one of the consoles was announced as using SD cards. Ergo the design decision was an engineering one, hence you need to decide and state whether MS and Sony got it wrong and you are a better engineer than them, at least when it comes to calculating best distribution method, or that you were mistaken and your beliefs in 2011 about the future economy of SD cards were wrong and SD cards weren't a viable alternative.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Yet this was 4 years ago and we saw the out rage over DD and online authentication . So MS / Sony weren't really free to design the consoles as they wanted too.

Of course they did. Any company is free to design their product how they like (as long as it's safe to use) but companies accept that some designs or operational product design choices may limit the appeal of said product. Microsoft clearly did not have the conviction that their proposed DRM solution, which was probably not helped by different execs giving conflicting accounts of how it would work. By that time they'd so fucked up the messaging it was simpler to kill it entirely than try and explain it. Dropping it was a bad decision but I felt they created the mess themselves.

Or perhaps gamers would embrace the sd cards and enjoy faster loads . We can see now a subset of gamers wanting to put SSD drives into their ps4s or gamers trying to get the fastest external drives for the xbox one to squeeze seconds off load times. So there is certainly a sub set of gamers out there that want a premium experience .

Is this really a widespread issue? I know some games (Bloodborne for example) have long load times but most of the games I play a lot on console do not, they're almost seamless or loading times are infrequent and/or fast. And the act of actually loading a game is pretty non-existant with suspend/resume. From the console in sleep mode you can be gaming in a few seconds.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Star Wars Battlefronts has miserable loading times. Of course for games that do have terrible loading times, how much is the data transfer rate and how much is the processing of the material?

 

[MrFox]

I can't tell if he honestly thinks a 512GB flash cart is a viable distribution format for games, or if he's just been trolling for 9 years.

I mean its a nice road map , is there any dates at all ? Any of this avalible. I don't see 300GB discs avalible .

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/prod...3_30tb.html/?gclid=CN_O6ci37dICFZaFswod1owJRw

First generation of this cartridge was BDXL. This is Gen 2 using 300GB discs, the next cartridges size will be 6TB, and the next one will be 12TB. Enterprise is where the money is for this capacity, same thing happened with BDXL, but they did try some PC drives.

For real world applications, see Amazon Glacier, Facebook, and many VFX and production studios. This is replacing LTO-WORM with true nearline cold storage, random access, and infinite read robustness.

This exactly what holodisc promised for the enterprise, didn't you love holodisc?

 

[function]

You sould tell transcend and sandisk they are doing it wrong since I can buy a 16GB SD card for $8 shipped to me from amazon in packaging. I think your prices are out of date.

"Last Update: Mar.23 2017 18:10 (GMT+8)"

http://www.dramexchange.com/

My prices are up to date; your expectations are unrealistic.

Also a publisher would be able to select the size of the card they want. They aren't limited. If a game fits on a 16GB card they can do that , if they need a 32gig go for that instead and so on and so forth

Which is why there would be pressure for smaller sizes and compressed / quality reduced / cut games. And DD would be inflated as a consequence too. Worse product, higher prices.

you mean driving up costs ? thought we couldn't do that or is that only when its nand chips.

You really want to compare going from $0.5 to $1 for two BR disks to requiring a 128 GB SD card?

Ten BR disk for around the price of a 16GB SD card. It's not a contest. That's why things are the way they are.

Problem with Multiple BRs is that your going to still need to install them. I believe your limited to 2TB 2.5 inch drives right now. So if your shipping a multiple 100GB disc game your going to fit just a few games on your drive. So bluray is just going to cost you else where. I guess maybe put in multiple hardrives in the console.

Wut.

Problem with dozens of flash cards is that you have to pay for them.

Two or three HDDs work out massively cheaper than buying dozens of high capacity, high speed SD cards. And they're a lot more efficient as a single 1TB drive can store 15 ~ 30 AAA games, minimising wasted space. SD cards? No.

It's not even close.

 

[function]

I can't tell if he honestly thinks a 512GB flash cart is a viable distribution format for games, or if he's just been trolling for 9 years.

Sometimes you gotta play the long game.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Will HDD density increase once again? It's been stagnating with the vendors just adding platters and using a silly trick with overlapping tracks (for archival grade HDD although that would work for games you mostly write once)

But if it doubles, and is thus (sqrt 2) faster than the current state of the art, it might be good enough. Like, quite possibly 200MB/s average on 5400 rpm.
Allow a CPU core to burst at 3.5+GHz even if it's just a special mode for loading screens. Yes, about 3x the single-thread performance of a 2.1GHz Jaguar, should be good for something?

NAND, perhaps more accurately 3D-NAND / V-NAND : yes it improves, maybe you'll see your 1TB for $100 and saturating the interface speed but well, that will still be expensive. And risky, as Moore's law can actually be ending for good or perhaps just cycles of overinvestment and underinvestment. We might be entering an era where it's like with DRAM prices (or oil prices) : year on year the price might be down 50%, but in a bad year it doubles in a matter of months/weeks.

even a $10 card/cart will still be $10. I wish we had $0.50 128MB cards (or bigger size), in a form factor we can write on. Floppy replacement! But I've never seen stuff cheaper than about $5. And with no parallelized read/writes that's slow as hell.

There's currently nothing on the HDD roadmap that will come out soonish that increases HDD area density significantly for the consumer space. There are some technologies that are being worked on but in all cases they've either been problematic to implement or will be too expensive for the consumer market. HAMR was the most promising but has suffered numerous setbacks and there is doubt as to when or if it'll eventually enter the consumer market.

Most tech analysts are expecting little to no progress through 2020, and the potential for 10-30% per year growth in area density after that if some technologies being researched pan out.

IF, big if, the problems associated with HAMR can be solved and if it can be combined with some other technologies, we could see a dramatic increase in areal density. There's a lot of big ifs. And after the numerous delays and problems encountered with HAMR, many remain skeptical of whether it'll be applicable to the consumer market and if it does, whether it would be available at anything resembling the consumer friendly pricing that we've had for HDDs up until now.

Regards,
SB

 

[eastmen]

I explained why - the backlash was after MS announced their plans. Ergo if it was gamers holding back SD adoption, it would have happened after one of the consoles was announced as using SD cards. Ergo the design decision was an engineering one, hence you need to decide and state whether MS and Sony got it wrong and you are a better engineer than them, at least when it comes to calculating best distribution method, or that you were mistaken and your beliefs in 2011 about the future economy of SD cards were wrong and SD cards weren't a viable alternative.

Yes and both xbox systems now can use SD cards games just don't currently ship on them. I have already admitted in numerous previous posts that neither company went with shipping a console using only sd cards in 2013. But again this is not 2013 anymore and again the market has changed and continues to change. Think about it how there was a new generation with xbox one and ps4 but now we have higher end premium upgrades and not a new generation

 

[eastmen]

"Last Update: Mar.23 2017 18:10 (GMT+8)"

http://www.dramexchange.com/

My prices are up to date; your expectations are unrealistic.



Which is why there would be pressure for smaller sizes and compressed / quality reduced / cut games. And DD would be inflated as a consequence too. Worse product, higher prices.



You really want to compare going from $0.5 to $1 for two BR disks to requiring a 128 GB SD card?

Ten BR disk for around the price of a 16GB SD card. It's not a contest. That's why things are the way they are.



Wut.

Problem with dozens of flash cards is that you have to pay for them.

Two or three HDDs work out massively cheaper than buying dozens of high capacity, high speed SD cards. And they're a lot more efficient as a single 1TB drive can store 15 ~ 30 AAA games, minimising wasted space. SD cards? No.

It's not even close.

I see your link and I looked but the prices are interesting and I have n way of seeing how they get those prices since its a pay site. Why would I buy a 16 gig sd card from them for $5 when amazon has them for $7 . Why would microsoft go to them for nand / flash when they can simply go to micron or Samsung and have them fab them for them . Why go through this middle man.

 

[eastmen]

I can't tell if he honestly thinks a 512GB flash cart is a viable distribution format for games, or if he's just been trolling for 9 years.

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/prod...3_30tb.html/?gclid=CN_O6ci37dICFZaFswod1owJRw

First generation of this cartridge was BDXL. This is Gen 2 using 300GB discs, the next cartridges size will be 6TB, and the next one will be 12TB. Enterprise is where the money is for this capacity, same thing happened with BDXL, but they did try some PC drives.

For real world applications, see Amazon Glacier, Facebook, and many VFX and production studios. This is replacing LTO-WORM with true nearline cold storage, random access, and infinite read robustness.

This exactly what holodisc promised for the enterprise, didn't you love holodisc?

Thanks for the link , ican't find this drive anywhere . What are its specs read / write speeds where can I get the discs. I could use this at work.

I did love holodisc. I mentioned it a few posts ago .

Also , I don't believe 512GB carts are viable in 2017. However if you support UHS-III it supports 512GB carts and if the gen after xbox one / ps4 lasts 8 years like the 360/ps3 gen well that could be the end of the 2020s we are talking about. So yes then I think in the future it will be viable. But that's the great thing with Flash vs optical . With bluray they needed new consoles with a new revision for higher capacity discs and so far only ms has moved to it.

 

[function]

I see your link and I looked but the prices are interesting and I have n way of seeing how they get those prices since its a pay site. Why would I buy a 16 gig sd card from them for $5 when amazon has them for $7 . Why would microsoft go to them for nand / flash when they can simply go to micron or Samsung and have them fab them for them . Why go through this middle man.

You don't buy from Dram-exchange, they report the contract prices for various types of memory. You have to pay for more detailed reports.

They're the best source that us plebs have.

If your opinions are at odds with Dram Exchange, your opinions are most likely wrong.

 

[eastmen]

You don't buy from Dram-exchange, they report the contract prices for various types of memory. You have to pay for more detailed reports.

They're the best source that us plebs have.

If your opinions are at odds with Dram Exchange, your opinions are most likely wrong.

Like I said why are their pricing for SD cards similar to end user prices (about $3). Doesn't make much sense there. Why would anyone create and sell 16GB cards at this point.

 

[function]

Like I said why are their pricing for SD cards similar to end user prices (about $3). Doesn't make much sense there. Why would anyone create and sell 16GB cards at this point.

Because margins are tight for low end SD cards.

Point remains, these are the actual contract prices for SD cards. I don't know where you're coming from if you're going to call out DRAM Exchange as being liars.

Have you considered that they're accurate, and that it's your unsupported world view that might need recalibrating?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Like I said why are their pricing for SD cards similar to end user prices (about $3). Doesn't make much sense there. Why would anyone create and sell 16GB cards at this point.

You've been assuming margins are significant. SD cards are a highly competitive market and they're sold in crazy volumes, so margins are pushed right down. There's zero way of knowing how an Amazon price relates to the best price a console company could get from the manufacturer because the profit margin could be tiny or far larger.

 

[Orion]

what's happened with racetrack memory? I think I heard that could offer potentially up to a petabyte at ram speed.

 

[eastmen]

Because margins are tight for low end SD cards.

Point remains, these are the actual contract prices for SD cards. I don't know where you're coming from if you're going to call out DRAM Exchange as being liars.

Have you considered that they're accurate, and that it's your unsupported world view that might need recalibrating?

could be , but like I said I can't see how many units that is for. Is it in 10k quanities ? 100k ? 1m ? MS or Sony would buy 10s of millions perhaps 100s of millions worth a year and like I said I am sure they would get a better deal than dram exchange

 

[eastmen]

You've been assuming margins are significant. SD cards are a highly competitive market and they're sold in crazy volumes, so margins are pushed right down. There's zero way of knowing how an Amazon price relates to the best price a console company could get from the manufacturer because the profit margin could be tiny or far larger.

I would think they would make some type of money. If SD cards are only $1-2 above the dram exchange price and this is what they are actually paying then I don't see how they could stay in business. After all that $1-2 has to go to the memory card maker , they have to pay for packaging , they have to ship it to amazon and then amazon needs to make profit and they need to then ship it out. Of course like I 've said the SD card maker may be ordering at higher amounts than what dramexchange tracks and thus are getting better deals on the nand chip and consoles move 10s if not 100s of games a year.