Next Generation Hardware Speculation with a Technical Spin [2018]

Status
Not open for further replies.
Even at 500gb the SSD cost will be more than the typical $35 budget allocated for storage.
They can't be beholden to a fixed price-point forever. Sooner or later they'll have to pay more for storage, and they've shown willingness in the past (how expensive was PS3's BRD drive!). If another $15 makes the difference, it'll be worth doing. SSD versus HDD is transformative, especially in a closed system designed around an SSD. If you only support SSDs as optional extras, you'll get a marginal improvement in performance as all the data will be structured and used assuming a slow HDD.
 
They can't be beholden to a fixed price-point forever. Sooner or later they'll have to pay more for storage, and they've shown willingness in the past (how expensive was PS3's BRD drive!). If another $15 makes the difference, it'll be worth doing. SSD versus HDD is transformative, especially in a closed system designed around an SSD. If you only support SSDs as optional extras, you'll get a marginal improvement in performance as all the data will be structured and used assuming a slow HDD.
This and what if there was an option to remove the optical and have SSD moving the saving to upgrade to SSD (with a bit on top of course).

Just an 'out there' thought which may get me banned for the stupidity of the comment...but is there a way to produce a hybrid drive of (say) 256gb SSD and the rest up to 2tb HHD?

I really think 2tb is a minimum when we consider some of the 'best selling' ganes are pushing towards 100gb already.
 
After a few glasses of wine I’ve come to the conclusion.....maybe a deluxe edition of the ps5 may have one, but not on the vanilla.
It will have a 2.0 tb hard drive, games are going to get a lot bigger over the next 5 years.
 
Yeah, I don't see a solely SSD system happening when the price per GB is so much greater than HDD's. Including a small SSD to supplement the HDD is the most cost effective way of reaching the speeds of SSD's and size of HDD's, so why would they do any differently?
 
After a few glasses of wine I’ve come to the conclusion.....maybe a deluxe edition of the ps5 may have one, but not on the vanilla.
I don't understand this reasoning. What's the point of an SSD if not in every console? We've seen the improvements in performance are only marginal with an SSD in a console designed for an HDD, both in PS3 and this gen. In such a case, devs can't use storage knowing there'll be super-low-latency storage on demand so the technical advantages of SSD are mostly lost.

If there's a only a high-end SSD SKU as you suggest, it'll just be a storage upgraded HDD console, same as we can have now. I wouldn't call that an SSD solution.
 
I don't understand this reasoning. What's the point of an SSD if not in every console? We've seen the improvements in performance are only marginal with an SSD in a console designed for an HDD, both in PS3 and this gen. In such a case, devs can't use storage knowing there'll be super-low-latency storage on demand so the technical advantages of SSD are mostly lost.

If there's a only a high-end SSD SKU as you suggest, it'll just be a storage upgraded HDD console, same as we can have now. I wouldn't call that an SSD solution.

how can we have an ssd on a consol large enough to do something useful at a set price point of $499 + - ?
Maybe a hybrid may be the answer we are looking for. But by offering an SSD and adding faster response and load times is a feature that can be charged as an extra for enthusiast market, how many here would pay an extra $100 for an SSD deluxe version? Wine wearing off.- only just.

Edit; I would pay the extra.
 
I don't see why not, although I wonder if it'd be worthwhile to custom build an SSHD if the drive manufacturer isn't already producing something in their catalogue (or even plans to in the future). Looking at a teardown of an EVO850-250GB, the actual HW footprint is pretty miniscule. That's probably something that could just be designed into the console motherboard.

An SSD cache (automagically and/or developer controlled) + HDD would probably be the best bang for buck.
Yeah, I was just thinking out loud... having an SSD and HHD would require more power hence my suggestion, but like you say probably better alternatives with similar results.
 
how can we have an ssd on a consol large enough to do something useful at a set price point of $499 + - ?
If it's not possible, a hybrid would be needed. Or you have a pretty awkward entry level system, like the 20 GB consoles of last gen. However, gimping the SSD by making it optional is the worst move IMO. Having a small SSD/flash in every machine that can be user upgraded is far better than a base console without.

Maybe a hybrid may be the answer we are looking for. But by offering an SSD and adding faster response and load times...
How many would pay $30 extra for a system that's actually designed for fast storage, and not only offers 20% faster load speeds but super rich worlds streaming resources from storage with super low latency?

As mentioned previously in this thread too, RAM could probably be reduced relative to an HDD based system as there wont' be such a need for data chacheing, so that may even mitigate flash cost somewhat.

Regardless, if low-latency storage is going to be a part of the next-gen architecture, it needs to be present in every console in sufficient amounts to get used. If a SKU doesn't feature flash, the experience will be gimp'd for everyone for the entire duration of the generation. And if your rival does it properly, three years on they'll be showing richer worlds with faster load times easily justifying an extra $30 for their box.
 
If it's not possible, a hybrid would be needed. Or you have a pretty awkward entry level system, like the 20 GB consoles of last gen. However, gimping the SSD by making it optional is the worst move IMO. Having a small SSD/flash in every machine that can be user upgraded is far better than a base console without.

How many would pay $30 extra for a system that's actually designed for fast storage, and not only offers 20% faster load speeds but super rich worlds streaming resources from storage with super low latency?

As mentioned previously in this thread too, RAM could probably be reduced relative to an HDD based system as there wont' be such a need for data chacheing, so that may even mitigate flash cost somewhat.

Regardless, if low-latency storage is going to be a part of the next-gen architecture, it needs to be present in every console in sufficient amounts to get used. If a SKU doesn't feature flash, the experience will be gimp'd for everyone for the entire duration of the generation. And if your rival does it properly, three years on they'll be showing richer worlds with faster load times easily justifying an extra $30 for their box.

I believe we are asking for the same thing but finding a way of doing it at a price point is the challenge. l guess that’s why I’d rather have a delayed launch and have the features that would truly take us to the NEXT gen, no half baked potato. But my other personality says how much are we going to benefit from those access speeds and would that cost be better off directed to a fasted GPU? What would give the more tangible benifits?
 
Well if you're suggesting the vanilla base unit coming without any flash storage is an option, we aren't asking for the same thing. ;)
 
I think we will see tighter integration of DRAM and general mass storage next gen. It will be driven by cost considerations.

The amount of DRAM has increased 16 fold per generation since the PS1's 2MB. That is over. DRAM currently costs the same per GB as in 2011. Console vendors will struggle to control costs even with a 16GB next gen console. FLASH, however, is at $0.2/GB.

Traditionally a fair amount of DRAM has been used to buffer assets ahead of time because of glacial mass storage performance; First optical, then HDD. If the core APU+DRAM of the console is integrated with a high performance storage sub system, you can make do with less DRAM.

I expect 12-16GB DRAM and 128-256GB FLASH (x4 PCIe 3.0).

Cheers
 
Edit.....the last part of my post was the more telling, you got an answer for that?
A faster GPU may be 20% more compute for the money, with ever diminishing returns on GPU power? Versus storage that is more like 10x more bandwidth and maybe 100x faster access times. Those figures highly variable of course depending on type of storage. But in a console, I think the difference in experience will be far more noticeable in a console with flash than the same console with no flash but a bit more GPU. I'd rather have a machine that boots from cold to playing a game in under twenty seconds than a machine with a bit better shadow quality and higher average dynamic resolution that takes two to three minutes to get to play. And in terms of graphics, things like pop-in can be better dealt with through low-latency storage so even in graphics, less GPU doesn't necessarily mean lesser graphics overall.
 
The original Xbox had an area (partition) as a volitile game cache, they could do similar with a small ssd or local flash drive solution. A mechanical HDD can stream some or all data to the cache for a meaningful in game performance boost.

Ssd should not be for storage within a console, a better solution must be possible within a closed system. This would hopefully keep the cost down whilst removing in game loading issues. Initial load may not be much faster but that is an acceptable trade off for me.
 
Well if you're suggesting the vanilla base unit coming without any flash storage is an option, we aren't asking for the same thing. ;)

So how much SSD/NVMe does a base unit at $399 come with?
What if the base unit is $499?

Dont get me wrong, I am absolutely for a console system ecosystem with guaranteed SSD/NVMe storage of at least 128GB. I would hope for at least 256GB, so its not a hassle for developers on both systems to keep juggling resources. But, when I'm making general predictions I am being a realist (pessimist grounded in reality), so I can be pleasantly surprised if it doesnt happen.
 
Even on eMMC 5.1, the throughput base is not as high as one would think. Naturally if you ramp up to the largest size currently available, 256GB, you might get faster performance. I'm not certain if the interface scale up to 4x.

"Achieving maximum sequential Read/Write speeds of 330MB/s and 200MB/s (based on 64 GB),"

256GB eMMC 5.1 part: https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/estorage/emmc/KLMEG8UERM-C041/
 
So how much SSD/NVMe does a base unit at $399 come with?
What if the base unit is $499?
As much as they can! ;) I can only make a qualitative prediction that there will (should!) be a significant amount of fast flash storage; not a quantitative prediction because the variables are so many. What price, and what other compromises to the system? More cost, or less GPU, or slower, more flash, or faster, less flash, or no optical, etc.

For me, the only very solid bit of logic is that the console designers must be looking at flash options and what they can do, and if doing so, they must see that flash-as-standard is the far better call than the base SKU having none and the whole experience being compromised. Which means we should see either hybrid drives or some on-board hybrid caching or an SSD only solution or a user-upgradeable NVMe port or some other variation, and the difference between the two devices might be significant - as significant as N64 versus PS1 with carts versus CDs being a real deciding factor.
 
Solder a silicon motion 2262 with 8 256Gbit devices and you have a 256GB FLASH subsystem, that'll hit 300K IOPS and 3GB/s bandwidth.

Cheers
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top