MS releases Xbox One S All Digital edition (No Optical Drive)

When the game console market already tipping over 50% digital sales for some publishers in 2018, physical game media does not matter. It'll matter even less in 2020. PC gaming has thrived without it for decade(s), and so will console gaming.
Exactly
game companies need to look to tomorrow not yesterday. Look at the xbox one x . Its powerful but to keep its size down the thing is a toaster oven. Just by removing the optical drive you can increase the cooling over the current model and still make it smaller.

Gamestop and such don't have to choose between selling a pc with bluray or not together with GTA5
I can walk into a gamestop right now and buy steam credit for a game or origin and so on. Gamestop would loose used sales on the newer console but they could devote more store space to junk like funko pops.

I mean think about it . If you ran a store would you want to have a $60 item that you make $10 from but if stolen it hits your shrink by $60 bucks. Do you want an item where for every one of it you can store 10 or 15 cards that give you the same $10 profit but only cost a penny and have no shrink past that until activated at your pos ?

Do you want an item that you need to put in plastic security cases that take man power to put them in the case and then man power to remove them from the case at the cashier and then again man power to bring those cases from checkout to boh for the process to happen again ?

There is so much savings for a store going to digital media from man power , to shipping costs to just space savings to put out more higher margin items.


I've often pondered why an MS or Sony or Nintendo haven't made a kiosk that also allows you to buy and print out the game code from it so that they don't even have to ship carboard digital cards.
 
I mean think about it . If you ran a store would you want to have a $60 item that you make $10 from but if stolen it hits your shrink by $60 bucks. Do you want an item where for every one of it you can store 10 or 15 cards that give you the same $10 profit but only cost a penny and have no shrink past that until activated at your pos ?

Do you want an item that you need to put in plastic security cases that take man power to put them in the case and then man power to remove them from the case at the cashier and then again man power to bring those cases from checkout to boh for the process to happen again ?
Do you want to sell an item that no-one needs to walk into your store to get as they can buy it online at a considerable discount with no B&M overheads? I don't see a future for any game shop if games become digital only. Cards will be sold in general stores and credit/games sold online. As an additional income for people coming into the shop to buy disks, cards works, but cards only? Makes no sense. Consumers would have to be really, really clueless.
 
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Do you want to sell an item that no-one needs to walk into your store to get as they can buy it online at a considerable discount with no B&M overheads? I don't see a future for any game shop if games become digital only. Cards will be sold in general stores and credit/games sold online. As an additional income for people coming into the shop to buy disks, cards works, but cards only? Makes no sense. Consumers would have to be really, really clueless.
Lots of people go to stores to buy game cards . There are multiple reasons like not wanting your credit card tied to the account to prevent hackers getting access to your credit or debit line . not wanting your children to have unlimited access . Then of course gifts . I'd imagine for Target or Walmart the money is in something like a controller or hdmi cable and so on. Those things that they make more than $5 on

I mean today no one needs to buy an actual physical copy of a game and we are over 50% on people buying digital. The majority of game stores are going away as they are not needed . What will remain are small mom and pop stores selling older and newer games along with perhaps having unique sales hooks like maybe a gaming lounge. But yea its going to be more like music stores or comic stores at this point.
 
It's debatable, I think. Cross gen will be around for a while IMHO. They may have hit their peak market penetration at <50M units, certainly. On the other hand, they may see it as a risk expense worth amortizing (lowered Bill O' Materiele) as part of their xCloud streaming endeavour if that makes sense, and power efficiency is the name of the game for scaling up servers across the world.

As I've brought up a while back, there would be concerns for die area for phys I/O, so again it'd be interesting in the context of a major overhaul (or not) as to what they end up doing because of the memory issue.

True, crossgen could be around for a while, especially given the enormous success of the PS4. For a 7nm shrink to make any sense you'd need a physically smaller memory bus, which would appear to count out a 256-bit bus. If so, that leaves you with GDDR5 + esram, or GDDR6. GDDR6 would allow you to forgo a clamshell arrangement once 2GB chips were available, but that's a step up in cost over GDDR5 and a big one over DDR3/4.

With Scorpio MS doubled the number of memory channels per GB, which might help with performing both esram and main memory operations from the same memory pool.

Still, I can't help thinking that 16nm is the way that MS will go. Even Nvidia don't have a 7nm product yet, and they can spunk incredible sums on tiny numbers of ultra-margin products.

It's the catastrophic pitfall of the shared bus that's a concern. The game code just runs, so the swaps can happen specifically. I'm not sure how you try to fake that into not transferring or waiting (extra latency really bad for the CPU now) on the memory controller - I guess that is what I'm wondering (since ESRAM is a seamless part of the memory page table) ?

:confused:

This is a bit over my head (so many things are!), but I can't see why you couldn't intercept the swap / DMA at the hardware level and turn it into a virtual memory address change, and just make sure you wait enough cycles and return the result that the game is expecting. To the game, the page table would look the same as on the base unit, the result would look the same, the timing (in as much as it needed to be) would appear the same. Only difference is nothing has actually moved, and you haven't used any BW.

(Do we know if the DMA units are clocked up in the S along with the GPU and esram? It could be that the game environment is already pretty robust in regard to varying speeds.)

I've no idea is Scorpio does anything like this though. It's just a guess. Scorpio has so much BW and so many memory channels that it can probably burn BW in copies and just laugh it off - I just don't think you'd need to if the system was built with mimicking esram copies and transfers in mind.

Actually, come to think of it, the larger cache on Scorpio probably helps mitigate the pressure of losing the bi-directional esram bus. A larger cache might be something you'd want to keep in a hypothetical "Scorpio Lite".
 
I was talking about a bump in performance regardless of route taken.

I agree that a frequency bump with the current X1 will still be limited due to esram size, ddr3 speed etc, but alu performance seems to be what is also holding it back a lot.
Also I'm not suggesting that it gives the X1 a massive uptick, more so to stop it having huge framerate drops and to have a chance of not crashing the resolution as much.

Yeah, I get where you're coming from and I think the same.

It might help MS push a discless platform if that platform isn't the worst place to play most games. And I'm not talking about resolution here, I mean smoothness. Some X1 games are really getting into a poor place with framerate now, impacting on playability.

A 20% bump in main memory BW would probably equate to something like a 30~50% bump in BW available to games (from main memory). At that point, it'd be worth another 20% on the GPU clocks, giving a 20%+ bump to performance in GPU limited games. And that should keep performance in a good place for as long as cross gen games are a thing.

Scorpio has that Hovis thingy technique, where for the same power and with the same silicon you can hit higher clocks by dicking around at the mobo level. A new main board designed for a smaller form factor, might incorporate such innovation and allow the existing 16nm X1S chip to clock higher without reducing efficiency. As I may have said earlier, just by using a reasonable DDR4 bin (even mainstream 2866 would be a big win) and adding DCC for the ROPs, you could largely eliminate the memory bandwidth bottlenecks.
 
Good point. Moving to 12nmFF would be fairly straight forward as well, so that might help a little bit on yields. I don't know if there needs to be much of a jump in clocks. They could almost just do a 2GHz CPU/ 1GHz GPU and call it a day without needing to go as heavy with Scorpio mobo tweaks. That also puts less pressure in going with a higher DDR4 bin just for pricing (DDR4-2400). It just needs to be cheaper than DDR3 really. The CPU bump would help a bit with the loading times in some cases. Compared to base clocks, it should be a nice little bump that means very little to most people.
 
Recreated mock ups based on promotion material they've seen.
https://www.windowscentral.com/xbox-one-s-all-digital-release-date

If this is the case, which I fully expect it to be. Its a shame, but pretty much what I expected. Even though it sounded crazy.

Be interesting to see the breakdown.

Maybe they should have worked the discless logo to replace the "O's" in "Xbox One S" for um... design marketing aesthetic. The S has the negative diagonal strike-through, for instance.
 
Why's it not smaller? Only reason I can think of is repurposing XB1S hardware. Take out drive, replace shell, you've an XB1 Download.
 
Yeah, probably the biggest reason would be that it's just the same electronics under the hood (no R&D). Then they can just order the same chassis with fewer manufacturing steps too - no need to modify it for a disc slot.

I guess given the slow down in HW sales for Microsoft, that's the most realistic expectation for something that isn't selling enough to warrant much R&D. :/ If they had projections for high turn over rate, then a massive redesign would have been the thing to do I think ala the 360 days when they were able to eventually put out >10M a year, especially bearing in mind some of the potential savings to be had in the cloud (power consumption etc).

Pessimistically, I wonder how many One S units they had planned to manufacture for the year (not yet shipped?) and decided to put that in cloud and test the XO SAD. :V

*cough*
 
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Yea, this is what I was talking about in my post, but just realized I didn't actually say I was talking about it not being smaller.

From the start I was arguing that I believe this is what I think they would do, not what I wanted but expected as I can see many pro's from the business side of it.

Something I didn't consider, would've been even better to put it in a 1X case as its slightly smaller, ports in same place, just make it white.
 
Yea, this is what I was talking about in my post, but just realized I didn't actually say I was talking about it not being smaller.

From the start I was arguing that I believe this is what I think they would do, not what I wanted but expected as I can see many pro's from the business side of it.

Something I didn't consider, would've been even better to put it in a 1X case as its slightly smaller, ports in same place, just make it white.

That would have necessitated designing a new hestsink+fan setup just for this SKU, though.
 
Why's it not smaller? Only reason I can think of is repurposing XB1S hardware. Take out drive, replace shell, you've an XB1 Download.

Being just a small cosmetic change in the shell and the removal of the optical drive, it's a cheap way to test the waters. If it is completely rejected by consumers the base hardware can be reconfigured into a base XBO-S.

They still take a loss, but not as large of one as if they significantly redesigned it to take advantage of the freed up space.

If it meets or exceeds expectations, that's when they'd invest more heavily in it, IMO.

Regards,
SB
 
That would have necessitated designing a new hestsink+fan setup just for this SKU, though.

Plus the X motherboard is mounted inverted compared the S.

Tommy McClain
It's possible the board for the 1S and Sade is redesigned for cost cutting and similar to xcloud boards.
But yea the case would need changing, forgot about exhaust.
Which gets away from the reasons I expected it to stay the same in the first place.
I'm tired :LOL:
 
Plus the X motherboard is mounted inverted compared the S.

yhojfvi1dx601.jpg


Sorry. I'll go now.
 
Has there been any leaks regarding the physical to digital program that there were whispers about.
Wonder if that's a thing.
 
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