Xbox Series... M?

Well, that's the idea anyway, link: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Xbox-...ght-of-the-Nintendo-Switch-Lite.526861.0.html

I mean, the Switch might eventually challenge the DS as the best selling console of all time. Soooo, I mean it makes sense, and frankly I was a bit perplexed Sony and MS didn't do an immediate turnaround on their own next gen consoles to mobile once they saw how successful it was. Like watching the iphone come out and saying to yourself "no, that's not a threat".
 
As for hardware, an update from the two Series consoles makes sense. Zen 3 is out, the new infinity fabric IP will be out by the end of this year, this years slight RDNA2 upgrade (supposedly 6nm and such) should be out. Further a shared very large (64mb ish) llc would make a lot of sense for a mobile console, cutting a good amount of wattage.

The biggest concern I can see versus the big consoles is the CPU. Eight cores and high clockspeed aren't exactly squishable. Even upgrading the arch is only going to do so much, all I can see happening in a 9-7 watt tdp is a quad core CPU with modest clock speeds. Still, as long as it's decently above last gen consoles I'm not sure many devs will mind, no more hyper optimization. Beyond that things like DSP hardware already in the Series can be pretty low power, modern EUFS flash storage is pretty comparable to NVME ssds. And

I'm guessing 9 watts because A. Microsoft has absolutely wonderful mobile cooling engineers (the Surface series might be dated in areas, but the cooling system is an engineering work of art) and AMD supposedly has a separate 9 watt mobile APU coming out this year anyway, one with an RDNA2 gpu rather than their current notebook lineup with "Vega+". As for hardware, an update from the two Series consoles makes sense. Zen 3 is out, the new infinity fabric IP will be out by the end of this year, this years slight RDNA2 upgrade (supposedly 6nm and such) should be out. Further a shared very large (64mb ish) llc would make a lot of sense for a mobile console, cutting a good amount of wattage.

Basically throw 10-12GB of lpddr5 mobile, say about 6400 for speed, in a mobile soc. Quad core zen 3 clocked at like 1.9ghz or so, maybe 16-18cu GPU (a double compute unit or two disabled for yields and tdp) clocked at around 1.2ghz. Throw in a 900-1080p OLED and you've got a mobile little speed demon for $400 or so. Battery life will be interesting to see, giant battery cells seem to have gotten relatively cheap thanks to phones, but of course that would add weight regardless.
 
As for hardware, an update from the two Series consoles makes sense. Zen 3 is out, the new infinity fabric IP will be out by the end of this year, this years slight RDNA2 upgrade (supposedly 6nm and such) should be out. Further a shared very large (64mb ish) llc would make a lot of sense for a mobile console, cutting a good amount of wattage.

The biggest concern I can see versus the big consoles is the CPU. Eight cores and high clockspeed aren't exactly squishable. Even upgrading the arch is only going to do so much, all I can see happening in a 9-7 watt tdp is a quad core CPU with modest clock speeds. Still, as long as it's decently above last gen consoles I'm not sure many devs will mind, no more hyper optimization. Beyond that things like DSP hardware already in the Series can be pretty low power, modern EUFS flash storage is pretty comparable to NVME ssds. And

I'm guessing 9 watts because A. Microsoft has absolutely wonderful mobile cooling engineers (the Surface series might be dated in areas, but the cooling system is an engineering work of art) and AMD supposedly has a separate 9 watt mobile APU coming out this year anyway, one with an RDNA2 gpu rather than their current notebook lineup with "Vega+". As for hardware, an update from the two Series consoles makes sense. Zen 3 is out, the new infinity fabric IP will be out by the end of this year, this years slight RDNA2 upgrade (supposedly 6nm and such) should be out. Further a shared very large (64mb ish) llc would make a lot of sense for a mobile console, cutting a good amount of wattage.

Basically throw 10-12GB of lpddr5 mobile, say about 6400 for speed, in a mobile soc. Quad core zen 3 clocked at like 1.9ghz or so, maybe 16-18cu GPU (a double compute unit or two disabled for yields and tdp) clocked at around 1.2ghz. Throw in a 900-1080p OLED and you've got a mobile little speed demon for $400 or so. Battery life will be interesting to see, giant battery cells seem to have gotten relatively cheap thanks to phones, but of course that would add weight regardless.

hmmm....

basically a gpd win 3 with a surface paint job (link to gpd 3 below)

I think it makes a surprising amount of sense tbh, you could use it to run all xbox one gen games natively, along with a selection of pc titles like prison architect, cities skyline, and other less demanding titles and then stream in any series X gen games that cant run on the system

The best way to do it imo, would be to allow 'dualbooting' where you could switch between a locked down console type environment and a full fledged windows 10 desktop

I'd buy one

GPD Win 3 Review: The Unofficial Microsoft Switch - NotebookCheck.net Reviews
 
If Microsoft goes mobile, I don't think they meet Nintendo on their own turf. Plus, they have xCloud on Android to fill that need. So they probably will carve out a niche with a different category/form factor. They have had good success with the Surface line. Maybe they go with a tablet/laptop design? They can do some cool stuff at 15-45 watt TDP. Plus, they could repurpose the APU for their Surface line.

Tommy McClain
 
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I think xcloud will likely be their thing here for mobile.
If they keep working the technology they can eventually get to something that will be enough for players to want to play on their devices. I think things will still feel better on local machines, but there are other ways to make up for it. In particular reduced latency for online games, less cheating, and possibly with enough speed and tech, reduce the latency to something that is reasonable for players.

And with enough power, theoretically more power than a home console could provide over eventuality if there are power and thermal limits, those certainly don't apply to data centers.
 
What's the proposed price point for this? Anything beyond a dumb xCloud terminal would be more costly than the X. How does that grow the number of subscribers?

I like the idea of an iPad sized device with a gaming slant though. I'd give my arms a good workout.
 
What's the proposed price point for this? Anything beyond a dumb xCloud terminal would be more costly than the X. How does that grow the number of subscribers?

I like the idea of an iPad sized device with a gaming slant though. I'd give my arms a good workout.

GPD 3 is 800 dollars. I think every other year there is an XBoy rumour for some reason

Makes no sense whatsoever to do a loss leader strategy on mobile hardware while at the same time cannibalizing it with Xcloud
 
You don't think that the Series S can scale its size/power down in 2-3 years? It's already small. It doesn't need to get "Switch" small for portability. xCloud can compete there. I think there's a huge opportunity to get into tablet or laptop gaming.

Tommy McClain
 
tenor.gif



Seriously I tell you guys for a long time and then some rando on twitter says something and we get threads !

5nm rdna 3 targeting 4tflop same cpu specs as the series s and same ram amount
 
I only see 2 options, really:

1. A device purpose made for Xcloud.
Already plays all the games on Xcloud so no porting or extra development time needed.
For people who want a better on the go experience than streaming to a phone would give them, better screen, physical controls and so on.
Could be made quite cheap, no expensive silicon needed.
Would still have all the drawbacks of game streaming with latency, bandwidth costs and so on.

2. A portable version of the Series S.
Already plays all the games that work on the S/X so no porting or extra development time needed. Could dock like a Switch.
Could suit both people looking for a main gaming device but also work as a complimentary portable device to a Series X or a PC.
Would certainly be quite a bit bigger than a Switch even with a shrink and Microsofts engineers putting all their brainpower on it, more in the small gaming laptop/Alienware Concept UFO area(which i personally would love, i never play my Switch outside the dock because the screen and the controls are too small to be comfortable).
Could be a tricky pricing situation.

These options could immediately leverage the Xbox ecosystem with Cross compatability, backwards compatability and Game Pass and so on which would be very attractive to consumers and painless for developers.
Any option that would leave players with a limited library of games and devs with yet another platform to develop for would be quite silly.
 
@Mskx I would think it would be both. A portable S with enhancements and changes due to its release along with the ability to play xcloud when you have a strong connection. If you want to dock it to your tv and you might as well stream xcloud for 4k vs trying to make the portable run it natively
 
@Mskx I would think it would be both. A portable S with enhancements and changes due to its release along with the ability to play xcloud when you have a strong connection. If you want to dock it to your tv and you might as well stream xcloud for 4k vs trying to make the portable run it natively
That would kind of be the worst of both worlds? The cost of expensive silicon but only using it to stream games a lot of the time? No thanks.

But if they use the same basic screen and controller setup but you can choose if you want an xcloud "module" or a Series S "module" that might make sense, economies of scale and so on
 
@Mskx I would think it would be both. A portable S with enhancements and changes due to its release along with the ability to play xcloud when you have a strong connection. If you want to dock it to your tv and you might as well stream xcloud for 4k vs trying to make the portable run it natively

I'd still question how they'd hit a reasonable price point? Vs the $300 XSS, how would you reduce costs enough with the cost of battery and screen on top?

For size and cost, guess there's scope to reduce number of RAM chips. The physical SOC shrink isn't huge and the cost won't reduce. Cooling for a smaller form factor still would be another expense?

That would kind of be the worst of both worlds? The cost of expensive silicon but only using it to stream games a lot of the time? No thanks.

MS do have some tech I forget the name of that uses the base game synced with a high fidelity cloud version to reduce latency. Might be time to wheel that out (if it works as advertised).

edit: Kawahai. Might just be bandwidth saving, since it still has to make the round trip.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/res...high-quality-mobile-gaming-using-gpu-offload/
 
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I'd still question how they'd hit a reasonable price point? Vs the $300 XSS, how would you reduce costs enough with the cost of battery and screen on top?

For size and cost, guess there's scope to reduce number of RAM chips. The physical SOC shrink isn't huge and the cost won't reduce. Cooling for a smaller form factor still would be another expense?



MS do have some tech I forget the name of that uses the base game synced with a high fidelity cloud version to reduce latency. Might be time to wheel that out (if it works as advertised).

edit: Kawahai. Might just be bandwidth saving, since it still has to make the round trip.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/res...high-quality-mobile-gaming-using-gpu-offload/


good shout on Kawahai, and importantly its already been implemented into idtech 4! From your link ''We implemented a Kahawai prototype and integrated it with the idTech 4 open-source game engine"

Reading about Kawahai it seems like an excellent complement to zenimax's Orion technology, which allows some post processing affects like smoke to be rendered on the client device, as an image without complex details like smoke can be compressed much more effectively
 
That would kind of be the worst of both worlds? The cost of expensive silicon but only using it to stream games a lot of the time? No thanks.

But if they use the same basic screen and controller setup but you can choose if you want an xcloud "module" or a Series S "module" that might make sense, economies of scale and so on
You'd just use it to stream games when you want 4k resolution. Something we both know a handheld wont be capable of doing with the fidelity of the series x .

When your out on the run you play locally and when your at home docked you play xcloud streams at higher resolution and settings.


I'd still question how they'd hit a reasonable price point? Vs the $300 XSS, how would you reduce costs enough with the cost of battery and screen on top?

For size and cost, guess there's scope to reduce number of RAM chips. The physical SOC shrink isn't huge and the cost won't reduce. Cooling for a smaller form factor still would be another expense?



MS do have some tech I forget the name of that uses the base game synced with a high fidelity cloud version to reduce latency. Might be time to wheel that out (if it works as advertised).

edit: Kawahai. Might just be bandwidth saving, since it still has to make the round trip.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/res...high-quality-mobile-gaming-using-gpu-offload/

5nm should cut a lot of the chip costs. Using a newer navi can reduce costs if its more efficent. Getting another 20-40% improvement in performance can do that. They can also go to infinity cache and get away with slower ram. Heck you could even go with a newer zen that has better ipc .

Lots of things they can do. Switch 1 had an average battery life of 2.5 to 6 hours https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/nintendo-switch-battery-life-2949802
 
5nm should cut a lot of the chip costs. Using a newer navi can reduce costs if its more efficent. Getting another 20-40% improvement in performance can do that. They can also go to infinity cache and get away with slower ram. Heck you could even go with a newer zen that has better ipc .

Lots of things they can do. Switch 1 had an average battery life of 2.5 to 6 hours https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/nintendo-switch-battery-life-2949802


Eastmen, you have been hinting for a while that microsoft might do something like this, are you saying that based on an educated hunch or something more?
 
That isn't confusing enough.

Xbox Series Y PE
I'd vote for Xbox Series I C U P _gold_pro_portable

I saw someone theorize that xbox are going with confusing names so people just give up and start saying that they play on xbox instead of saying I play on a xbox series x or s (or through the xbox app on pc, or xcloud (sorry xbox gamepass ultimate with cloud gaming)) It fairly neatly explains their actions regarding naming conventions imo
 
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