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

[Shifty Geezer]

Only in the SSD-SKU. But adding flash, which might or not be used effectively in all consoles is worth it? (compared to say, invest the money in more RAM which can be utilized rather easily)

There's no reason adding flash or SSD won't see the expected benefits. Whether addressed as an IO device or mapped to RAM space, devs can easily push and pull data to it. The console company can also set up a standard VM system where the data works as a cache. I'd expect the same with a glob of RAM, which would either be available as a ramdrive or a system-driven HDD cache or part of the memory map.

 

[function]

Heres hope that memory can be used for more than just caching. Simulating big worlds for an instance, wouldnt you like a GTA where the effects ripple through the whole city, less cops (KIA) means crime will flodd in from other parts, destroyed/damaged cars keep there till they are carried away (setting up strategic roadblocks). Or just for an already existing example - RTS`s like "Supreme Commander"
More RAM = huge boost for things like VT and caching in general, but the real beauty is that its not limited to that!

I agree, the less memory you can use to achieve graphics of the intended standard the more you can use for other things. Hopefully.

Or perhaps you can use less memory in total and put the money into more processing power ... or put the money into adding Kinect to every system ... and selling it to casuals.

Pretty sure game on a flash card would load significantly slower than same game on reasonable speed BD drive.

Depends on the BR drive, where on the disk you're accessing, what type of access pattern you're using and what type of solid state storage you're using I guess.

A 6X BR drive would give you something like 9 to 27 MB/s if you use the PS3 as a basis - a cheap 8GB card should get you 10 MB/s or hopefully more. There are plenty of SD cards that pass 20GB/s - some even pass 60. For lots of small reads even a slow SD card would presumably be better. I was looking at this earlier:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/charts/2011-sd-cards/CrystalDiskMark-3.0-x64,2712.html

My 256MB USB pen drive from 2004 (I think) nets 15MB/s, and my cheap 2GB drive from about 3 years ago gets 25 MB/s. I don't think getting comparable performance to a BR drive would be that hard for solid state storage, but competing on cost per game is obviously going to be difficult.

 

[hoho]

a cheap 8GB card should get you 10 MB/s or hopefully more. There are plenty of SD cards that pass 20GB/s - some even pass 60.

At what price can you get the cheapest 20MB/s flash card? How fast has the speed increased in past years? What about price at that speed?

For lots of small reads even a slow SD card would presumably be better

It might be somewhat better but doing stuff like 4k random reads on it will likely be rather horrible. Likely better than optical but probably not good enough to justify it's cost.

 

[Acert93]

wild idea you put 16GB of DRAM as cache. maybe use registered memory or something to run in from a single channel. well a 16GB ddr3 stick is expensive but I'm not the engineer trying to work that out . or a regular 8GB stick is incredibly affordable already compared to not long ago.

it can be filled in three minutes from a HDD, so you load up your game, start playing it after a short enough waiting time, but the game continues loading GB after GB of content starting with the most local, relevant one and when hard disk grinding is done, you can explore the game with no pop in ever even if you use a horse, vehicle, fast turning speed etc. and fast forward a few kilometers away by pointing at the map rather than manually riding your horse on the way etc. and not having to refill your cache, as it's got all the content already .

it's just a variation on the SSD but, where are our small and fast and cheap SSD? it may be that needing multiple flash chips to get good enough transfer rates put a floor price on SSD as well. so far cheapest SSD and cheapest HDD are the same price. but time may prove me wrong on this.

What you are describing is essentially the GameCube's A-RAM. And it makes sense if you are going to include a *small* SSD with the intention of speeding up loads. At which point I would agree a system with GDDR5 >> 8GB DDR3 A-RAM >> HDD > Blu Ray, makes sense. Stream data into your A-RAM while the game is starting. The game, instead of seeking out the HDD or Optical Drive would be seeking to (relatively) very fast memory with extremely low latency. And at 8GB it pretty much goes back to you start a game and then only have your initial long load time--8GB+system memory should be enough to have enough content in memory to prevent further long load times during that gaming session. Maybe not as a large SSD but definately a much cheaper solution and a method to cheaply begin addressing the detrimental aspects of non-writable/slow/high-latency cheap/large storage optical media.

EDIT: Of course why not just go with a large amount of RAM to begin with unless you are limited for other reasons (for example your GPU has 512-1024MB of memory on an interposer); unless the cost of the 8GB and small bus is insignificant in the total design.

 

[function]

At what price can you get the cheapest 20MB/s flash card? How fast has the speed increased in past years? What about price at that speed?

Crystal Disk Mark using my ancient laptop's card reader:

My 1GB SD card from 2004: 7.6 MB/s sequential, 4.2 MB/s 4k
My super cheap 2GB SD card from 2006: 8 MB/s sequential, 5 MB/s 4k
My cheapo 8GB micro SD (so small!) from 2010: 8 MB/s sequential, 2 MB/s 4k

So yeah, my micro SD maybe not for power users. In all cases 512 KB random read rates were the same as sequential reads. I'm assuming my card reader isn't the bottleneck at 8MB/s (seems odd), but I have no way of actually knowing.

It might be somewhat better but doing stuff like 4k random reads on it will likely be rather horrible. Likely better than optical but probably not good enough to justify it's cost.

Can't see an optical drive being anywhere close to my eight year old 1GB SD card tbh. A 2X BR drive might not even match it for 512K random.

Might be interesting to look at the chips used in a fast SSD: 30+ MB/s per 8GB flash chip with a drive price that averages to £1 / 1 MB (and that's including the controller chip, packing, retail margin, VAT etc). One of those chips could make a re-usable Bluray drive busting cart; four would make a sweet cache / permanent storage area to build in to every system.

 

[Elan Tedronai]

yes no one has ever done anything but optical media before, it's not possible.

like i said. let microsoft lead the way.

nintendo has already an optical drive in it's next gen console. Sony has enter blu ray factories at it's disposal and 16x blu ray drives. They have no reason to dump their own optical format for some expensive flash cards.

 

[upnorthsox]

What you are describing is essentially the GameCube's A-RAM. And it makes sense if you are going to include a *small* SSD with the intention of speeding up loads. At which point I would agree a system with GDDR5 >> 8GB DDR3 A-RAM >> HDD > Blu Ray, makes sense. Stream data into your A-RAM while the game is starting. The game, instead of seeking out the HDD or Optical Drive would be seeking to (relatively) very fast memory with extremely low latency. And at 8GB it pretty much goes back to you start a game and then only have your initial long load time--8GB+system memory should be enough to have enough content in memory to prevent further long load times during that gaming session. Maybe not as a large SSD but definately a much cheaper solution and a method to cheaply begin addressing the detrimental aspects of non-writable/slow/high-latency cheap/large storage optical media.

EDIT: Of course why not just go with a large amount of RAM to begin with unless you are limited for other reasons (for example your GPU has 512-1024MB of memory on an interposer); unless the cost of the 8GB and small bus is insignificant in the total design.

My thoughts on the "A-Ram" have been to have 3 memory slots with one pre-filled with 2-4 GB and then sell 1, 2, and 4GB memory cards for $40, $50, and $70 respectively. That should give you a nice $20-30 margin on those which will more than make up for initial pre-filled slot and people will buy them. You'd probably see 80% attach for them, along with some maxing it out to 12GB (+2GB system RAM).

 

[Acert93]

lSony has enter blu ray factories at it's disposal and 16x blu ray drives. .

When I was recently reading up on Blu Ray drives I had some problem hunting down 16x ones. So, what are the specs on these 16x drives? Noise at 1 meter? Power draw at load? Seek time? Peak/Min transfer? CLV or CAV?

My thoughts on the "A-Ram" have been to have 3 memory slots with one pre-filled with 2-4 GB and then sell 1, 2, and 4GB memory cards for $40, $50, and $70 respectively. That should give you a nice $20-30 margin on those which will more than make up for initial pre-filled slot and people will buy them. You'd probably see 80% attach for them, along with some maxing it out to 12GB (+2GB system RAM).

The point isn't to create enthusiest/casual segmentation with A-RAM but to give developers a standard resource to minimize the impact of slower media (HDD have slow seek time, poor random read, and only modest sequentual read; optical are worse, sometimes by a number of factors, than HDD). By essentially making large chunks of it optional you knee cap the device to the lowest common denominator and the extra memory, at best, would be used to do some pre-loading. The point of RAM is extremely low latency and very high transfer -- even on a 64bit bus an A-RAM pool is going to be a magnitude faster than a HDD and dwarf its seek time. By making large chunks optional you limit the developers use of the space to leverage such; it would be a glorified cache and nothing more.

Might as well start selling 2x, 4x, and 12x Optical Disk options.

 

[Elan Tedronai]

i do know there are 16x blu ray writers. so i am assuming logically a 16x drive would be not impossible for the ps4. as for read speeds. it would certainly be a lot quicker than the current 2x ps3

but the point remains. sony has gazillions of blu ray making equipment at it's disposal. There's practically no need for them to dump their stuff for expensive ssd

 

[upnorthsox]

When I was recently reading up on Blu Ray drives I had some problem hunting down 16x ones. So, what are the specs on these 16x drives? Noise at 1 meter? Power draw at load? Seek time? Peak/Min transfer? CLV or CAV?



The point isn't to create enthusiest/casual segmentation with A-RAM but to give developers a standard resource to minimize the impact of slower media (HDD have slow seek time, poor random read, and only modest sequentual read; optical are worse, sometimes by a number of factors, than HDD). By essentially making large chunks of it optional you knee cap the device to the lowest common denominator and the extra memory, at best, would be used to do some pre-loading. The point of RAM is extremely low latency and very high transfer -- even on a 64bit bus an A-RAM pool is going to be a magnitude faster than a HDD and dwarf its seek time. By making large chunks optional you limit the developers use of the space to leverage such; it would be a glorified cache and nothing more.
Might as well start selling 2x, 4x, and 12x Optical Disk options.

I don't see the conflict in the 2 parts highlighted, minimizing the impact of slower media = a glorified cache. Anyhow, that's the furthest from my intentions. Mine is to give Devs an extra 4GB of ram to do as they see fit at little to no added cost. Going beyond 6GB total system memory is more than can be expected but hey if load times really bother you all you need is to get a memory card to give yourself a glorified cache. It also gives you an option near the end of the gen if 6GB isn't cutting it anymore. I mean, it sure would have been nice to have had the option this gen.

Edit, this should read: Mine is to give Devs an extra 4GB of ram to do as they see fit at little to no added cost and have the framework in place to extend beyond.

 

[Acert93]

The difference is this:

2GB System memory + 8GB A-RAM: Every unit can treat the 2nd memory pool as a low latency, relatively high bandwidth memory pool. All 8GB can be used. More than a buffer to lower load times the memory could be used as an adjunct system memory. Things formerly not possible due to the large latency/bandwidth divide between the HDD/Disk and the System memory, large chunks of gaming data (100s of MBs per second, even GBs) can be moved into system memory.

2GB System memory + 2 / 4 / 8 GB A-RAM SKUs: Developers can use 2GB, the lowest common denominator, as a low latency, relatively high bandwidth memory pool. The models with more memory the extra memory could only serve as a buffer for predicated loads. So whereas the 2GB model would have to pull from the optical/HDD the 4GB (2GB) and 8GB (6GB) models could have that **load time stream** partially pre-buffered, lowering load times. BUT it could not be used as in the first scenario as a standard game resource used during gameplay.

If the above is not clear enough, just put it into PC terms: The difference is between a game that requires 8GB of memory because it needs to access all of that data at any point during gameplay and a game that requires 2GB, but if you have 8GB they will reduce your loadtimes by pre-caching some of the next levels to lower your load times.

(As an aside, while A-RAM is a nice idea, unless the main system memory is something complex/expensive, it is hard to envision a scenario where you wouldn't just beef up main memory. i.e. Why use a 2nd RAM as a quasi-SSD by loading into it from the HDD when you could just do the same thing with your primary memory pool -- unless you are facing a scenario of a 2GB machine with a HDD, in which case plugging a bog standard 8GB dimm module would almost seem necessary to alleviate memory troubles; for all the attention and importance of caching architecture on the CPU side to avoid misses and stalls it seems obvious to me there needs to be something to address this issue between system memory and storage.)

As for the framework of extendable memory the N64 did that. I don't think we will see that again for the reasons experienced on the N64: There were games that, if you did not have the 4MB expansion, were nearly unplayable. This on top of the additional development resources for an additional SKU.

 

[manux]

Only in the SSD-SKU. But adding flash, which might or not be used effectively in all consoles is worth it? (compared to say, invest the money in more RAM which can be utilized rather easily)

In my universe every sku would have SSD. Don't fragment the platform and make the baseline Good and Dependable. If need be force devs to use the platform strengths or no publishing(as long as there is single target to shoot for). Platform owner does want people to go out to store buy the angry birds, rent movies(preload it before watching is good to have) etc.

Platform owner wants people to spill over the smallish SSD so they go and buy the 2.5" premium priced HDD to extend disc space. For mass storage cheaper slower memory is just fine, as long as the working set(s) can be in fast memory.

I don't see SSD as additional cost, I see it as a means for better platform which enables people to spend more(profit platform owner more). Coincidentally the same solution that enables spending also gives performance advantage on games and pricing improves according to moore's law. Similarly if console manufacturer decides to use slower ram as cache it needs to be filled from somewhere(or load times will be horrible) and uh oh... ssd works there too.

Console wouldn't need the absolutely fastest flash+controller. 100MB/s flash +optical 20MB/s read speed would be plenty good increase over current gen. Ofcourse faster is better but how does price scale with speed? I suppose current gen is somewhere around 20MB+10MB/s realistically(based on comments that for example xbox hd is crippled on multiple levels)

On those flash card speeds, vita seems to be around 7MB/s. Far cry from next gen optical+integrated proper fast SSD. I suppose it's money issue or did sony just blew the vita HW somehow?

 

[function]

It could be that Sony need to minimise power draw from constant reads due to it being a mobile platform. Or it could be a different type of flash memory, maybe?

A single flash chip in an SSD can deliver well over 30 MB/s, but probably at way, way over the power consumption (for both flash chip and controller) of the Vita memory cards.

 

[eastmen]

At what price can you get the cheapest 20MB/s flash card? How fast has the speed increased in past years? What about price at that speed?
It might be somewhat better but doing stuff like 4k random reads on it will likely be rather horrible. Likely better than optical but probably not good enough to justify it's cost.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=0DF-0001-00005

acording to customers who tested the 16 gig card its able to write at 38.5MB/s and reads were about 64.5. At $25 thats not half bad. Its 4k random reads will be much better than a bluray drive , many times better actually .

 

[eastmen]

Come up with some numbers instead of just making claims, do you expect the harddrive to be 3TB or 250GB? Do you expect consoles to be without harddrives? And the power argument is pretty weak, USB can drive a 2.5 inch harddrive, and a 12xspeed Blu-Ray takes 10 Watt. 15 watt more to cool is NOT going to be a problem in a package with 200+ watt or whatever we end up with.

And sorry to say, but $10 dollars is not worth saving time on an install, that is just crazy, with my limited collection of games i would be spending hundred of dollars on fast installation?

I don't excpet a 3TB 2.5inch hardrive in a next gen console at launch. Do you ?

I would expect them to go with the largest single plater 2.5 hardrive at launch. I believe that is 320gigs currently ?

Look at it this way. Even if its only 10w more. Thats 10 watts more. Meaning a larger power supply . Lets also not forget that a bluray drive is the largest thing in current and next gen consoles. They take a large amount of internal space and thus reduce the cooling capacity of said console.
You also forget that while its 10w only , its still 10w through the life of the console. So at 200w it might not be terrible , but how about when we get to sub 100w power envolope ? And then there is the fact that a 10w bluray drive might not perform as well as a higher power one. We don't know the trade offs of the usb verisons.

 

[eastmen]

you must have money to burn then cuz i'm quite sure that if you surveyed 10 gamers on the street, 9/10 would choose to pay less for their games and have to wait a few extra minutes for their game to load, than have to shell out more money for games. Plus, in the age of publishers trying to monetise everything by cutting out content to sell as DLC and other such shady tactics, do you really think that the vast majority of gamers would be happy to pay even more on top for their games? Nah, i didn't think so.

Afterall, I'd rather pay £1000 for a console with uber 8GB of DDR4 system RAM, a 1TB SSD and BR drive with super-quiet liquid cooling and noise suppression systems, and pay less per game on bluerays. However i believe that both you and I are in the minority, as most people would likely rather pay less for both the console and the games (but especially the games).

Do you think people wanted to pay $60 instead of $50 this gen ? But they still did because there were benfits to go with the higher price.

I only buy 2-3 games a year anyway . I'd rather pay for the speed

 

[hoho]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=0DF-0001-00005

acording to customers who tested the 16 gig card its able to write at 38.5MB/s and reads were about 64.5. At $25 thats not half bad. Its 4k random reads will be much better than a bluray drive , many times better actually .

16G for 25$ isn't too bad indeed but it is still incredibly expensive vs optical media and it's streaming speed is about equal. Obviously random reads will be faster but I have my doubts if it's worth the huge price premium.

Also don't get me wrong. I'd be all for the no-optical console but I'm simply afraid that it'll all boil down to the huge price premium for the distribution media that will eventually make it unfeasible and I don't think reasonably sized flash media would drop to reasonable levels within 1-2 years.

 

[Blazkowicz]

if you only buy 2-3 games I believe you can wait a bit for the full installation and get a game both cheap and fast.

I don't excpet a 3TB 2.5inch hardrive in a next gen console at launch. Do you ?

I would expect them to go with the largest single plater 2.5 hardrive at launch. I believe that is 320gigs currently ?

it's 500GB currently.
the lastest and bestest one is this thing, it looks like a sexy hard drive as far as a hard drive can arouse you sexually.
http://www.storagereview.com/hitachi_travelstar_z7k500_released

 

[Blazkowicz]

Also don't get me wrong. I'd be all for the no-optical console but I'm simply afraid that it'll all boil down to the huge price premium for the distribution media that will eventually make it unfeasible and I don't think reasonably sized flash media would drop to reasonable levels within 1-2 years.

hmm yeah, why not distribute games on tape while we're at it.
no more noisy optical, high data density!

800GB for a $28 tape! it's 50 times bigger than your $25 16GB example.
http://www.amazon.com/HP-Ultrium-storage-ULTRIUM-Manufacturer/dp/B0052UQ3EU

 

[eastmen]

16G for 25$ isn't too bad indeed but it is still incredibly expensive vs optical media and it's streaming speed is about equal. Obviously random reads will be faster but I have my doubts if it's worth the huge price premium.

Also don't get me wrong. I'd be all for the no-optical console but I'm simply afraid that it'll all boil down to the huge price premium for the distribution media that will eventually make it unfeasible and I don't think reasonably sized flash media would drop to reasonable levels within 1-2 years.

Thats a product that has many layers of profit built into it. The actual cost for it is much much less . Or should I point to a copy of The muppets on bluray at $30 and claim thats how much a bluray would cost for games ?