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

I wonder if they could do 8cm minis with up to 16 layers, I guess they could spin it much faster with less noise and vibration, shorter seek, and still get about 120GB capacity. Sony also have a new pulsed laser being developed, if they manage to get it ready for mass production by 2013, they'd get a smaller pitch and faster speed with the same rotational speed, and that would still put hundreds of GB on an 8cm mini.
http://hothardware.com/News/Sony-Works-With-University-To-Create-New-Bluray-Laser/
 
Prophecy2k said:
Sorry i'm not following your line of reasoning at all. How does removing the optical disc drive maximise the 2d surface interface for heat exchange?

All it does is makes more vacant room within the box. Alone this doesn't offer any benefit to cooling efficiency within the system.

Console cooling systems are more akin to laptops than PCs (well at least the PS3's is). Thus the thermal exchange route goes as follows:

Chip --> Heat Pipe Fluid --> Fan assembly --> External Air

In a PC it would be:

Chip --> Heat Sink --> Chip Fan --> Internal Cavity --> External Case Fan --> External Air

Thus for PCs the volume of the internal cavity can affect the overall cooling system performance, whereas in consoles and laptops it's irrelevant because the heatpipes carry heat directly to the fan assembly which forces the flow of hot air clear out of the unit.

Also, the only 2d heat exchange surfaces of relevance are the "chip-to-heatsink/heatpipe" interface, and surface area of the "heatsink/air fan assembly-to-external ambient air" interface. Removing an optical drive alone changes neither of these.

Edit:
Unless you were thinking about heat exchange from dissipated chip heat through the motherboard, basically conductive heat exchange through the Mobo, metal and external plastic case of the console? If so, in reality it's probably a pretty negliable amount, and ultimately I doubt the removal of an optical drive creates that much more surface area available for heat exchange through this route anyway.
Click to expand...

you could of course use that space for a larger fan that moves more cfm and lower dba levels.

Or keep cooling the same while reducing the size of the console itself. There are benfits to getting rid of an optical drive.
 
eastmen said:
http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/05/samsung-ultra-high-speed-microsd/


16 gig micro sdhc cards offering a maximum sequential read speed of up to 80MB/s
Click to expand...
As long as you're making a complete abstraction of price, it's the perfect media...

They should use RAM with a small battery. It would be amazingly fast, it's a MUCH better solution than this puny 80MB/s, and extra RAM would come with every game, they'd save the cost of internal ram too. We know ram price comes down very fast, they could start with 8GB, and later games could be 16GB or more. Zero load time, because it's already in ram. :rolleyes:
 
RAM is far too expensive at 4GB running at $20 still. That said, yes, being able to ship your game on a nonvolatile DRAM (battery, new tech, whatever) would absolutely be the cats meow. It would take time to adjust, but what could be done on 4GB would be pretty freaking amazing as you totally turn your worst bottleneck for design into one of your prime assets. Again it would take time to develop inventive approaches (e.g. it took a while for Megatextures to come around to leverage the large space that storage was providing) but instead of getting the 3x-6x jump from DVD to Blu Ray you are taking a 1000x increase in transfer speeds and maybe even greater reduction in latency. Ok, so you may go from 8GB of usable DVD space to 4GB of nonvolatile DRAM (if such a thing even exists), so yes a step back, but if the money wasn't an issue the 2x step back would have some amazing consequences in mind blowing improvements in other ways.
 
AlStrong said:
You mean flash? :p
Click to expand...

You can go hug your NAND chips if you want but I am going to go back to my LED Perpetual Machine (it glows! ... under a microscope), Entropy Defying (cough), power plant (pW FTW! Did I mention it glows under a microscope?) for my always one DRAMs. You laugh, but it could happen (or not).

Ok, maybe we just should start building super wide NAND :cry: I wonder what the inflection point in size is for performance to begin being a more important factor than density.
 
I have long suspected the blue power LED on my computer case puts out far more light energy than it could possibly be using in the form of electricity. I have to turn my computer all the way off because when I just sleep it it blinks with the light of a blue supergiant sun!
 
MrFox said:
As long as you're making a complete abstraction of price, it's the perfect media...

They should use RAM with a small battery. It would be amazingly fast, it's a MUCH better solution than this puny 80MB/s, and extra RAM would come with every game, they'd save the cost of internal ram too. We know ram price comes down very fast, they could start with 8GB, and later games could be 16GB or more. Zero load time, because it's already in ram. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

yea cause i'm sure those 12 layer bluray discs others are bringing up will be free.


Nand continues to drop in price while capacity and peformance increases .
 
The surprising thing to me about people clamoring for flash is that optical disc storage is dirt cheap by comparison.

So multiply that by 1million copies (nice round number). Whether or not you sell, you pay for 1 million discs at 25 cents (for easy math) or at $5 (US).

The math is pretty clear which is better for your business.
 
goin round and round in circles....

just look at the cost per console (at the end the consumer pays the price, always), either you pay one time 30-40$ more or 5$ for each game you buy (and thats using assumptions towards flash`s favour). The math gets worse if you look at "Platinum" games where an additional 5$ is significant.
 
Never said it was free, but it's going to cost very little compared to an optical drive and the supporting hardware, but really you should try reading the thread, because. It's all been discussed numerous times.
 
I actually have been following along.

It seems pretty clear that there is no reasonably cheap, readily available product ready to replace optical.

Maybe you should try reading the thread?
 
To be fair, the 'flash' argument hasn't been properly represented because we're all going by flash card prices, and have no info on ROM systems. There's so much guesswork involved, neither side can be proven conclusively the better option in all-round value and performance. A lot also depends on the business model of next-gen. What if they go with a cheap, 2-year lifecycle console format? Or an upgradeable one? Or a tablet-based one? That all changes the balance of pros and cons.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
To be fair, the 'flash' argument hasn't been properly represented because we're all going by flash card prices, and have no info on ROM systems. There's so much guesswork involved, neither side can be proven conclusively the better option in all-round value and performance. A lot also depends on the business model of next-gen. What if they go with a cheap, 2-year lifecycle console format? Or an upgradeable one? Or a tablet-based one? That all changes the balance of pros and cons.
Click to expand...
Well, a "ROM" based system will only mean added costs.
You have mass-market cheap SD on one side (as kinda best-case) and then you go in the direction of low volume proprietary (copy protection/DRM, "read only" protection, pre-loaded content) and maybe even SSD-like speed. you cant pick all "best-cases" at once (which proponents like to do), Blu-Ray however has lots of existing plants that can be just used in whatever volume necessary and more can allocated short-time if needed.

So either its high-volume no-thrills SDCard & cheap prices, resulting in easy piracy.
Or more expensive nonstandard carts with own production lines (even more costs), look at Vita Memory cards for a basic idea.

Or just using a BDRom drive and existing infrastructure, the rest will almost surely remain hypothetical speculation anyway.
 
There's plenty of potential for security on SD or whatever flash based format they decide to use. And a custom form factor would add almost nothing to the overall cost once it was up and running

And why do people insist on using 2012 prices as representative for the entire generation? You need to do cost analysis for an 8-10 year period on every type of title shipped. Many titles still fit very comfortably on DVD (even much smaller really) and I expect that will be true in 2020 still. Would such an analysis favor flash? Probably not, but there are advantages (smaller, cheaper, quieter box with much better seek times) that could potentially make it worth the effort. The infrastructure for the venture can't be too bad or they'd never be able to sell 3DS and vita games for $40 and less.
 
AlphaWolf said:
And why do people insist on using 2012 prices as representative for the entire generation?
Click to expand...
They haven't (AFAICS). But is there any reason to think the minimum price will drop below $5? I posted earlier on an observation that hit me, that the lowest you can pay for an SD card is always around £4, like HDDs. So though capacity will increase, minimum price possibly won't, and we're looking at something of the order of $5 card vs. $0.50 BRD disc for the life of the platform.
 
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