Console Maker's OS

[milk]

In that fight, google can release the 'google TV 2', apple can release the 'apple TV 2', MS won't really be able to do that. They're stuck with the spec they launch with - if they think they might need 3GB to compete against the "appleTV 3", they need to reserve 3GB now...

That is where I disagree. What needs to be decided now is how much HW is reserved for GAMES. If needed MS could release the next redesign of NextBox with aditional ram and new non-game functionality that require it will be exclusive to the slim model. I think that is actually the smartest way to go about it.
Focus on games now, since most lauch consumers are interested on that, and when HW becomes cheaper, you can make use of newer tech to aford more power for the extras.

 

[-tkf-]

Imho the battle for the living room is over, no one won it and no one will. It will be a mish mash of smarttvs, boxes and consoles.

 

[HolySmoke]

weird to see how Sony is ignoring those, maybe they don't want multi tasking? Just run 1 app at a time. Rumor says 360 will have a hdmi in port, so it might have some kind of dvr support. Sony released a DVR box add on for ps3 already. Maybe they are taking that route again to keep the PS4 price as low as possible.

There's nothing particularly preventing multitasking with a small memory footprint. The (by far) biggest memory eaters on modern computers are Javascript heavy webpages and it's pretty much only if you have multiple tabs open. Just limiting open tabs to 1 or 2 instead of 8 could be enough to drop the OS reserve by a full gigabyte. Drop Flash support as well and it goes down even further.

There's very little to warrant a 3gb reserve in any case and even my Flashless 512mb iPhone 4 still handles multitasking with aplomb. iOS, OSX, and Win8 all kick dormant programs out of memory and there's no reason that the new Xbox OS shouldn't do the same. In fact, it's one of the core new features of Win8. It's also the reason why I think this rumor is a complete load of nonsense.

 

[Scott_Arm]

There's nothing particularly preventing multitasking with a small memory footprint. The (by far) biggest memory eaters on modern computers are Javascript heavy webpages and it's pretty much only if you have multiple tabs open. Just limiting open tabs to 1 or 2 instead of 8 could be enough to drop the OS reserve by a full gigabyte. Drop Flash support as well and it goes down even further.

There's very little to warrant a 3gb reserve in any case and even my Flashless 512mb iPhone 4 still handles multitasking with aplomb. iOS, OSX, and Win8 all kick dormant programs out of memory and there's no reason that the new Xbox OS shouldn't do the same. In fact, it's one of the core new features of Win8. It's also the reason why I think this rumor is a complete load of nonsense.

But Surface RT ships with 2GB of RAM. I guess they should have left it out then. Would have been cheaper to go with 512 MB or 1 GB.

 

[Brad Grenz]

There's nothing particularly preventing multitasking with a small memory footprint. The (by far) biggest memory eaters on modern computers are Javascript heavy webpages and it's pretty much only if you have multiple tabs open. Just limiting open tabs to 1 or 2 instead of 8 could be enough to drop the OS reserve by a full gigabyte. Drop Flash support as well and it goes down even further.

There's very little to warrant a 3gb reserve in any case and even my Flashless 512mb iPhone 4 still handles multitasking with aplomb. iOS, OSX, and Win8 all kick dormant programs out of memory and there's no reason that the new Xbox OS shouldn't do the same. In fact, it's one of the core new features of Win8. It's also the reason why I think this rumor is a complete load of nonsense.

That's not a solution for programs that are never dormant, ie the rumored DVR, media server and Kinect driven natural user interface (voice and gesture recognition) features.

 

[HolySmoke]

But Surface RT ships with 2GB of RAM. I guess they should have left it out then. Would have been cheaper to go with 512 MB or 1 GB.

Hardly the same thing or usage scenario. Tablets are far more likely to be used for browsing with multiple tabs than a set-top box or console. However you slice it, browsers are the far biggest memory consumers nowadays. My own Win8 PC is currently using 2.4gb of memory of which 1.2gb is just Opera with about 20 tabs.

 

[HolySmoke]

That's not a solution for programs that are never dormant, ie the rumored DVR, media server and Kinect driven natural user interface (voice and gesture recognition) features.

Sure, but that still sounds pretty damn wasteful. It's not applications that typically consume a lot of memory but the content that they use. And all of these are applications that would stream rather than consume a lot of memory. DVR would be a small app streaming to disk while a media server should never use more than a few megabytes for indexing, for example.

A 3gb reserve would be immense for a gaming console. Photoshop didn't even have that kind of addressing space until last year.

 

[LightHeaven]

That's not a solution for programs that are never dormant, ie the rumored DVR, media server and Kinect driven natural user interface (voice and gesture recognition) features.

You can install a full blown windows 7 and do all that and much more with "only" 2GB of ram. And that's running desktop apps that have no consideration for memory savings when multi tasking.

720 is more likely to run metro style apps, who are much much more conservative to memory when they are not the foreground application.

Unless 720's OS is much worse than vista (without any service pack) at memory management 3GB is an absurd just for having apps that can be paused and switched back later on, or to provide limited backgrounding scenarios like voice calls or media streaming.

But Surface RT ships with 2GB of RAM. I guess they should have left it out then. Would have been cheaper to go with 512 MB or 1 GB.

What's your point? Surface has 2GB of ram so apps can take advantage of that extra space, they are not there just to have the OS up and running. Memory usage with nothing running going by surface users is about 1GB. If you can have a full blown OS using less than 1GB of ram why would you reserve 3? Why just not use the same memory management this same OS already has and let applications use all the memory available and when they go to the background they enter a suspended state with limited memory consumption?

And that's not even taking into account that W8/RT support notifications for messages, voice calls, etc even if you close the application so you don't even need to even keep them at the suspended state to take advantage of some of the background tasks...

 

[Scott_Arm]

You can install a full blown windows 7 and do all that and much more with "only" 2GB of ram. And that's running desktop apps that have no consideration for memory savings when multi tasking.

720 is more likely to run metro style apps, who are much much more conservative to memory when they are not the foreground application.

Unless 720's OS is much worse than vista (without any service pack) at memory management 3GB is an absurd just for having apps that can be paused and switched back later on, or to provide limited backgrounding scenarios like voice calls or media streaming.



What's your point? Surface has 2GB of ram so apps can take advantage of that extra space, they are not there just to have the OS up and running. Memory usage with nothing running going by surface users is about 1GB. If you can have a full blown OS using less than 1GB of ram why would you reserve 3? Why just not use the same memory management this same OS already has and let applications use all the memory available and when they go to the background they enter a suspended state with limited memory consumption?

And that's not even taking into account that W8/RT support notifications for messages, voice calls, etc even if you close the application so you don't even need to even keep them at the suspended state to take advantage of some of the background tasks...

So 1 GB for the OS, 1 - 1.5 GB for apps and then 500 MB - 1 GB for Kinect + other persistent always-on services. Doesn't sound crazy to me.

ERP has suggested the working space for the OS may be less than 3 GB, but not much less, so it could be 2.5 GB, and then those numbers wouldn't be too crazy either.

 

[DaveNagy]

That's not a solution for programs that are never dormant, ie the rumored DVR, media server and Kinect driven natural user interface (voice and gesture recognition) features.

I too am having a hard time imagining what could possibly use that much memory, while a game is being played.

The Kinect stuff sounds plausible. You'd definitely want that available all the time.

The whole DVR rumor has never made a lot of sense to me. If it uses the (rumored) HDMI-in, I think that would limit you to recording/watching a single channel at a time. It's a very poor DVR indeed that has that limitation these days. And what about hard disk contention? Does my game start streaming more poorly when Dancing with the Stars comes on? Is MS going to "reserve" hard drive performance too? You could have an external drive, I suppose, and external tuners even, but at that point why not just have an external DVR and let me play my games in peace!

And what other apps do I really need, while I'm playing a game? Various "notifications", sure. Email, Twitter, whatever. That doesn't take much horsepower. Skype? Voice chat, I suppose. Video-chat? No. I'm playing a game. Worst. Feature. Ever. Music streaming would also be nice. Doesn't need much RAM, though. Streaming game play up to the cloud? That would be nice occasionally, but that seems like enough of a "special event" that other functionality could be suspended and sent to disk while that was going on.

Having various apps "stay up" so they are there immediately when I pause my game? Hmmm. Yes, that would be nice. I would not begrudge MS as much as 512MB to enable that sort of thing. Maaaaybe a full gig. I have a really hard time justifying more than that.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

There's nothing particularly preventing multitasking with a small memory footprint. The (by far) biggest memory eaters on modern computers are Javascript heavy webpages and it's pretty much only if you have multiple tabs open. Just limiting open tabs to 1 or 2 instead of 8 could be enough to drop the OS reserve by a full gigabyte. Drop Flash support as well and it goes down even further.

There's very little to warrant a 3gb reserve in any case and even my Flashless 512mb iPhone 4 still handles multitasking with aplomb. iOS, OSX, and Win8 all kick dormant programs out of memory and there's no reason that the new Xbox OS shouldn't do the same. In fact, it's one of the core new features of Win8. It's also the reason why I think this rumor is a complete load of nonsense.

I guess that's why you have smartphones shipping with 2 GB of memory now and more in the future. Because they don't really need it?

As to being required to browse with only 1-2 tabs. Ugh, no thank you. I browse with multiple tabs on the TV regularly. Sure if you have no other choice, people will do it. But why limit what people can do so arbitrarily when the user experience can be better.

3 GB isn't about the minimum that is possible. It's about giving the fullest user experience possible. Smartphones don't have to have 2 GB of memory, but they do as it enhances the user experience compared to phones with less memory. The same applies here.

I'm sure MS could lower the reserve OS partition, but why?

Multiplatform titles are unlikely to make use of significantly more memory than what the competing platform is able to offer. 5 GB for games is already more than the competition has in their entire console.

So why not reserve 3 GB for the OS and applications to drive a much more feature rich user experience when not in game? As well as the ability to have it always on and always available even while in a game. And remember that entire 3 GB may not be for user launchable applications either. There's always the possibility that memory is used for improved natural voice recognition by having a larger vocabulary of words on system. Improved skeletal recognition by having a database of potential skeletal points to match to the point cloud from Kinect, etc.

Sure, it's always the case that you can go with a barebones minimum app. I know people that prefer to use command prompt only applications on their computers running linux. No graphical interface at all. Text only. In that case we'd really only need 4-8 MB of memory for our console OS. Not going to happen.

MS has decided that they think there's a potential benefit to the consumer to have a very rich living room media experience with the next Xbox. Not something pared down. Not something that's purposely limited to fit within the context of a tablet/smartphone experience on a TV, but a full blown lets see what we can do in the living room experience.

In the same way you have AAA games, presumably this would allow them to have a AAA living room experience versus the barebones experience that PS3 and X360 offered.

Regards,
SB

 

[Brad Grenz]

I too am having a hard time imagining what could possibly use that much memory, while a game is being played.

The Kinect stuff sounds plausible. You'd definitely want that available all the time.

The whole DVR rumor has never made a lot of sense to me. If it uses the (rumored) HDMI-in, I think that would limit you to recording/watching a single channel at a time. It's a very poor DVR indeed that has that limitation these days. And what about hard disk contention? Does my game start streaming more poorly when Dancing with the Stars comes on? Is MS going to "reserve" hard drive performance too? You could have an external drive, I suppose, and external tuners even, but at that point why not just have an external DVR and let me play my games in peace!

It wouldn't be recording through the HDMI in. Presumably MS has been pursuing IPTV and Cable/Sat partnerships for Durango. Linear television would be delivered over the internet, or via a tuner accessory or alternate SKU only available directly from your cable provider. My theory is that they would reserve large amounts of RAM for buffering to avoid the exact hard disk contention you're talking about. The HDMI in allows them to still do pass through of the signal from your existing cable box in situations where they don't have an established partnership, or where you might be happy wih your existing DVR. That way they can still overlay notifications on your live TV, and control and change the channel on the DVR via HDMI-CEC. The biggest issue with Nintendo's TVii is that it never knows if you're on the right input, so it is constantly asking you if you have the input correctly set whenever you do anything. HDMI pass through eliminates that issue, provides additional benefits and conforms to Microsoft's "Durango is the only thing you need plugged into your TV!" vision outlined in the leaked 2010 presentation.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I guess that's why you have smartphones shipping with 2 GB of memory now and more in the future. Because they don't really need it?

I would argue that they don't, but it's a great differentiator to charge a premium. Joe Public doesn't understand tech, but they understand bigger numbers, and if RAM is cheap than the investment can provide sales returns even if no technical advantages.

I'd be interested to see how RAM is used on a Galaxy Note 10.1 with 2GBs and full multitasking. You'd have to have a lot of apps open for that RAM to come to into play (apps remain resident for quick switching until closed either by user or system to free up more RAM), so I doubt it gets touched by 90+% of users, but I'd need to see user statistics to know. Evne if they do have 2 GBs of apps active at once, the difference in experience between that and 1 GB of apps may not be noticed by the users at all.

 

[Gubbi]

The amount of reserved RAM can always be lowered but never increased without breaking things. The high amount of reserved RAM is just a conservative move by MS.

They will want to have multiple apps/subsystems resident which enhance the gaming experience:
Skype video conferencing (similar to how chat works today).
Kinect video processing (movement/head tracking).
Kinect audio processing (a good speech recognition system can use up to 300MB memory).
XBox music/Spotify (for streamed music in games, please please please support this).

The we have all the auxiliary stuff:
Browser
Always loaded Dashboard
DVR
etc.

Cheers

 

[DieH@rd]

Maybe they want to make the job easier for early developers... "For start focus yourself only on 5 gigs, anb later on when install base is bigger, you can invest more money into game development and aim for the stars."

 

[LightHeaven]

So 1 GB for the OS, 1 - 1.5 GB for apps and then 500 MB - 1 GB for Kinect + other persistent always-on services. Doesn't sound crazy to me.

ERP has suggested the working space for the OS may be less than 3 GB, but not much less, so it could be 2.5 GB, and then those numbers wouldn't be too crazy either.

1GB for kinect? Why would you need all that space? And i'm talking about 1GB for a full blown OS, with desktop, drivers and what not... You don't need all that in a console.

Just to be clear, I don't think 3GB of dedicated ram is impossible, i just want to see on what they would use it. Fast switching apps + media streaming capabilities does not justify all that memory because even windows 7 running applications with no optimizations of memory usage when in background can do all those tasks and more with less than 2GB of ram.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

1GB for kinect? Why would you need all that space?

Large reference databases for skeletons and speech, potentially.

 

[LightHeaven]

Large reference databases for skeletons and speech, potentially.

A dictionary with a few expected words don't require much memory and it's already done even on 360. Reckoning entire phrases with unexpected words are usually done on the cloud, and doesn't require all that memory either.

I have no idea how large the skeleton data is, but i think the necessity of querying it each frame would also limit how large that would be.

 

[mrcorbo]

If Durango is expected to serve content to one or more client devices (as per the leaked vision doc), I could see a significant amount of memory memory being reserved for buffering the input and output of the transcoding engine.

 

[blakjedi]

They'll be compete with the mobile stuff then like the iPad... of which a console has no chance.

They're best off sticking to what they are... consoles.

i think MS is going for the home server that also plays games and does HTPC work...