Console Maker's OS

Dream bigger. With a 3gb OS the average joe doesn't need their home PC anymore. And I'm fairly sure whatever PC, media, game and cable TV related feature any of us can think of will end up being possible on it by several users at once.

I think that's where people get confused. You boot up Windows on your current home PC and sure, it's only using a few 100mb of ram. Now go open a dozen hungry apps, multiply that by a few users using the same box, while other users are playing HD games on it, and try to maintain a chug free experience. You're gonna need more than 512mb.
 
Bagel seed said:
Dream bigger. With a 3gb OS the average joe doesn't need their home PC anymore. And I'm fairly sure whatever PC, media, game and cable TV related feature any of us can think of will end up being possible on it by several users at once.

I think that's where people get confused. You boot up Windows on your current home PC and sure, it's only using a few 100mb of ram. Now go open a dozen hungry apps, multiply that by a few users using the same box, while other users are playing HD games on it, and try to maintain a chug free experience. You're gonna need more than 512mb.
Click to expand...

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.
 
almighty said:
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.
Click to expand...

Well maybe they might be smart and open it up to iPad too.

TBH I feel it might be so overwhelming capable of doing so much I'd rather not get it otherwise I'd feel like I need to start doing all that stuff.
 
damienw said:
I could see 'We need 512 NOW! But we expect to shrink it over time"

I used to keep tabs on the 360/PS3 OS RAM requirements because I found it interesting. And they both shrank quite a bit from their original sizes.

I could do without a lot of the social features/apps that are rumored. It'd be nice to be able to pause and then bring up a YouTube tutorial, though. Stuff like that I'm all for.

Both rumored OS sizes seem outrageous to me. I mean, for 3.5 gigs MS better have full Windows on that baby!
Click to expand...
The 360 did not shrink their system reservation. Individual libs that games link in did get smaller, but the system reservation never changed.
 
Bagel seed said:
Dream bigger. With a 3gb OS the average joe doesn't need their home PC anymore. And I'm fairly sure whatever PC, media, game and cable TV related feature any of us can think of will end up being possible on it by several users at once.

I think that's where people get confused. You boot up Windows on your current home PC and sure, it's only using a few 100mb of ram. Now go open a dozen hungry apps, multiply that by a few users using the same box, while other users are playing HD games on it, and try to maintain a chug free experience. You're gonna need more than 512mb.
Click to expand...

An average Joe owns a laptop and uses it for work, web browsing, music and movies/TV...I can see consoles replacing the laptop for the movies/TV but not for the previous three, especially work and web browsing (and chances are average Joe will prefer to listen to music on the device he's working on).
 
Clockwork said:
I don't want countless devices under my tv unless its unavoidable.
Click to expand...
If by "countless" you mean "three" instead of "two". I have a BD player, a receiver, and a PS3. Since the BD player is, in fact, designed with the single purpose of playing video, I choose to do it all through there instead of the gaming platform that cost four times as much. Regardless of the source of the video, be it disc or Netflix or Hulu or streaming from my PC, it's all just video, and that's its purpose.

Shifty Geezer said:
You Google skills stink then, because it's easy how to find the force-eject for PS3 (hold down power/eject and switch on power at back; something like that).
Click to expand...
Little tip... that trick doesn't work when the system can't POST. The drive must be told to release the disc, it requires some level of initialization from the system board, which couldn't even power itself on properly. Most disc drives feature a physical button that forces a mechanical ejection, even if the drive is without power. Sony declined to do that. I know I'm not the only one to have that problem, I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest to see PS4 go back to a tray-based drive.
 
almighty said:
I know what you're saying but seriously, 10x is a lot of memory.

I meen apart from cross game chat, digital game downloads and HD camera/kinect support what they they possibly be planning that uses that much memory?
Click to expand...

Well what if they want it to be able to run a dozen unique virtual Windows RT sessions concurrently? Or maybe they want to reserve 2gb for cache for the optical drive. Or maybe they have some new voice related stuff that we don't know about which needs a ton of memory. Perhaps they want you to be a able to sleep dozens of memory hungry apps alongside whatever game you are playing. I mean I really don't know what they plan to do.

Look at it another way. Rewind many years ago, and the idea of adding an hdd to a gaming machine was rediculous. I mean it just plays games, why saddle it with this expensive heater which doesn't cost scale well? Fast forward a decade and now it's like well yeah, of course you want a hard drive for a whole host of reasons. What was once an absurd idea is now all but mandatory. So let's see first if that 3gb rumor is even true, and if it is let's see what they have in mind for it.
 
FWIW the number I've heard for memory reserved by the Durango OS is less than 3GB, but not very much less.
 
As I've said in other threads reserving this amount of RAM would imply some fairly significant always available functionality, if they are also reserving significant CPU resources it implies significant always "active/running" functionality.
We've reached memory sizes where demand loading/unloading functionality is a less than stellar experience because of the time it takes to read from disk.
 
Depends on what kind of functionality they're thinking about. If they're reserving RAM and CPU cycles so that the system can automatically update my Facebook page in real time when I get an achievement, they can go **** themselves.
 
So much hate... I think everyone should reserve judgement until the facts are available.
 
If I could pause my game, press the guide button and instantly go back to my full dashboard to browse through demos, movies, console settings, social network, and then just as easily switch back to my game, I think I'd be pretty happy. Maybe pause my game and open a video conference chat using Kinect and Skype. That memory could allow you to browse the full xbox live store to download DLC and additional content for the game you're playing, while you're playing it, without quitting out of what you're doing. Pause my game and switch over to Internet Explorer to look up a game guide, or some not porn. Maybe a full email client, IM, facebook, twitter. If ERP has a reliable source for the OS memory, then it can't be anything less than basically a full OS, like you'd see on a smartphone or tablet. Even in those cases, 2GB is usually sufficient. I'll see what ends up being what. Primarily I'm a gamer, so I'll be curious to see how it all works out.
 
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