cyberheater
Newcomer
I thought it was 32mb but someone suggested 64mb.
Who's right?
Who's right?
How big a OS footprint does the 360 have?
- Thread starter cyberheater
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SenatorMonkey
Newcomer
It's 32MB, and a small percentage of 2 of the 3 processor cores. I have a feeling that while it's great that they 'only' took away 32MB from a unified 512MB, it might limit what additions and improvements they can make to the OS at a later date. We'll see, though.
scooby_dooby
Legend
SenatorMonkey said:
According to Allard, what they took was more than they actually need, so they can come back and add stuff later.
cyberheater
Newcomer
SenatorMonkey said:
Appologies for asking but what is the source of your information? Are you a dev?
Once again. No disrespect intended.
32MB is an incomprehensibly huge amount of space for what is essentially almost no real actual work. Ok, so the OS presents function calls to render 3D graphics and presumably, sound streams, loading and saving data to disk and flash, some I/O and so on.
Yet WTF! 32MB?! You can get a full-featured GUI OS running in less than a tenth of that!
Future expansion?! They could add in everything AND the kitchen sink and still make it fit if they really wanted to.
For a fixed platform, 32MB reserved for that joke of an OS in the 360... Mindboggling!
Yet WTF! 32MB?! You can get a full-featured GUI OS running in less than a tenth of that!
Future expansion?! They could add in everything AND the kitchen sink and still make it fit if they really wanted to.
For a fixed platform, 32MB reserved for that joke of an OS in the 360... Mindboggling!
swaaye said:
W95 is a terrible framework to build off of. W95 also doesn't support multiple-cpus not to mention other needed features like near real-time threading. The kernal of NT is actually quite small and capable once you strip down everything you don't need.
I probably will if it turns out to be true!m1nd_x said:
These numbers seem a bit too rumor-esque at the moment methinks so I wait a while for confirmation before going ballistic on this one.
One might think if PS3 really has a proper OS running at all times, spending a sizeable amount of memory to house it will be alright, but DAMN, 64 megs? Check out what people did on the Commodore Amiga back in the early 90s, with maybe 4MB of available RAM, or 8 at the very most! I had 6 in mine, and that was A LOT. A really big program had a file size of 250kb, kind of puts things in perspective to how it is today...
I don't see how you could POSSIBLY blow 32, or let alone 64 megs of RAM on an OS for a fixed platform. 32MB on the xbox is so stupid because you can't even DO anything with the OS while a game is running or you're watching a DVD. What's it needing all that memory for? The drivers for wifi, USB, I/O and the 3D API must consume a tiny fraction of all that space. 64MB on PS3 is a quarter of XDR RAM, I'd better be able to load a friggin word processor into part of that space while running a game or else I'll be pissed!
Needless bloat at its finest. The world's truly going insane...
Doesn't this 32MB also include the guide/blade system? So it also has to handle the user profile, xbox live/network system, music player etc. So it isn't huge deal considering what you get from it.
Also there is rumor that you will be able to download stuff while playing games soon, so it will handle that as well.
32MB well spent I say.
Also there is rumor that you will be able to download stuff while playing games soon, so it will handle that as well.
32MB well spent I say.
I think it's adequate. There's textures and fonts for the Guide, a network stack (with buffers), a music player (again with buffers for compressed music), the sound mixer / encoder, essentially a VoIP-client. All of which in the worst case are running at the same time...Guden Oden said:
Now again, look at your Win95 example, add Winamp, Skype, mount a remote volume and encode the sound-output of the system to Dolby 5.1. I don't think you'll be staying much below the 32mb mark.
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scooby_dooby
Legend
Guden Oden said:
Do you realize the 32mb is intended for all future iterations of the dashboard? It's not using the full 32mb right now, and we're going to see the Dash grow by leaps and bounds as the integrate things like VOD and the web-cam.
Guden Oden said:
A single OS framebuffer on 360 might run you close to that, you know..
Things are changing Guden, requirements are changing. The OS is ever present in the new game systems (well, 360 and PS3 at least), the application is no longer completely on its own on the system. Those OSes have varying requirements, that are growing significantly, even twixt 360 and PS3. The types of things they'll be doing simultaneously with games go well beyond what your Amiga ever had to do, and in some cases more than the average PC might handle comfortably
(well, in PS3's case, if mooted functionality materialises).
Back in the day, I had an Amiga A500 with 1 MB RAM using the over-expensive official CBM Ram extension. As an experiment once I got it multitasking upwards of 20 applications including a demanding 8 track audio program called OctaMED. OctaMED never showed any signs of faltering while the other apps, though running extremely slowly, didn't suffer either. Damned impresssive OS.Titanio said:
Most resource hogs these days are graphics, but clever thinking should get around that. As I've already mentioned, a vector based GUI would have small memory footprint, better quality and scalability, and allow some swish special effects. Useful applications should be able to get by without needing bucketloads of RAM. Doesn't PSP manage a fair bit with only 8 MB RAM reserved, including updates like Flash support up and coming? If all that PS3 memory is reserved just for image buffers, that's a crazy number of 1080p screens worth. Are 8 1080p screens really going to need to be preserved in RAM during a game? What exactly is PS3's OS supposed to be doing while games are running? I'm still unsure on this matter. Just checking my current PC I'm using about 30 MB with a graphics application, web editor and Flash editor program concurrently. PS3 isn't going to be that sort of thing while gaming, is it?!
It's all mindless conjecture until we know what these resources are for, and then we can have a fair discussion as to whether these are useful, desirable features and whether we think they are implemented efficiently. But until then I'm siding with Guden. Past OS have done great things with little memory footprint by modern standards. Even mobile phones cram a lot into a small memory footprint.
