News & Rumors: Xbox One (codename Durango)

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So...

8 Threads with 6GB of RAM with 5 Threads and 4 GB's available to gaming? Would be inline with other rumors suggesting a large portion of RAM dedicated to the OS/Apps and some hardware threads/cores reserved.

Hmm, this actually makes sense...

If this is the case, that's disappointing. Many of the rumors have sounded disappointing though, so it's not a huge surprise.

I guess a lot depends on the GPU if that's the case. Depends on competition too, wont look so bad if PS4 comes in at 2GB.

The rumors all have been saying 8GB of RAM though, so 6GB is a downgrade. Overall I tend to discount this guy though.
 
I don't have the time right now to go through the next gen prediction thread to see if this has been posted but someone directed me to this older thread from earlier this year, where someone who claims to work at MS was giving out hints regarding Durango. I was wondering if any of this made sense to anyone *cough*bkilian*cough* perhaps?
Huh, I have no idea what he's talking about. We haven't announced any successor to the 360, so any employee talking about how awesome this theoretical product is is inviting career repercussions.

That aside, he still isn't making much sense, those numbers mean nothing to me, and I wracked my brain for about 10 minutes trying to make sense of them.
 
What does that even mean? They started making kinect games so you believe it has made them unable to make anything else?

Yeah, Perfect Dark is a fun, tongue in cheek kind of shooter anyway - it's not Killzone or COD, I see no problem with Rare making it (though I don't expect it to be much better than PDZ was).

And I also don't see whats iffy about the 360 controller having a screen - other rumours have said as much. I don't expect a WiiU like device though, more like a Dreamcast controller where it's a small touch enabled screen can display minor information or configurable buttons for things like inventory items, activate powers etc.

I think the quote that hints this guy might be legit is this (and not simply some guy trying to drum up anticipation by dropping ludicrous TFLOP numbers etc):
That said, the new system will rock your world... I can't wait for us to unleash the plan to our customers... because it's finally a plan I think only Microsoft is positioned to deliver. We're finally bringing together ALL of our strengths, and making something that no one else could really truly compete with... I'm sure Sony's next machine will be great, and I'm sure Nintendo's WiiU will have some great games - but I know that neither of them are positioned to truly compete with what we've got on the horizon... it's really, really exciting. I was enthused for our 360 launch, and I was *REALLY* excited about the potential Kinect unleashed to the world of electronics, but this is by far the most excited I've ever been for any of our products, and I've been working at MS for nearly 12 years now.

Which is exactly what I'd expect from the leaked strategy doc (Fortaleza glasses etc) and MS's recent push to integrating their products and becoming more Apple-like.
 
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I really wish people would stop making this "more Apple-like" comparison. Integration, an ecosystem, etc, that's how Microsoft dominated while everything else kept going fragmented, forked, uncohesive, open. Perhaps the majority is just too young to remember these dark ages and all they know is Apple? But all Microsoft's efforts were broken up with the constant legislation, court rulings, lawyer meanderings, and general public pushback at every turn (and placing blame squarely on Ballmer is also irksome in lieu of this but that's another story). Notice how as soon as the oversight committee vacated, all the other companies have been free to create those intergrated experiences unabated over the years, and now others especially Apple are rolling in money, that Microsoft goes back to creating the ecosystems that put them on the map in the first place.

It's not "apple-like", google-like, or any of that when it's a page out of Microsoft's playbook in the first place.

So yes, expect durango, windows phone, windows 8, etc to all play nice together in 2013. But not too nice or we'll need Durango-N in 2014 to languish amongst the other consoles. With ballot dashboard boot screen, and a Durango Essentials Pack to accept controllers since it ships without physical controllers nor the code to accept such an input device. Meanwhile the press, web, and general public blast it for being what the fragmentation they shouted for, while coveting Pippin 2 which is Durango sans meddling, but more expensive with that logo. :)

Carry on.


:cool::yep2:
 
How many CPU's is this thing going to have? How many different iterations of the hardware will there be?
 
my take on the cryptic numbers.

G stands for something else besides games as he stated. I think the main candidate is gigabytes.

T can be teraflop/total/threads

6G/8T go together,
4G/5T go together.

I think the most likely interpretation is that the system has 6G of ram and 8 threads, games use 4G and 5 threads.

Second interpretation 8 gigabytes of system ram, 6 use for games. 5 gigabytes of other ram, 4 used for games. :oops:

BGAssassin, what do you make of it.
 
It's not "apple-like", google-like, or any of that when it's a page out of Microsoft's playbook in the first place.
What of Apple's precisely would be out of MS's playbook, today?

The only real consumer-level integration MS has accomplished over the years was when they contrievedly baked IE into the OS, and was rightfully scorned and stomped upon for doing so since it was a blatant, unabashed attempt to corner the internet and turn it into a proprietary MS-only playground, which failed, which we should all be eternally thankful for.

MS's meanderings with xbox live integration on the PC has been a universally hated and ridiculed project for being the worst of two worlds.

Can't really think of much else, unless you go under the hood with MS devtools, compilers etc.
 
20... 5T,8T - 4G, 6G ...13


8 GB Total Ram 6 GB of Ram for Games

5 core CPU Total 4 cores used for Games

2013 release date.
 
8 threads and 6 gigs of total memory and allotting 5 threads and 4 gigs for gaming would go along with MS's desire to guarantee certain services and applications run 100% regardless if someone is presently gaming or not. Just consider this rumor in relation to the patent and speculate upon it.
 
Just wondering what the hell you could possibly spend 2 gigs on in a console, that isn't gaming-related... I really can't wrap that one around my head.

There's a million better things you could use that RAM for if it was all available for the console's primary purpose - GAMING.
 
8 threads and 6 gigs of total memory and allotting 5 threads and 4 gigs for gaming would go along with MS's desire to guarantee certain services and applications run 100% regardless if someone is presently gaming or not. Just consider this rumor in relation to the patent and speculate upon it.
So a third of the RAM is reserved for non-gaming OS tasks? Win 8 can run in 512 MBs. MS is expecting the best part of 1.5 GBs of applications running on XB3 in the background of games?
 
I wonder if potentially 3 of the 8 Threads/Cores are reserved for the OS, then it justifies a Bulldozer like module approach. I doubt the OS/Apps need extensive use of the FP unit so let those tasks reside the modules where the other core is doing the heavy vector processing. If the task needs the the full AVX unit, maybe it can steal some cycles when available. I guess this could cause some issues in the L2 cache.

I could envision something a possible work division like this:

Module 1: Core1 : OS/APP Core2: Game AVX heavy code
Module 2: Core3 : OS/APP Core4: Game AVX heavy code
Module 3: Core5 : OS/Kinect Core6: Game AVX heavy code (maybe AVX/FP unit shared due to Kinect)
Module 4: Core7/8: AVX/FP shared or dedicated to one core depending on how the work loads is partitioned.

If they're really going to dedicate so many resources to the OS/Apps, then why replicate the hardware everywhere.
 
Threads and memory doesn't make much sense to me. What would take 3 threads specifically?
 
Threads and memory doesn't make much sense to me. What would take 3 threads specifically?

What if MS, worried that "reserving 15%" of cycles or whatnot for OS, Apps, and Kinect is taking the easier route: 3 threads and 1GB for the OS, Apps, and Kinect *always* reserved.

This could also play into other models, e.g. a set top box model where it only runs the OS, Apps, and Kinect. They could use a svelter hardware design (3 cores + 1 GB memory) and/or even use defective chips.
 
What if MS, worried that "reserving 15%" of cycles or whatnot for OS, Apps, and Kinect is taking the easier route: 3 threads and 1GB for the OS, Apps, and Kinect *always* reserved.

This could also play into other models, e.g. a set top box model where it only runs the OS, Apps, and Kinect. They could use a svelter hardware design (3 cores + 1 GB memory) and/or even use defective chips.


Except that 3 threads isn't 15%, it's nearly 40%.

I can't imagine a gaming console out on the market that would dedicate 40% of its CPU capabilities to non-gaming tasks.
 
I really wish people would stop making this "more Apple-like" comparison. Integration, an ecosystem, etc, that's how Microsoft dominated while everything else kept going fragmented, forked, uncohesive, open. Perhaps the majority is just too young to remember these dark ages and all they know is Apple? But all Microsoft's efforts were broken up with the constant legislation, court rulings, lawyer meanderings, and general public pushback at every turn (and placing blame squarely on Ballmer is also irksome in lieu of this but that's another story). Notice how as soon as the oversight committee vacated, all the other companies have been free to create those intergrated experiences unabated over the years, and now others especially Apple are rolling in money, that Microsoft goes back to creating the ecosystems that put them on the map in the first place.

It's not "apple-like", google-like, or any of that when it's a page out of Microsoft's playbook in the first place.

So yes, expect durango, windows phone, windows 8, etc to all play nice together in 2013. But not too nice or we'll need Durango-N in 2014 to languish amongst the other consoles. With ballot dashboard boot screen, and a Durango Essentials Pack to accept controllers since it ships without physical controllers nor the code to accept such an input device. Meanwhile the press, web, and general public blast it for being what the fragmentation they shouted for, while coveting Pippin 2 which is Durango sans meddling, but more expensive with that logo. :)

Carry on.

I meant Apple-like more in terms of offering cool, high quality, well integrated hardware and software

And I thought MS's malaise was mostly due to them becoming a bloated corporate behemoth, dominated by bureaucracy and internal politicking and led by a sales guy rather than a product guy
http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2012/08/microsoft-lost-mojo-steve-ballmer
 
Back when the "HD war" was going on I was a regular on a HT forum from where one of the users eventually set up that showtimeforfree site, Darkfalz was there too & from what I remember he was a total ms/hddvd fanboy who never managed to provide even a hint of any real substance to his "I-work-for-ms" claims.
 
20... 5T,8T - 4G, 6G ...13


8 GB Total Ram 6 GB of Ram for Games

5 core CPU Total 4 cores used for Games

2013 release date.
There are many way to play that games :) I'll try based on an "off the radar possibility", a NV only system.

2013 granted

5 cores (cortex A9) as in tegra 3+ (and an IGP) with 2GB of low power DDR2 or DDR3

8 cores (cortex A9)

4GB of high bandwidth RAM

I was just reacting in another thread about a Nvidia based system (not because of odds because of boredom) but it could matched those numbers and the philosophy described in early paper about Durango pretty well.

The tegra 3+ (or more recent) runs the OS, apps, and kinect it's connected to its own 2 GB of RAM.

Then we have a second SOC that include a mid range Nv GPU and 8 cortex A9.
This SOC is connected to 4GB fast RAM (either DDR4 or GDDR5).
I chose A9 versus A15 or something custom NV may or may not have because they are really tiny and don't consume much.

If I look at AMD offering (and up coming offering) I would be surprised to see SMT making it in a CPU any time soon. There is no known implementation of SMT on RAM (for now at least).
So to have 8 cores you indeed need tiny cores. More than that you need really low power cores.
Actually I'm not sure even up coming Jaguar cores would be low power enough if you plan to have 8 of them at decent clock speed.
Nvidia said that they are planing for GPUs integrating CPU cores (in Maxwell or another project?) It could make sense. Anyway they know how to put a SOC together.

Overall it would not be that much silicon and power. Tegra 3 is tiny ~80sq.mm @40nm and cheap. THey could use ore recent iteration of tegra though I don't expect them to be big/costlier.

Something like half the Nvidia actual high end GPU + 8 A9 and there L2 would be definitely sane (in size and power consumption) using 28nm lithography.

Anyway off the radar though lol.
 
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