News & Rumors: Xbox One (codename Durango)

[XpiderMX]

The 12Gb is totally senseless.
You cant put it on DDR3 controller without impacting speed (16Gb, not 12, and still...). You cant put it elsewhere on the board (come on, where do you put it? Between NB ans SB? on PCIE?
You cant re-project your motherboard, redesign it, re-test it, reprint it, re-attach all components in so little time.

Really, I would have expected something crazy like 16Gb ddr3, or out-of-spec DDR3-2800...
But discussing on 12Gb is... really odd.

Ah, and meanwhile re-do a full DRM in 2 months (my fav. part, as its real)

There is a "tech" thread about Xbox One rumors, maybe you can help with your knowledges there.

 

[Dave Baumann]

But here's my point. That's not Microsoft's money to spend, that money you want them to spend on another 4Gb belongs to the shareholders and investors.

Ugh. Nope, its MS's. And if you want to continue down the line of SEC, then guess what, "Safe Harbor" statements always include competitive clauses and you can wrap increases in projected costs around increased competitive understanding and postitioning.

For unreleased products you are not talking about real money but statements about the potential for money to be earned, and there are all kinds of caveats with that. Investing would be very easy if everyone could predict the future.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Xbox One prototypes that didn't make it

Link fixed. Wow that is a lot of prototypes.

 

[AlphaWolf]

But here's my point. That's not Microsoft's money to spend, that money you want them to spend on another 4Gb belongs to the shareholders and investors. This is a case of Microsoft being authorised by the Board to spend $xx million to produce a 8Gb box, as planned. If they have $xx million left over, they don't get to spend it on extras or buy everybody cake. That isn't how business works. Or least not successful business.

The whole investor/sec angle you are trying to make is beyond ridiculous. What matters is what they've told investors at shareholder meetings, not some pre-launch PR piece.

Investors might get annoyed if they spend more than they estimated (some might even sue (and lose)), but barring a deliberate attempt to defraud nothing would happen. Companies have cost overruns all the time, and there is no evidence they are over their estimate because we don't actually have a number for either their actual cost or the estimate.

 

[Jwm]

Looking at the sketches you can clearly see one that looks like the PS4, what a mess that would have been!

 

[pMax]

Why?

Take a look at any 2GB GeForce GTX 660 available on the market right now. That is using mixed densities memory because the memory interface is 192b. This is already in place for high performance graphics scenarios, in the scenario being discussed here the it can be even less likely to impact gaming performance since the channels that would have higher density of RAM could be the channel that have the OS reservation space allocated to it which are not being stressed in a gaming scenario.

One controller with higher density and the other... yeah, that's really make sense.
Then you "only" have to re-project your memory manager, very hard.
...but XB1 is using an hypervisor, and that would make this much easier.

So one controller with share WinOS and XBOS space. WinOS apps will be slower, and that's acceptable.

And so, you could give 8Gb full to the game.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Ugh. Nope, its MS's. And if you want to continue down the line of SEC, then guess what, "Safe Harbor" statements always include competitive clauses and you can wrap increases in projected costs around increased competitive understanding and postitioning.

I've seen nothing to suggest Microsoft have filed an 8K specific to the Xbox One, it's only routine stuff like Steven Sinofsky leaving, change of CFO etc, but since the SEC relaxed on Reg FD filings, allowing announcements to be made other ways as long as investors are notified, this isn't surprising. So, no "safe harbour" statements, just the press announcements which lacked qualifications like "things may change". Unless you can link to such statements?

But the fact remains. This isn't a new mouse with some cost overruns, this is Microsoft's entry in what they believe could be a billion console generation which is estimated to be a $68Bn a year (2012) industry. Changes like dropping another 4Gb of RAM in for, I presume Microsoft want a third of that potential 1Bn console market. Less profitability on every console shipped for the next 5-8 years for what? Is it really needed? Sure, they could put 16Gb in there and still break a profit. They could probably go 20Gb and still make profits over the whole generation, but why ship more hardware than you need too.

For unreleased products you are not talking about real money but statements about the potential for money to be earned, and there are all kinds of caveats with that. Investing would be very easy if everyone could predict the future.

I'm talking about the mandate under which the Xbox division are operating, which sure isn't "here is a big bag of money, make what you think is best.". After the problems they had with RRoD I could imagine more scrutiny than regarding the XBox One project and I don't believe for a second that they can spend any surplus money on specification upgrades that make no sense.

 

[AlphaWolf]

A cost overrun of the Xbox One costing $340 to manufacture instead of $320 due to case production problems and having to pay premium rates to get CNC time is one thing. This isn't that thing.

This is buying a house for for $400,000 then before you move in being told, hey we added a third garage, it's now $440,000.

And it's easily possible they secured better pricing by increasing volume, we don't know that there is significant cost increase or that any increase puts them significantly above their target.

And it doesn't matter if they added a helicopter and a yacht as long as they launch a product that does well, no one will care. If it doesn't do well someone might get fired and some investors might shake their fists but there is no fraud, there is no SEC involvement. Companies are allowed to make changes to product in development, it happens more often than not.

I myself doubt the 12GB, but if it's not in there it won't be because of worry of investor revolt or the SEC.

 

[Dave Baumann]

I myself doubt the 12GB, but if it's not in there it won't be because of worry of investor revolt or the SEC.

Same here. I'm shaking my head at some of the arguments put forth why this isn't possible or feasible just as much as I am why it will happen.

 

[ERP]

Right. The value for me is the issue, but we don't know their costs so it's hard to say for sure.

FWIW I think it would have a more direct impact on visuals than any sort of minor GPU clock speed bump.

Having said that I don't think it's likely this late in the game.

 

[COPS N RAPPERS]

Xbox One prototypes that didn't make it

Jeez, They did have some good other options to pick from, 80% of them had curves. I do see why they picked The Xb1's case used; it's because of it's general purpose. Simplicity, It's dimensions are simple enough to get any typical size motherboard in there with little hassle.

 

[Dave Baumann]

FWIW I think it would have a more direct impact on visuals than any sort of minor GPU clock speed bump.

Just curious - where do estimate such an improvement would come from? Higher resolution textures, higher resolutions intermediate buffers? Other stuff?

 

[ERP]

Just curious - where do estimate such an improvement would come from? Higher resolution textures, higher resolutions intermediate buffers? Other stuff?

Textures for the most part, probably both higher resolution on 3rd party titles (since that's easy to do) and more varied on XB1 specific titles.
Intermediate buffers are rarely memory limited.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Looking at the sketches you can clearly see one that looks like the PS4, what a mess that would have been!

In the prototype hardware design docs, there's a sketched idea - "AMD 8 core x86 + 18 CUs + 4 GB unified GDDR5, maybe 8" - scratched out with a reference to that case.

 

[Bagel seed]

I agree with DrJay24. It's already hard enough to articulate to common folk what the tangible differences would be in having games that used 5 vs 7 gb of available ram and 1.2TF vs 1.8TF. Minor spec bumps isn't going to make a big difference in mind share now or later.

We all saw how the first year advantage and the momentum of 'well all my friends have Xbox' in the US worked out very well for MS this generation - a few millions lead grew into 12+ million, so building a core base of users as quickly as possible against your competitor is paramount. Supply and price are the limiting factors here.. Downclock for better yields and a price cut are the biggest moves they can make at this point to have a positive effect on sales.

 

[BRiT]

*ahem* This is not the business discussion thread. Please keep those sort of posts out of this thread.

 

[Cyan]

Textures for the most part, probably both higher resolution on 3rd party titles (since that's easy to do) and more varied on XB1 specific titles.
Intermediate buffers are rarely memory limited.

Taking into account some of the top of the line PC graphics cards only feature like 2-3GB on average I always thought that 5GB was more than enough for textures, especially now with the Tiled Resources tech.

I thought that the additional RAM could be especially useful to improve load times -Forza 5 seems to have slow load times for instance-.

Additionally, I was one of those people who were happy with the leaked specs. Any improvement for a product which is expected to last a decade or so is welcome though.

Dave hinted at an upgrade being a feasible possibility, and he knows a lot so to say. Penello said that they are going to give the full specs when the console is launched, iirc.

 

[Rangers]

FWIW I think it would have a more direct impact on visuals than any sort of minor GPU clock speed bump.

Having said that I don't think it's likely this late in the game.

8GB vs 12GB=50% increase

800mhz vs 900 mhz =12.5% increase

Intuitively you're getting a much more significant increase in the parameter in the former, probably why it would be better if you could only choose one.

 

[BeyondTed]

8GB vs 12GB=50% increase

800mhz vs 900 mhz =12.5% increase

Intuitively you're getting a much more significant increase in the parameter in the former, probably why it would be better if you could only choose one.

If 5GB for games is correct then 5GB to 9GB for games is getting close to a 100% increase.

 

[Strange]

it's worse than that i think, among the forum nuts who discuss tv's like we discuss video games they have a word for it, "panel lottery"

It means some identical SKU TV's can come with different panel technologies (IPS, and I forgot all the other ones heh heh), and it's a "lottery" which one you get on purchase (of course the average consumer wouldn't notice/care).

Like "Oh, I like that Samsung TV, but too bad it's a panel lottery model"

It's not as crazy as you think, as it happens in apple products too.


http://macperformanceguide.com/blog...okPro-Retina-screen-burn-in-ghost-images.html

Now I've been to forums and cross checked with Apple technical support and can say that this is true as this actually happened to me.

There were two types of panels provided to produce the MBPs at this time. One was from LG and the other one was from Samsung.
The LG panels had serious ghosting after a period of use and the panel and led the entire aluminum back case had to be replaced with Samsung panels. (which replaced my dented back side for free, made me a very happy consumer)

So no it's not as crazy or far fetched as you may think and they may have some very obvious effects that many "average" consumer can notice.