News & Rumors: Xbox One (codename Durango)

[3dilettante]

Also means they apparently aren't having yield issues, in fact, quite the opposite. Yields must be pretty good for an upclock to be feasible without ruining profitability. Actually, I should ask, I only assume the Xbox One is going to be profitable but at $499 is there any reason it won't be?

It's not a big enough change that I'd add the word "quite" in there.
It does mostly rule out the very bad range of yield rumors, and does reinforce the impression that the design is somewhere close to where it wants to be, or will be.

Unless yields were on the cusp of unmanufacturability, the change is nice but shouldn't have an impact that would wipe out profit margins. Even if there is a tiny yield impact, there are ways of compensating.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

It's not a big enough change that I'd add the word "quite" in there.
It does mostly rule out the very bad range of yield rumors, and does reinforce the impression that the design is somewhere close to where it wants to be, or will be.

Unless yields were on the cusp of unmanufacturability, the change is nice but shouldn't have an impact that would wipe out profit margins. Even if there is a tiny yield impact, there are ways of compensating.

Then again, is a 6.6% increase in GPU clock worthwhile enough to justify any yield impacts, no matter how small?

I see it more as...

They have a thermal design target and a yield target they want to hit. Once they got the final silicon, they found out they could still hit those targets with the small incremental boost. With something like that it becomes more of a why not, versus a perceived need for 6.6% more GPU clock at the expense of X% worse yields.

Regards,
SB

 

[expletive]

Article also says 8GB memory.....

That part is clearly just a rehash of whats already been known though.

 

[3dilettante]

Then again, is a 6.6% increase in GPU clock worthwhile enough to justify any yield impacts, no matter how small?

If the yield impact is trivial, even small benefits can win out.
There is a side benefit of at least some positive buzz and a very modest bit of improvement while in a performance knife-fight with a competitor. A tweak to anything, from fan RPM or taking some slight cost savings now or in the future would take a minor issue to even lower levels of unimportance.

There's a constellation of factors and thresholds Microsoft and AMD may be weighing.
Not knowing the exact manufacturing arrangement, we don't know how much of the impact would affect Microsoft versus the APU supplier.

 

[Rangers]

So is it just me or is Penello hinting on GAF at more "aces up the sleeve" as ekim put it. This is mostly surrounding a fair amount of 12GB discussion and this question

I have a question for you and I ask this in the most respectful way:

and I understand that's a PR line, it's ok. But if not by you and not now, when will these rumors/questions be put to bed/confirmed/answered? Will you guys talk more about specs, architecture, live, etc at Gamescom? Will you have an X0 event sometime this year or rather, will you have a dedicated event for the Xbox One before launch? I mean U.S. launch, to be clear.

A respectful question which I will answer respectfully

I don’t think anyone... us, the right honorable gentlemen in Foster City, our pals in Cupertino, or any other company actually disclose the timelines under which they will announce information.

My line isn’t a PR line – it’s just I’m not in PR so I don’t determine when news is getting released. It’s not my call, and I can’t share our PR plans with the world. Everyone is going to be putting out information on the new consoles at their own pace.

What I’m trying to do, is get on here and give more details and more context.

I agree – we haven’t done a great job on this. We’re trying to do better. But you guys have SUPER specific questions – most of them really good – and for our PR team to try and wrap up that level of detail is harder than you think. So I’m happy (I love it actually) to come here and try to really dig in and get some of the specifics answered.

But – I still work here. And I will continue to try and answer questions as long as I can, but I can only comment on stuff that’s announced. Cool?

 

[eastmen]

Rangers. Im going to go out on a limb and say 1.8/850 and 12 gigs is what we will end up with.

 

[Persistantthug]

So with the GPU's clockspeed raised to 853mhz.....what does that raise the Flop output to now?

 

[bagofsuck]

So with the GPU's clockspeed raised to 853mhz.....what does that raise the Flop output to now?

1.3

 

[Persistantthug]

1.3

Cool....


And if you don't mind, I know it's been explained before, but how do you do the math for that?

 

[(((interference)))]

Rangers. Im going to go out on a limb and say 1.8/850 and 12 gigs is what we will end up with.

This is where eastmen and my other source for the upclock rumour differ.
Eastmen thinks there'll be a CPU upclock as well, while my other source only has heard a GPU upclock being considered, however he doesn't have confirmation that they're not going to upclock the CPU - he just hasn't heard a CPU upclock being mentioned.

 

[Rangers]

If the yield impact is trivial, even small benefits can win out.
There is a side benefit of at least some positive buzz and a very modest bit of improvement while in a performance knife-fight with a competitor.

Yeah. Somebody on GAF posted that it's "just one or two" FPS in a 30 FPS game. My first instinct was to say even less, because it's just compute, but no an upclock effects the whole GPU, from the setup engine to the ROPs, at least if you're GPU limited it could indeed gain the full effect. Each frame in a 30 FPS game is 3.3%, so 6.6% is right about 2 frames (of course in a ideal scenario). Going from 28 to 30, or 26 to 28 FPS is definitely relevant imo.

 

[Rangers]

Cool....


And if you don't mind, I know it's been explained before, but how do you do the math for that?

shadersX2Xclock...


so in this case 768X2X853=1,310,208. 1.31 TF.

This is where eastmen and my other source for the upclock rumour differ.
Eastmen thinks there'll be a CPU upclock as well, while my other source only has heard a GPU upclock being considered, however he doesn't have confirmation that they're not going to upclock the CPU - he just hasn't heard a CPU upclock being mentioned.

I have my doubts about CPU, because if they did why wouldn't Whitten have mentioned it? There's no good explanation.

 

[(((interference)))]

Yeah, and there's that thing about Jaguar needing 66% more TDP to run at 2 Ghz.

So I'd assume even a 100 mhz CPU upclock would be a significant increase in TDP.

 

[Persistantthug]

shadersX2Xclock...


so in this case 768X2X853=1,310,208. 1.31 TF.

Thank you....Easy math....just the way I like it.

 

[expletive]

This is where eastmen and my other source for the upclock rumour differ.
Eastmen thinks there'll be a CPU upclock as well, while my other source only has heard a GPU upclock being considered, however he doesn't have confirmation that they're not going to upclock the CPU - he just hasn't heard a CPU upclock being mentioned.

And what about the ram?

 

[ThatGamer]

I think it is possible they might wait until Gamescom to try and put their announcement over the top like Sony did with the 8 GB GDDR5.

 

[NotTarts]

Yeah, and there's that thing about Jaguar needing 66% more TDP to run at 2 Ghz.

So I'd assume even a 100 mhz CPU upclock would be a significant increase in TDP.

8 Jaguar cores at 1.6 GHz probably consumes ~20W. At 2 GHz that would jump to ~30W.

 

[Solarus]

i think ms is going to announce many things that are going to surprise us at gamescon. so even though ms said theyre not reintroducing xbox, they kind of are with all the upgrades its been getting. its almost a compeltely different animal from its reveal. much more powerful and might even have much more ram.

 

[AzBat]

With all the excitement over the confirmed GPU clock(IMHO only interesting to dispel rumors of downclock) I guess the bit on the podcast about no Xbox Guide got overlooked. That's cool.

"I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly I became accustomed to the new dashboard and the fact that when I hit the Xbox button whatever I'm doing shrinks down, and all of a sudden there's the whole dashboard," said Hryb.

"The fun thing about 360 – and we've been doing this for a long time – is you had the dashboard and you had the Guide, but you couldn't get to the rest of the dashboard because then you would leave your game behind," added Whitten.

Tommy McClain

 

[DrJay24]

i think ms is going to announce many things that are going to surprise us at gamescon. so even though ms said theyre not reintroducing xbox, they kind of are with all the upgrades its been getting. its almost a compeltely different animal from its reveal. much more powerful and might even have much more ram.

You want to be that guy? Really?

53Mhz and now it is a completely different console?