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I don't know if that story really applies. In that story the space pen is over-engineered for no reason. In reality, the Xbox One is maybe not even over-engineered, and even if it is, probably not for no reason. The memory setup likely had more to do with industry predictions about the availability and cost of GDDR5 at launch. They may have guessed wrong, but if you read anything about experts and predictions, you'll find that their ability to guess at those things is not much better than guessing at random (maybe not in this field?).
You can design a "space-pen" for all the right reasons, with the best people in the field, in the most efficient manner possible.... but you may still find your solution competing against a "pencil".
In XB1/PS4 terms Sony "lucked upon a pencil", and we don't know everything about the space-pen.
It will come across like that when you attempt to mollify the louder hardcore system warriors by answering reasonable questions on the enormous console board there.
It's asking for a headache though. Didn't MS go through all of this with Xbox 1.5 and the 2x more powerful PS3?
If you entirely miss the moral of that anecdote, then I guess that's what you can take away from it.
It was Nelson who was mostly leading that PR/Tech superiority charge on the power back then.
Has this been posted already:
http://www.dailytech.com/Xbox+One+t...fit+on+Each+Sale+from+Launch/article33324.htm
http://www.dailytech.com/Xbox+One+t...fit+on+Each+Sale+from+Launch/article33324.htm
Does it really matter though? Somebody mentioned GAF has 15k members....
Even ignoring what percent of those are highly active, which is probably like 10%, in the scheme of consoles sold, that's nothing. That's like a 10th of a single slow NPD sales month for Xbox.
And I dont know why you cast the second part as a negative. It's basically "people thought the X360 was a weakling and it turned out not to be". That's a good outcome, one I'm sure they'd love to replicate with XBO.
We're going highly off-topic, but essentially.
- the key problem facing MS was building a next-gen console.
- they created by far the most cost-efficient ToF camera ever built.
- they created a custom blu-ray controller and a custom chip for the camera.
- they created a system to approach the performance of GDDR5 using low cost DDR3 combined with eSRAM.
- they created an APU with ?15? custom processors, a custom audio block and umpteen other new features.
So, a lot of work, and yet we're comparing that console to the PS4 (which is possibly the simplest major console design in the last couple of generations).
I don't think it's wrong to suggest that people are wondering if the XB1 is a "space pen". Whether that's fair is unclear... but I don't worry their engineers are stupid, I worry that they were wasting their time.
The PS4 may not have 15 custom processors, although I suspect that if Sony counts using whatever metric Microsoft uses, there's a half-dozen or more.
Both consoles have multibillion transistor APUs, so I don't think the lack of boxes in a high-level diagram is truly illustrative of the system's complexity. The fact that it appears simple is likely a source of much of its complexity.
The coming gen is more complex than what has come before.
Things always look different in hindsight. The only things in the design that look out of step with the norm are having the data move engines and the ESRAM, and I think both stem from wanting 8GB of RAM. They chose DDR3 over GDDR5 for some reason (most likely prediction of cost and availability), and that led them to ESRAM and the DMEs. Having an audio block isn't particularly outrageous or risque. I suppose since Kinect is considered by them to be a part of the complete system, so you can debate that as well. Kinect v1 was interesting, but didn't work as people wanted it to. The way they were doing the depth buffer by projecting that grid and analyzing it was a dead end. There was nothing out there that did what they needed, so they rolled their own. It was that or nothing.
Oh, and about the space pen. The moral of the story is to understand the problem you're trying to solve. The engineers thought they needed to make a pen that worked in outer space. The real problem was finding a way for astronauts to write in space, which was easily done with a pencil. They over-engineered a solution because they didn't understand the problem. Pretty sure Microsoft understood what they were trying to do (media box) very clearly.
I think that the fact hat MSFT is to break even on the XB1 is pretty interesting, to me it means that they are going to have a lot of room for aggressive pricing policies if they ever need to.
From a PR pov, when the system is more expensive than the competition I'm not sure it is a good move to let buyer know about it.
From a PR pov, when the system is more expensive than the competition I'm not sure it is a good move to let buyer know about it.
It's not like that's a big secret. It would show up in their financial statements and it would be a question they'd have to answer to the public. Also, how entitled do you have to be as a consumer to be upset that a company is breaking even on sales of their products rather than selling at a loss?
Well I don't know about "how entitled" one have to be but I can think of some people thinking that definitely the other system (which may or may not break even) offers more for the money.
Ultimately one may find out later that Sony was also breaking even on the ps4 but I think that on that one MSFT could have waited before making that matter official.
It is also interesting as it must have been a long while since a home console with the pretense of being a leading force on the market is launched in the grey.
My-self I always though that actually subsidized hardware was a bad deal for costumers. keeping away lesser companies that may have driven innovative approach. It is really a short term win for the costumers but I guess lots of people think they have choice when dealing with a duopole so I may be a bit alone in that camp.
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The jury is still out on whether hindsight is going to say Microsoft made a bad bet.
We won't know until devs really get into exploiting the next gen platforms and the tools and general knowledge mature.
The decision to forego a GDDR5 bus might have given them 10-20 Watts of power they didn't need to dissipate, were free to dedicate to other things, or some additional leeway in how the chip clocks or yields.
Conversely, having that kind of power hanging around your neck might make some choices less tenable.
I think using that particular urban legend is more informative about the person using it than what they applied it to.
It's frequently a sign of a "I personally don't know the reasons for X, so it must not be necessary" thought process.
LightHeaven
Regular
I think it's unfair to call their design as a space pen, because the force that driven that design probably wasn't just to get the target game performance... They had some other non gaming goals.
The machine has to be capable of running windows 8 apps, even if a game is already running, and apps snapping can't take performance out of the game. They also wanted kinect skeleton tracking and voice recog at all times, without degrading game performance either. And background tasks like recording gameplay, or even apps pulling data to display... And so on.
The design probably have to accommodate all that and still deliver on the game performance developers wanted.
Certainly, I think that's entirely correct, and I have no doubt that was the right technical conclusion, and I suspect that neither bandwidth nor memory capacity is going to be a problem for the XB1...
But maybe, when the 8GB requirement became apparent, it was an opportunity to consider if the correct answer wasn't to cut down the OS?
Anyway, I think that's enough discussions of my space-pen, hopefully Penello can speak more about the console and less about how technically competent the engineers are
Indeed, that urban legend is a myth, same as my common-law, misinformed frogs in hot water myth I used a while ago and was corrected on. The space pen was invented independently of NASA, and NASA used pencils before adopting the space pen. And while the moral is true, it doesn't have a legitimate example for people to fall back on, nor proof that people are prone to over-engineer solutions.
That's not to say every console is perfectly designed, nor perfectly balanced. They just need to be intelligently evaluated post-release. One can say that PS3 was over-engineered with a very expensive RnD input that failed to provide the same ROI as MS's similarly capable solution, for example. Next-gen, we'll be looking at whether MS's choice of lots of custom silicon and custom RAM solution was better value design than PS4s or not. Such platform comparisons are of course pointless now, and not really welcome as premature versus discussion without informed basis.
D
Deleted member 11852
Guest
I watched the whole 12 minute interview and I don't get the fuss. Microsoft's messaging has obviously been problematic, in part because of the inconsistencies and changes and in part because of the PR spin lingo which I think many folks are wise too. But this interview was a lot more honest, even accounting for the fact that he's delivering Microsoft's standard lines on Xbox One vs PlayStation 4.
According to the GAF front page now, it has 129k members and 13k are currently online and that's why it matters to Microsoft to be there. Regardless of what you think of GAF, many of it's members are prolific posters of information on others sites so if you wan't to get a message out organically, without appearing to be running an astroturfing campaign, you seed it to a massive community where it'll spread. Unfortunately, it'll also change, but that happens anyway. How many sites give their interpretation of an announcement? How many folks really click and read the source?
Microsoft, and it's employees, aren't endorsing or trying to placate GAF by being there, they are using GAF for their purposes. Sometimes it'll work, sometimes it wont'.
RancidLunchmeat
Veteran
Isn't it incredibly fascinating that the two competitors have completely switched designs this coming generation from the last two? The Xbox and even the 360 (although less so) were essentially off the shelf components while Sony had their custom solutions in the emotion engine and cell. Now, it looks as if MS took a basic SoC and then customized the hell out of it while Sony essentially took a basic SoC and just slapped on a superior memory controller to utilize faster GDDR5 memory.
Personally, I think this is because as Lighthaven stated, MS had goals and plans that went beyond gaming so they needed a more customized architecture while Sony is primarily focused on building a gaming machine.
Oh, and I think Penello's latest interviews and statements firmly support Blakjedi's frequent comments. That the blow back from forum warriors forced MS to completely change their strategy and fundamentally effected how the console would work and that is causing launch problems as they try to reconfigure everything to work with disc based non DRM'd content.
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