News & Rumors: Xbox One (codename Durango)

[astrograd]

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.

I think you'd have to totally ignore how engineering actually works in the real world to draw that kind of conclusion. In the real world complex sets of priorities are set in stone and targeted at the outset. The narrative thus far has focused on the eSRAM being there as if it were a band aid and suggestive of a design weakness somehow. Yet, it is now known to be the reason for the X1 to offer more bandwidth to the GPU than PS4's memory setup can. That's while retaining the pricing advantages of DDR3 and on top of other possible payoffs for the eSRAM.

Is that solution more complicated? Sure. Is it worse? No, probably not imho. Sometimes complex designs are necessary in order to not compromise a set of nuanced priorities. If the pencil's only purpose is to write in space, then it's an ideal solution. But if that same tool needs to fill the role of a variety of utilities in different contexts it may very well be incredibly lacking. I think it's safe to say that pretty much everything ppl had assumed about the console as it being a compromised, weak design has turned out to be much more nuanced and well thought out than that.

 

[brasnial]

I for one don't know how anyone can post a comment saying there is nothing hidden in Microsoft's box .

Just for one minute take all the emotion out of the argument about what machine or company is better for games and just take what a independent company is saying about its hardware at face value .

Microsoft has said we have some things we can't or are unwilling to talk about at this minute .

Now that doesn't mean suddenly the Xbox one is going to become two or three times more powerful .

In my eyes and from a neutral gamers point of view maybe some new interesting tech is in there .
A new way of doing stuff using new chip designs or methods surely we are all just a little bit geeky here and would like to see something new.

Wouldn't it be very interesting indeed if there was a new chip design in the Xbox one maybe something physics or ray tracing or taking a rumour from a long time ago a new crossfire set up .

I don't believe any of these things I've listed above as there no evidence for any of them but from Microsoft's own mouth they have things inside there box they can't or won't talk about yet that's a fact as Microsoft have told us that much .

So all this it can't be true is wrong ....itis true if we take Microsoft's word on it which leaves us with a fun guessing game for the next month or two so get guessing guys

 

[Proelite]

Brasnial has to be MisterXMedia. Has to be.

 

[Tap In]

I think you'd have to totally ignore how engineering actually works in the real world to draw that kind of conclusion. In the real world complex sets of priorities are set in stone and targeted at the outset. The narrative thus far has focused on the eSRAM being there as if it were a band aid and suggestive of a design weakness somehow. Yet, it is now known to be the reason for the X1 to offer more bandwidth to the GPU than PS4's memory setup can. That's while retaining the pricing advantages of DDR3 and on top of other possible payoffs for the eSRAM.

Is that solution more complicated? Sure. Is it worse? No, probably not imho. Sometimes complex designs are necessary in order to not compromise a set of nuanced priorities. If the pencil's only purpose is to write in space, then it's an ideal solution. But if that same tool needs to fill the role of a variety of utilities in different contexts it may very well be incredibly lacking. I think it's safe to say that pretty much everything ppl had assumed about the console as it being a compromised, weak design has turned out to be much more nuanced and well thought out than that.

Could not agree more.. the only people who do not see that there do not want to see it.

 

[AstoundingHolmes]

Speaking of space pens (though I don't subscribe to the point in regards to xbo), the bluray controller has been bugging me ever since I heard about it. I sort of wrote it off in musing that Sony had some patent on controllers and MS couldn't bear paying them so they made their own, but that's obviously nothing more than a laugh. Anyway, I don't get why they would bother engineering their own controller - everything installs and runs from the HDD, so why not use a standard controller? Some security mechanism? I seem to recall that there was a hack involving certain types of 360 ODDs being vulnerable - or maybe it was the Xbox - so that might be an attempt to halt one prior vector.

 

[Rangers]

I for one don't know how anyone can post a comment saying there is nothing hidden in Microsoft's box .

Just for one minute take all the emotion out of the argument about what machine or company is better for games and just take what a independent company is saying about its hardware at face value .

Microsoft has said we have some things we can't or are unwilling to talk about at this minute .

Now that doesn't mean suddenly the Xbox one is going to become two or three times more powerful .

In my eyes and from a neutral gamers point of view maybe some new interesting tech is in there .
A new way of doing stuff using new chip designs or methods surely we are all just a little bit geeky here and would like to see something new.

Wouldn't it be very interesting indeed if there was a new chip design in the Xbox one maybe something physics or ray tracing or taking a rumour from a long time ago a new crossfire set up .

I don't believe any of these things I've listed above as there no evidence for any of them but from Microsoft's own mouth they have things inside there box they can't or won't talk about yet that's a fact as Microsoft have told us that much .

So all this it can't be true is wrong ....itis true if we take Microsoft's word on it which leaves us with a fun guessing game for the next month or two so get guessing guys

It doesn't have to be anything that crazy.

If we perhaps over analyze Microsoft's statements we can conclude there is more to the picture than meets the eye, but how is anybody's guess.

It can just be as Penello stated, they think they have engineered well enough that the system has few bottlenecks and everything operates at near peak performance.

It could also be to do with the supposed 15 co processors. Maybe some things are not yet revealed.

Maybe it's just they think the ESRAM gives them a nice edge in various ways. This is the Occam's razor solution imo.

Maybe we'll find out in November, apparently. Maybe not.

 

[brasnial]

Brasnial has to be MisterXMedia. Has to be.

For all I no you could be him proelite ...as I stated I don't believe there's any supper advanced tech in Microsoft's box but there is going by Microsoft's own words stuff tech inside there that they are unprepared or unable to talk about at this minute .

Now my guess is that there co-processors all have fixed functions ..the audio ones we no about ....the guessing game in my opinion should be what kind of fixed function co-processor would help graphics and CPU functions .
I for one would love a console with fix function physics hardware .

These co - processors exist Microsoft has admitted that much to the press so the debate should be what are they and what do they do not how powerful they are or how powerful is the machine .

I'm no fan boy unless you would count loving my neogoe game and machine collection .

 

[Pozer]

At this stage, with final dev kits already being worked on by hundreds if not thousands of devs.. I seriously doubt any exotic silicon of any substantial benefit is going to be unmasked. My guess is the sum total of all the subchips to offload tasks and the flexibility of programmable esram keep the gpu at high efficiency and make overall performance a bit closer to competitors than many people are expecting.

 

[brasnial]

It doesn't have to be anything that crazy.

If we perhaps over analyze Microsoft's statements we can conclude there is more to the picture than meets the eye, but how is anybody's guess.

It can just be as Penello stated, they think they have engineered well enough that the system has few bottlenecks and everything operates at near peak performance.

It could also be to do with the supposed 15 co processors. Maybe some things are not yet revealed.

Maybe it's just they think the ESRAM gives them a nice edge in various ways. This is the Occam's razor solution imo.

Maybe we'll find out in November, apparently. Maybe not.

Thanks for the support rangers ...you are correct its human nature to look for more than there is but hay that's what got as where we are so far on the evolutionary trail .
So its our best and worst trait as a species

 

[Nisaaru]

All Larry means when he says "the truth comes out" is that the games will tell the story, and NOT that there is any more or different hardware than what's been described already. I think they are pretty convinced that, (and perhaps rightly so), the rendering advantages the PS4 has aren't so great that it will result in some clearly better experience to the majority of gamers.

There's a lot double entendre going on and the people doing it surely know what they are doing. The question is why.

 

[Nisaaru]

Maybe it's just they think the ESRAM gives them a nice edge in various ways. This is the Occam's razor solution imo.

But wouldn't that mean that current PC GPUs with their wide GDDR5 buses and extensive cache structure are inefficient because their CUs would idle a *lot*. I mean, you can't have both.

 

[AlphaWolf]

They do...

 

[Cjail]

The narrative thus far has focused on the eSRAM being there as if it were a band aid and suggestive of a design weakness somehow. Yet, it is now known to be the reason for the X1 to offer more bandwidth to the GPU than PS4's memory setup can. That's while retaining the pricing advantages of DDR3 and on top of other possible payoffs for the eSRAM.

Probably this is OT but but PS4 initial bandwidth was at 192Gb/s so only by adding bandwidth on XBO you can achieve that figure.
Now how you can say that MS choose eSRAM in reaction to what Sony was doing with PS4; do you have evidence to support this theory? (honest question)
Now the combination DDR3 + eSRAM no doubt has a reason to exist (Sony thought about a similar solution at some point as well) but if it was the best solution performance/price wise then GDDR5 would not be used at all.
MS solution is good but it's not like they managed to make GDDR5 obsolete.

 

[LightHeaven]

:smile: You made me laugh with your Paint comment. Maybe part of the power of the Xbox One is hidden in the dark side of the moon....

Other than that, it's not the first time I hear about Microsoft being under NDA for the time being til October and November. According to this news they are keeping some secrets under wraps. I consider you one of the geniuses here so any information could help to know what is going on.

Further explanation on how the hardware works might explain where are the rest of those 47MB of cache -Gipsel :smile2:exposed some pretty interesting information in that regard too, but it can also be sheer technical (something I know he loves) conjecture on his part 'cos maybe they aren't accounting for audio caches and stuff-. So perhaps we'll have to wait and see.

http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/165918-the-xbox-one-will-feel-more-powerful-in-practice-than-it-seems-on-paper?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ziffdavis%2Fextremetech+%28Extremetech%29

So at least two articles reference this. This one and the venturebreat one. So, evidently it's an actual thing MS said. Hmmm...

That's weird because the venturebeat article worded it as "MS didn't want the competition to know how well designed it's system was". What could it hurt now? It's not like Sony can redesign the PS4, can they? Is MS really worried about next next gen?

Weird. Probably reading too much into it. I wonder if we will even get any new details in November.

Maybe it makes sense if it performs much better than expected due to these unknown things, and they didn't want Sony to upclock in response? Pretty much the only possible way it makes sense.

I might be mistaken, but it seems clear to me they are talking about the consoles being released and people see that their game performance is indeed close, and not about a secret customization or whatever in their design waiting to be revealed....

 

[Shifty Geezer]

i wish we could know more about these 15 co processors and if they are going to be a game changer.

Look at the HotChips slides. Top of this page:

http://www.planet3dnow.de/cms/1538-...f-der-hot-chips-25-huma-sein-oder-nicht-sein/

...first slide, an overview of the SoC.

In the top left there's a label "15 special purpose processors offload CPU and GPU" and there's a labelled arrow connecting them to the memory system. Now, either one assumes the 15 custom processors are secret and not shown on the diagram, or one appreciates that they are included. So what 'processors' are shown. Well, for starters the "Audio Processors" label includes 3 or 4 processors according to the VGLeaks audio diagram (the actual SHAPE block is called an engine there, not a processor, but the other three components are named processors). We know we have 4 processors in the memory move units. These are all grouped under that "15 processors" label in the HotChips diagram. Along with them, we have an "AV out Rsz Cmpst" (resize composite) which'll be a processor we've already heard of. Then there are "Audio DMA", "PCIe", "AV in" and "Video Encode/Decode" in the same groups of diagram blocks that we may be uncertain of as they haven't been explicitly talked about.

The sensible interpretation is that these blocks, grouped with the known processors, are the custom processors - there's no other sane way to interpret the diagram. And that there answers your question. These 15 'processors' are ancillary blocks, doing housework. They aren't game changers. They mostly alleviate some percentage of work from the CPU and GPU for them to keep doing other things without being interrupted. There's probably no way to put a percentage figure on their contribution either. The functions are also often featured in other designs - other SoCs have graphics composite processing hardware, for example, and memory units - so it's not like they are 15 unique features that no other system has. The audio processors are special, and the rest may be tweaked to be better, or fairly standard fair.

But the most important point here is that there isn't any hidden hardware that's suddenly going to make XB1 far more powerful than we currently understand it to be. There's no secret second GPU. There's no amazing 15 processors as yet untalked about that deal with physics and AI and raytracing and voxel rendering and hardware sprites and copper-list display planes. The information is right in front of us, as presented by MS themselves to the public and to their developers.

 

[pjbliverpool]

They do...

As they will in both consoles whether they are using esram or not. Unless they are filling that spare CU capacity with GPGPU work of course. It generally workload that results in CU's being idle rather than memory constraints - normal rendering workloads simply don't need 100% of the CU's 100% of the time.

 

[Tchock]

Probably this is OT but but PS4 initial bandwidth was at 192Gb/s so only by adding bandwidth on XBO you can achieve that figure.
Now how you can say that MS choose eSRAM in reaction to what Sony was doing with PS4; do you have evidence to support this theory? (honest question)
Now the combination DDR3 + eSRAM no doubt has a reason to exist (Sony thought about a similar solution at some point as well) but if it was the best solution performance/price wise then GDDR5 would not be used at all.
MS solution is good but it's not like they managed to make GDDR5 obsolete.

But your assumption would be that MS and Sony are in the same position, with similar R&D/Eng resources and capital outlay. Why would Sony take a chance on an exotic solution at this point when they've been burnt on the PS3?

OTOH the EDRAM bet has worked really well on the 360, plus the trends wrt real time rendering point to an emphasis on post-render processes... 32MB seems mighty fine for most render targets with developers' foresight and optimization.

But wouldn't that mean that current PC GPUs with their wide GDDR5 buses and extensive cache structure are inefficient because their CUs would idle a *lot*. I mean, you can't have both.

Imprecise, but there are inefficiencies that can be addressed.
The reason why GPU performance does scale well (to a point) is that memory latency can still be masked with brute forced thread count- but why not just solve the root of the problem itself?


We could very well end up with the PS4 having more compute throughput overall if it doesn't choke on certain fragments* (devs write tighter shader code?), and the XO having less power but performing much nimbler/closer to spec on complex stuff.


* R800 - GCN seem to have alleviated quite a bit of this, but I do wonder...

 

[Cjail]

Honestly I am not assuming anything.
I just would like to know where or when MS said that they choose eSRAM to "offer more bandwidth to the GPU than PS4's memory setup can" as astrograd said.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

But your assumption would be that MS and Sony are in the same position, with similar R&D/Eng resources and capital outlay. Why would Sony take a chance on an exotic solution at this point when they've been burnt on the PS3?

And Sony did very well with the PlayStation 2. Getting performance out of Cell took work, as did EmotionEngine, but it wasn't PlayStation 3's CPU or GPU that were the principle problem, it was the split memory architecture and giant OS footprint that made it a pain in arse compared to the 360.

 

[Betanumerical]

Honestly I am not assuming anything.
I just would like to know where or when MS said that they choose eSRAM to "offer more bandwidth to the GPU than PS4's memory setup can" as astrograd said.

Its also should be kept in mind that no matter how fat the eSRAM is the GPU can only write so fast (i cant remember the exact figure right now) and thats no where near the limit of the eSRAM.