dragonelite
Veteran
Probably pachter right....
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Probably pachter right....
they already have a count down going and quite frankly sony seems to be making a normal generational leap which i'm sure ms will do also. The 360 controller will get enhanced some way , Kinect will get refreshed , more features will be added to the dash and xbox live and so on.
At the end it will matter which exclusives you like more than anything else.
My initial reaction was to agree with this but the more I think about it the business model will likely determine my decision. For the first time since the PS1/N64/Saturn days I don't see myself owning all platforms.
More than likely I will buy the system that has the least intrusive business model. Sony was strangely silent about that tonight and MS has done their reveal yet either but the more I think about it the I am thinking this is how I will decide.
For myself the ps4 is useless. I'm sorry and i'm sure it will be a great system for a lot of people but I've never been a fan of the playstations controller and this doesn't seem to make changes that will help that (I could be wrong) and the majority of exclusives are just not interesting to me. Mabye both will change this generation but it doesn't seem like it. This generation there was uncharted and it seems like maybe the last of us. my ps3 died after uncharted 2 but i'm able to simply borrow a system from a friend.
The xbox next will most likely also be useless to me unless there are some dvr / media center functions in it. The exclusives appealed to me more than the playstation ones but meh I can do without them or wait till the system is cheaper to buy them.
I've also passed on the wii u until its $200 bucks and more games I like come out (but my friends and I will still get together to play smash brothers almost every other month no matter what )
i'm more and more into the pc and the features it provides that consoles don't appear to like the rift , multi monitor gaming and so on.
Kinect 2 and the xbox would have to be huge innovative things for me to want it. I like using the Kinect to voice control my xbox for Netflix and other functions but it doesn't allways work as well as it could.
I thought both MS and Sony had good exclusives this gen and I like both controllers for different reasons. Maybe Steambox will ship with a decent hardware spec and make all this a non-issue.
I thought both MS and Sony had good exclusives this gen and I like both controllers for different reasons. Maybe Steambox will ship with a decent hardware spec and make all this a non-issue.
not everything appeals to everyone. I'm not a huge fan of the more Japanese type games . Killzone and that other playstation shooter were also not very good games imo. So I dunno just wasn't a lot for me
Devious
Regular
Even though I have never really participated in the long going chats about next-gen specs here, I for one still think MS will come out with a fairly powerful console that will rival neck and neck with the specs that were revealed with the PS4 today. For some odd reason I sense some urgency in here about MS skimping on hardware and this and that I will just say chill out.
I mean I read some of the replies going on in the Orbis thread when Sony announced 8GB GDDR5 and most of you were shocked. Would definitely be best just to wait and see what MS has to offer in terms of hardware and software. Who knows, we might get shocked like some of you were today. 
I mean I read some of the replies going on in the Orbis thread when Sony announced 8GB GDDR5 and most of you were shocked. Would definitely be best just to wait and see what MS has to offer in terms of hardware and software. Who knows, we might get shocked like some of you were today.
Even though I have never really participated in the long going chats about next-gen specs here, I for one still think MS will come out with a fairly powerful console that will rival neck and neck with the specs that were revealed with the PS4 today. For some odd reason I sense some urgency in here about MS skimping on hardware and this and that I will just say chill out.
I mean I read some of the replies going on in the Orbis thread when Sony announced 8GB GDDR5 and most of you were shocked. Would definitely be best just to wait and see what MS has to offer in terms of hardware and software. Who knows, we might get shocked like some of you were today.
Microsoft doesn't have to match the PS4 on every point, they just have to show up willing to fight. I would not consider them down and out yet, i am pretty sure they have something ready to shock and awe us.
My biggest problem is the Windows 8 thing, i don't like being married to a complete eco system like Apple, if they plan to build to much on that it will be annoying.
But we should all be glad that Sony is giving up, they had a very tough time with the PS3 and they didn't give up, and with the PS4 they are back fighting, that is more important than any tech specs. I would hate Microsoft to have to console space for themselves (or Sony for that matter).
The fight is on, and we are winning.
My guess is that with the Orbis rumours seeming to be very close to correct minus the total amount of RAM, Durango leaked specs will be similarly close. They'll have their presentation, show a lot of nice looking games, but will sort of sidestep talking spec details. They'll try to sell it on the software, games.
PS4 didn't talk specs at all either, save 'two gigaflops' which was recycled from last gen. There's no reason for anyone to get into a specs war these days.
I wonder if MS will use the xbox as a sort of experimental platform for their Windows business.
http://gamma.cs.unc.edu/SC2007/Manferdelli-SC07-Workshop.pdf
This is a pretty old presentation from 2007 but it at least gives hints what MS thought the future would look like through 2015. They felt like opportunities would present themselves in the form of parallelism around 2010-2011 with a many core design (25X more GOPs or multi core single thread) and stacked dram increasing ddr bandwidth from 40 GB/s to 1280 GB/s in 2012-2013.
MS felt like heterogeneous design would provide massive improvements (100 fold) but memory bandwidth and I/O performance was the key to those improvements. Its seems like virtualization is a big key in how they will tackle a heterogeneous enviroment by alleviating some of the difficulties devs may face working in such enviroment.
http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph...icrosoft+AND+asymmetric)+AND+memory)+AND+pool)
This a patent called VIRTUAL MACHINE MEMORY MANAGEMENT IN SYSTEMS WITH ASYMMETRIC MEMORY. Its the closest thing in their patents that describe the eSRAM setup.
At first glance it seems to describe some kind of cloud service with clients using virtual machines, which may or may not have implications on MS designs of turning the xbox platform into a cloud based service platform.
But deeper into the patent they describe hardware.
"This increasing number of cores on processors places an increasing amount of pressure on memory, both in terms of performance and capacity. Accordingly, hardware architecture designs are proposed where processors have access to asymmetric memory pools, wherein asymmetric memory pools comprise a first memory and a second memory, and wherein the performance characteristics of the first memory are non-identical to the performance characteristics of the second memory. In other words, the first memory may have lower latency and higher bandwidth with respect to a processor or processor core when compared to latency and bandwidth of the second memory."
"In another example, as mentioned previously, the processors 102-104 may be multi-core processors resident on a server, and the near memories 106-108 may be on-chip memories. In this example, the near memory 106 is accessible to each core on the multi-core processor. Furthermore, the far memory 110 may be off-chip memory. In such an embodiment, the near memories 106-108 may be DRAM that is stacked on the processors 102-104, respectively, through utilization of 3D die stacking, and the far memory 110 may be some form of off-chip memory. While certain examples have been provided, it is to be understood that any suitable hierarchical asymmetric memory scheme is contemplated and intended to fall under the scope of the hereto-appended claims.
This is the only MS patent that describes the use of 3d die stacking I've come across even when using a boolean search through MS US patents for references to die stacking.
Virtualization is pretty prominent across MS patents, so it made me wonder how feasible is it for MS to provide a virtual Xbox OS and cloud service that operates as an Onlive/Steam like service to PC users, where Onlive like capabilities are provided to hardware with limited resources and Steam like service to those with more capable hardware. In terms of 720 owners, the virtual OS would allow for emulation of xbox1 and 360 titles.
I ran into this patent Web-Browser Based Desktop And Application Remoting Solution
http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph...y&RS=((AN/Microsoft+AND+virtual)+AND+security)
Looks nothing game related at first and seem to be web browser based but it contains a image similar to the 2007 presentation.
"A user may enter commands and information into the computer 20 through input devices such as a keyboard 40 and pointing device 42. Other input devices (not shown) may include a microphone, joystick, game pad, satellite disk, scanner or the like....
Generally, the virtual processors are executable instructions and associated state information that provide a representation of a physical processor with a specific architecture. For example, one virtual machine may have a virtual processor having characteristics of an INTEL .times.86 processor, whereas another virtual processor may have the characteristics of a PowerPC processor...The combination of virtual processors and memory in a partition can be considered a virtual machine."
Seems a little more involved then a web based presentation for something like a business meeting.
May explain why durango needs so much RAM. Host OS plus guest OSes to facilitate backward compatibility or the use of Windows 8 on a console.
http://gamma.cs.unc.edu/SC2007/Manferdelli-SC07-Workshop.pdf
This is a pretty old presentation from 2007 but it at least gives hints what MS thought the future would look like through 2015. They felt like opportunities would present themselves in the form of parallelism around 2010-2011 with a many core design (25X more GOPs or multi core single thread) and stacked dram increasing ddr bandwidth from 40 GB/s to 1280 GB/s in 2012-2013.
MS felt like heterogeneous design would provide massive improvements (100 fold) but memory bandwidth and I/O performance was the key to those improvements. Its seems like virtualization is a big key in how they will tackle a heterogeneous enviroment by alleviating some of the difficulties devs may face working in such enviroment.
http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph...icrosoft+AND+asymmetric)+AND+memory)+AND+pool)
This a patent called VIRTUAL MACHINE MEMORY MANAGEMENT IN SYSTEMS WITH ASYMMETRIC MEMORY. Its the closest thing in their patents that describe the eSRAM setup.
At first glance it seems to describe some kind of cloud service with clients using virtual machines, which may or may not have implications on MS designs of turning the xbox platform into a cloud based service platform.
But deeper into the patent they describe hardware.
"This increasing number of cores on processors places an increasing amount of pressure on memory, both in terms of performance and capacity. Accordingly, hardware architecture designs are proposed where processors have access to asymmetric memory pools, wherein asymmetric memory pools comprise a first memory and a second memory, and wherein the performance characteristics of the first memory are non-identical to the performance characteristics of the second memory. In other words, the first memory may have lower latency and higher bandwidth with respect to a processor or processor core when compared to latency and bandwidth of the second memory."
"In another example, as mentioned previously, the processors 102-104 may be multi-core processors resident on a server, and the near memories 106-108 may be on-chip memories. In this example, the near memory 106 is accessible to each core on the multi-core processor. Furthermore, the far memory 110 may be off-chip memory. In such an embodiment, the near memories 106-108 may be DRAM that is stacked on the processors 102-104, respectively, through utilization of 3D die stacking, and the far memory 110 may be some form of off-chip memory. While certain examples have been provided, it is to be understood that any suitable hierarchical asymmetric memory scheme is contemplated and intended to fall under the scope of the hereto-appended claims.
This is the only MS patent that describes the use of 3d die stacking I've come across even when using a boolean search through MS US patents for references to die stacking.
Virtualization is pretty prominent across MS patents, so it made me wonder how feasible is it for MS to provide a virtual Xbox OS and cloud service that operates as an Onlive/Steam like service to PC users, where Onlive like capabilities are provided to hardware with limited resources and Steam like service to those with more capable hardware. In terms of 720 owners, the virtual OS would allow for emulation of xbox1 and 360 titles.
I ran into this patent Web-Browser Based Desktop And Application Remoting Solution
http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph...y&RS=((AN/Microsoft+AND+virtual)+AND+security)
Looks nothing game related at first and seem to be web browser based but it contains a image similar to the 2007 presentation.
"A user may enter commands and information into the computer 20 through input devices such as a keyboard 40 and pointing device 42. Other input devices (not shown) may include a microphone, joystick, game pad, satellite disk, scanner or the like....
Generally, the virtual processors are executable instructions and associated state information that provide a representation of a physical processor with a specific architecture. For example, one virtual machine may have a virtual processor having characteristics of an INTEL .times.86 processor, whereas another virtual processor may have the characteristics of a PowerPC processor...The combination of virtual processors and memory in a partition can be considered a virtual machine."
Seems a little more involved then a web based presentation for something like a business meeting.
May explain why durango needs so much RAM. Host OS plus guest OSes to facilitate backward compatibility or the use of Windows 8 on a console.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
That's something interesting that I hadn't really thought about in recent years. But there have been PC tech sites that have tested and demonstrated that memory bandwidth and latency for the CPU can at times significantly impact the performance (in terms of FPS) of a game above and beyond whatever the graphics pipeline is doing.
Unfortunately due to the nature of GPUs (you can't tinker around with memory latency and bandwidth easily), we've never really had similar tests for graphics cards.
It does make me wonder if the eSRAM truly is only for the GPU. It likely is, but it does make me wonder.
I really am interested to see what they were thinking with the design of Durango. It'd be awesome if they released a whitepaper for Durango explaining things in detail, but I doubt anything like that would happen in a million years.
Regards,
SB
http://kotaku.com/5986239/the-rise-and-fall-of-superdae-a-most-unusual-video-game-hacker
That was an interesting read. Could be great fiction or could be fact. No way of knowing. LOL
Tommy McClain
That was an interesting read. Could be great fiction or could be fact. No way of knowing. LOL
Tommy McClain
8GB DDR3 != 8GB GDDR5.
Paul Thurrott said:
http://www.windowsitpro.com/article...o/wininfo-short-takes-february-15-2013-145253
Evidently he posted this over a week ago. Found that last bit interesting. Corroborates an earlier rumor about there being 2 Xbox systems. I find it odd that Microsoft would release another Xbox 360 model at the same time they release their next gen. Does that mean the 720 is not backward compatible? or maybe it is backward compatible? Confusing.
Tommy McClain
Durango = new xbox 360 with bc support and new xbox = radeon 8970 x2 with 32 gigs of gddr ram ?
Mabye they are finally able to get the xbox 360 down to a complete one chip design and the console wont have a hardrive but flash ram. Perhaps they can get it down to the size of the wii u or smaller ?
Would make sense to drop a $100 redesigned 360 into the mix and then maybe a $300-$400 xbox next. Would certainly put a lot of pressure on sony.
Well I would imagine that it is a redesigned 360, and of course the 360 will continue to sell alongside the new Xbox. They will probably announce a price cut too.
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