News & Rumors: Xbox One (codename Durango)

[Deleted member 11852]

Problem there is, a precedent has to exist. I recall that apps bought on iphones would run on your ipad but the actual ipad optimized version had to be bought separately.

This is the developer's choice. You can build a binary (these days, multiple binaries in a fat binary container) with multiple UI's for each target hardware (2x iPhone screens, 2x 10" iPad screens, 2x 7" iPad screens) or do something smarter and adaptive.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

I asked three questions, one about the amount of RAM and reservation, one about how they were approaching the (then) rumors that pointed at the PS4 being significantly more powerful, and one about how they were going to pitch an online only console with sales targets in the hundreds of millions, to the majority of consumers that had capped internet.

Are you seriously going to leave us hanging like that?

 

[mosen]

This session should be interesting.

This session goes into the architecture of Xbox One, explains the different operating system(s) and their relation to Windows 8 (hint: it’s running Windows 8!), and outlines strategies for developers who want to take advantage of hardcore to-the-metal features of DirectX, whether running on Xbox One or Windows.

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2014/2-651

 

[ramr]

Yeah, this is key to understanding how MS got to this situation, the core really wasn't the target audience for XB1, eg. the "TV TV TV" E3 reveal, only after that did they realise how disastrous it would be to aggravate the core and rapidly tried to claw back ground with the numerous volte-faces that followed.

The bolded is pure revisionist history. The was no TV at E3. They held an entire event devoted to TV and entertain prior to E3. MS had a fantastic strategy with 1 critical flaw. It required that people have a modicum of intelligence and acted rationally. Unfortunately, neither of those things are true of the meme-driven internet hive mind. Thus a great strategy and massively PRO-consumer vision stated from begin was lambasted and thus we don't get all of the nice things promised by the original Xbone strategy.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Are you seriously going to leave us hanging like that?

You can read the rest in bkillian's upcoming book ;-)

Launching a console is a multi-year effort. You're often working with target architectures still being hammered out and that only exist in IC simulators. You're estimating the cost/availability of technology needed for manufacturing years in advance. Microsoft's competitor were lucky on the increase in density of GDDR5 chips, this could have been a 4Gb vs 8Gb console race or Microsoft's competitor could have been forced to wait and launch later when the higher density GDDR5 was available (referencing the original target of 4Gb GDDR).

But there would have been a point when prototype hardware, or actual devkits, were in the hands of the same developers in Activision, EA, Rockstar and Ubisoft. Even under NDA and not revealing specific details about a competitor, you can skirt a NDA by feeding back "this is x [tech capability] % of where we'd like it" and both Sony and Microsoft would likely have been getting feedback about this, and understood it.

And this is why I am curious about 'The Road to Xbox One' - an equivalent to the Mark Cerny presentation about One's competitor. How did Microsoft end up with the One's overall set of features, what drove those decisions. Perhaps they thought their competitor would continue on their path of esoteric hardware and ease of development would trump higher technical specifications.

I'm also very curious how AMD segregated their two APU teams and how they picked who would work on which team.

 

[DrJay24]

The bolded is pure revisionist history. The was no TV at E3. They held an entire event devoted to TV and entertain prior to E3. MS had a fantastic strategy with 1 critical flaw. It required that people have a modicum of intelligence and acted rationally. Unfortunately, neither of those things are true of the meme-driven internet hive mind. Thus a great strategy and massively PRO-consumer vision stated from begin was lambasted and thus we don't get all of the nice things promised by the original Xbone strategy.

So people are stupid, MS is good. Way to blame the victim.

Wasn't the so called "event devoted to TV" the XB1 reveal? I can see how that planted the idea of MS's focus, despite what they said at E3 to try to recover to bad press. You can only make one first impression.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Wasn't the so called "event devoted to TV" the XB1 reveal? I can see how that planted the idea of MS's focus, despite what they said at E3 to try to recover to bad press. You can only make one first impression.

The TV-heavy reveal of Xbox One was 21 May 2013, E3 was just under three weeks later and after all the feedback from the reveal, I don't recall them mentioning TV at all.

 

[3dilettante]

Microsoft's competitor were lucky on the increase in density of GDDR5 chips, this could have been a 4Gb vs 8Gb console race or Microsoft's competitor could have been forced to wait and launch later when the higher density GDDR5 was available (referencing the original target of 4Gb GDDR).

While there is an element of fortune to all projects, I think it was more than just luck.

I'm also very curious how AMD segregated their two APU teams and how they picked who would work on which team.

Thanks to Linkedin and various leaks, it seems like there was a general pool of AMD IP that AMD, Sony, and Microsoft have contributed to and pulled from.
Customizations made off of that seem to have often flowed back to the pool, since AMD's latest GPUs and APUs have some of those features.

There must have been some number of dedicated team members to each project, but a fair amount of the validation if not the design work for the generalized feature sets seems to have been done in a combined manner.
I'm not sure if that means the secluded teams would put things on the pile (it's not like the requesting customer's identity matters), or the main body of engineering was done with the main pool satisfying design requests with no specific originator.

The multiple advance leaks of information about the console chips, the existence of the semicustom division, and comparative leaks by staff show significant portions of AMD's efforts were not segregated.

 

[iroboto]

You can read the rest in bkillian's upcoming book ;-)

And this is why I am curious about 'The Road to Xbox One' - an equivalent to the Mark Cerny presentation about One's competitor. How did Microsoft end up with the One's overall set of features, what drove those decisions. Perhaps they thought their competitor would continue on their path of esoteric hardware and ease of development would trump higher technical specifications.

This is one possibility: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHSjpFUKQR4

 

[Deleted member 11852]

While there is an element of fortune to all projects, I think it was more than just luck.

Japanese ninja voodoo?

 

[3dilettante]

There would be a continuum of things ranging from the essentially impossible to the trivial.
One more density bin for regular GDDR5 fits somewhere in between.
Broke for a multibillion dollar conglomerate can still cover reasonable engineering costs.

It's an additional density grade for an established DRAM tech. Because of the limited volumes of that sort of product, there is a stronger business case for fast-tracking or bringing forward a new revision of the tech if there is a buyer willing to guarantee some volume or potentially more favorable pricing.
Just promising a DRAM manufacturer that it won't be left hanging with no buyer when the new modules are introduced would at least give it reason to stay on schedule.

 

[Cyan]

Cortana was also announced as the digital assistant for Windows Phone. I wonder if the voice work they have done for Kinect has assisted here and whether this (all voice devices) will go to a single cloud / analytics pool.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-26855113

Then my dream about having an AI assistant someday with a very marked personality being a part of the console might become true!

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=64915

I hope so, people love those kind of things that talk back to them.

He said 8GB was decided "early on in the process", not "At the beginning". When I started working on the project, and for months afterwards, there was less RAM. Some of my coworkers had been working on it for months before I got pulled in. Now this is still about 2 years before launch, so it can easily be classed as an "early" decision. But when I started, everything else, including ESRAM, HDMI in, and, at first, no optical drive, was already in the design.

The ESRAM is a logical evolution from the 360 design, why would anyone think it had been forced on the designers due to some other influence, like the amount of RAM?

I'm pretty sure my recollections in this case are correct, because I asked questions about it at the meeting where we announced the project to a larger group of employees, in January 2012. I asked three questions, one about the amount of RAM and reservation, one about how they were approaching the (then) rumors that pointed at the PS4 being significantly more powerful, and one about how they were going to pitch an online only console with sales targets in the hundreds of millions, to the majority of consumers that had capped internet.

:smile2: bkilian, who was the person taking all those decisions and proposing those measures? Mehdi, Mattrick or Whitten?

2 of them aren't in the company anymore, so I guess it was one of those two who had the last word on everything, but I am just curious.

 

[BRiT]

*AHEM*, please keep the Sony talk out of the Microsoft thread.

 

[bkilian]

Are you seriously going to leave us hanging like that?

Yup. Although to the second question, their answer is pretty much public at this point: It's plenty powerful enough, and it's about more than just games.

:smile2: bkilian, who was the person taking all those decisions and proposing those measures? Mehdi, Mattrick or Whitten?

2 of them aren't in the company anymore, so I guess it was one of those two who had the last word on everything, but I am just curious.

Boyd, Treadwell, and Whitten were the folks who seemed to have a lot of influence when I was there. There were a few others as well.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Is Jen Taylor providing the voice?

Kinda off topic...

Jen's a pretty interesting actress, based on our experience with performance capture on Halo 4. She's able to voice a young woman (Cortana) and an elderly one (Halsey). She can act like Halsey for sure (AFAIK Cortana was captured from a younger actress though). She's about 40, yet she looked barely 30 in the video feeds (witness cameras and face camera).
So we had to work a lot with getting her performance to work on Halsey... it looked really creepy when we were close to 1:1 on matching her expressions using a much older face. But I still think that was one of our most believably acting characters - the subtle eye movements and the body language have really sold it IMHO.

She's definitely someone who should've gotten more important roles, kinda sad to see her being more famous for video game work. Also, perf capture with video games seems to become a really, really interesting field, but more on that (much) later...

 

[Laa-Yosh]

I should really write this book titled "Conversations lifted from their context".

Just yesterday I've seen a chat log with the director and our coordinator about how much a woman about to be raped should be stripped, complete with illustrations of what "side boob" means.

Amazing stuff. I witness one of these like every week.

 

[(((interference)))]

The bolded is pure revisionist history. The was no TV at E3. They held an entire event devoted to TV and entertain prior to E3. MS had a fantastic strategy with 1 critical flaw. It required that people have a modicum of intelligence and acted rationally. Unfortunately, neither of those things are true of the meme-driven internet hive mind. Thus a great strategy and massively PRO-consumer vision stated from begin was lambasted and thus we don't get all of the nice things promised by the original Xbone strategy.

Sorry, I meant the initial reveal in May, not the E3 conference.

And bkilian can attest to the fact that their eventual decisions were a huge turnaround from what they had planned.

 

[dobwal]

http://channel9.msdn.com/?wt.mc_id=build_hp#videoHolder

Xbox one platform build 2014

Host OS with two vms, shared and game. Too slow. Rejiggered and now called partitions and both game OS and app OS are win8 based.

Original xb1 is referenced as Xbox Prime.

 

[Scott_Arm]

http://channel9.msdn.com/?wt.mc_id=build_hp#videoHolder

Xbox one platform build 2014

Host OS with two vms, shared and game. Too slow. Rejiggered and now called partitions and both game OS and app OS are win8 based.

Original xb1 is referenced as Xbox Prime.

The part about Kinect is probably the most interesting bit.

Edit: Also mentions that they're still looking at 360 emulation.

 

[Cyan]

http://channel9.msdn.com/?wt.mc_id=build_hp#videoHolder

Xbox one platform build 2014

Host OS with two vms, shared and game. Too slow. Rejiggered and now called partitions and both game OS and app OS are win8 based.

Original xb1 is referenced as Xbox Prime.

Thanks for sharing, I am listening to it in the background, and all I can see and listen to is 4 people talking. In the end it confirms Xbox One is a Windows 8 device.

The part about Kinect is probably the most interesting bit.

Missed that part, what did they say about Kinect?

I am into the Visual Studio and Web Tools thing, which sounds grek to me.

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Phil Spencer hints at the existence of two new studios:

https://twitter.com/XboxP3

Phil Spencer interview on his new role.