Post-PS4 announcement and 8GB "surprise": Is Microsoft in time to change something?

[Gubbi]

The new kinect is unlikely to be free, and will probably eat a fair portion of the silicon cost difference between PS4 and durango. The new playstation eye on the other hand is as simple and dumb as can be, hardware-wise.

AFAICT, they are almost identical. The only difference is the speckle pattern IR-emitter and one of the image sensors picking up IR as well as RGB. Both have 4 mics.

The image sensors are in the range of $8-10 each, don't know what the mics are, but I'd expect K2's costs to come in under $40-50.

And Sony needs to ship a PS eye with every console, or they might as well not bother. 3D reconstruction is going to be more computationally expensive for eye than K2.

Cheers

 

[dobwal]

From what i read here and in other places as well there is a debate about that,is not 104+68 per say,you can't ad the number like that,and this is not the only forum i have read that.

Even so 172 vs 176 still favor Orbis.

Yeah it has a smaller GPU and cheaper memory,but also has ESRAM,DME,Kinect.

In fact Kinect is the actual reason why the GPU i so low end compare to how the 360 one was back on 2005,remember MS pay for all the components on Durango i am sure sony make several parts of their console.

You see that in the 360 vs PS3,the PS3 is $260 with HDD,the 360 with HDD is $300,doesn't have blu-ray and make you pay for online play..

I don't know from were people are getting the idea that now Durango will be ultra cheap and the PS4 will not.

32mb of eSRAM is not that expensive enough to matter in comparision of 8gb of Gddr5 vs 8gb of ddr3/ESRAM. The PS4 comes with a camera too and the controllers have extra tech including a capacitive touch screen.

If you look at MS profit earnings it doesn't seem that the $40 dollars difference is strictly based on the 360 having a higher BOM.

Durango may not be ultracheap in comparsion to the PS4 but just looking at the hardware, MS should have a price advantage.

 

[patsu]

Lets not forget the retooling of a fab to 90nm to produce CELL, which was then running so under-utilized that Sony had to sell it for pennies to Toshiba (effectively give it away) and take a writedown of billions, then years later, when 90nm was obsoleted, buy it back to produce imaging sensors; IMO, the primary reason Sony jettisoned Ken Kutaragi.

Toshiba bought the fab @ US$863 mil
http://betanews.com/2007/09/18/sony-reportedly-selling-cell-be-chip-fab-to-toshiba/

Toshiba sold it back to Sony @ US$650 mil:
http://news.techeye.net/chips/toshiba-confirms-sale-of-fab-to-sony

 

[ThatGamer]

The only thing they can do is going back to the drawing board and release 6~8 months later .
If they go with the current specs they're done .

Agreed at this point, which would do more damage? I think Durango being substantially weaker than the PS4 for the next 7 years is worse than being delayed by a year. PS3 caught up and Durango probably could as well. Once people start seeing a noticeable difference in quality between PS4 and Durango the strength of the Xbox brand will nose dive. Not to mention this could help Sony's first party games stand out more and gain more mind-share.

Imo the best option is to delay the console if the rumors are accurate.

We also cannot forget that the PS3 came out a year later at $100-200 more expensive and still outsold the Xbox 360 in Europe, Japan, and rest of Asia. And that's with just so-so difference in game performance/visuals, if any, at launch.

This pretty much shows price isn't nearly as big as some people make it out to me. I think it is more about reputation and brand strength. If MS releases a console that consumer can easily see has worse game quality than the PS4. It will damage the Xbox brand and hurt them not just in this gen but future gens as well.

 

[Strange]

Well, several people here can't do simple arithmetic. 104+68 is 98% of 176. 98% is "the same".


Because it has a smaller GPU, and a much (much, much) cheaper memory system.

On top of that it will burn less power, so power brick will be cheaper as will cooling.

Cheers

Not when 104GB/s is 32MB large and 68GB/s is 8192 MB large.
the 256x size difference isn't going to help. Not to mention the limitations in what could actually access the 32 MB and the additional bandwidth hits that occur when you move stuff to it.

I honestly do not think eSRAM is going to allow Microsoft to ignore bandwidth issues. It might be possible if PS4 was ~100GB/s, but not when PS4 has more bandwidth than both of them COMBINED.

This is like comparing a 10 lane highway to a 4 lane highway both at 100km/hr and expecting the 4 lane highway to magically match the 10 lane highway's throughput by having one or two extra 300km/hr carpool lane somewhere down the line.

 

[Betanumerical]

Well, several people here can't do simple arithmetic. 104+68 is 98% of 176. 98% is "the same".


Because it has a smaller GPU, and a much (much, much) cheaper memory system.

On top of that it will burn less power, so power brick will be cheaper as will cooling.

Cheers

I don't buy that you can just add bandwidth like that, sure it probably works like that in a few situations, but when the DDR3 is feeding the ESRAM how can you expect it to match the single pool of GDDR3 _if_ assets need moving in the ESRAM every frame or so?.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

So let's assume the next XBox isn't being manufactured yet and there's enough headroom in the power adapter for a 30% overclock in the GPU (800MHz -> 1040MHz).
This would result in a 1.6TFlops GPU in Durango against 1.84TFlops in PS4.

How much of a long shot woul it be for Microsoft to just change the cooling system at "the last minute", like Sony apparently did with the amount of GDDR5?

 

[Orion]

Agreed at this point, which would do more damage? I think Durango being substantially weaker than the PS4 for the next 7 years is worse than being delayed by a year. PS3 caught up and Durango probably could as well. Once people start seeing a noticeable difference in quality between PS4 and Durango the strength of the Xbox brand will nose dive. Not to mention this could help Sony's first party games stand out more and gain more mind-share.

Imo the best option is to delay the console if the rumors are accurate.

The delay would've to be of at least a year for them to get noticeable spec superiority.

 

[Orion]

So let's assume the next XBox isn't being manufactured yet and there's enough headroom in the power adapter for a 30% overclock in the GPU (800MHz -> 1040MHz).
This would result in a 1.6TFlops GPU in Durango against 1.84TFlops in PS4.

How much of a long shot woul it be for Microsoft to just change the cooling system at "the last minute", like Sony apparently did with the amount of GDDR5?

I think it'd be easier to up ram to 12GB, that way they'd surpass them in specsheet numbers.

 

[AlphaWolf]

So let's assume the next XBox isn't being manufactured yet and there's enough headroom in the power adapter for a 30% overclock in the GPU (800MHz -> 1040MHz).
This would result in a 1.6TFlops GPU in Durango against 1.84TFlops in PS4.

How much of a long shot woul it be for Microsoft to just change the cooling system at "the last minute", like Sony apparently did with the amount of GDDR5?

Seems unlikely. 30% is going to add a lot of power requirement if voltage needs to go up to support it, but I don't know that they need to get that close. A small jump perhaps.


While you're throwing hail mary's perhaps they could activate redundant units (assuming they exist).

 

[ThatGamer]

The delay would've to be of at least a year for them to get noticeable spec superiority.

I think it would be worth it. They don't even need superiority just parity at least. PS3 overcame a year deficit at a higher price. I think Xbox can do the same and the brand would be better off. They could start hyping it around PS4 release to steal some thunder as well.

 

[MfA]

Why is GDDR5 supposed to be expensive again? Non recurring costs are long paid ... I'll bet that if you're willing to make a large enough bulk order the difference with DDR3 (which is not significantly cheaper to manufacture) will be in the 10s of percent.

 

[BRiT]

Why is GDDR5 supposed to be expensive again? Non recurring costs are long paid ... I'll bet that if you're willing to make a large enough bulk order the difference with DDR3 (which is not significantly cheaper to manufacture) will be in the 10s of percent.

<off-topic>
Because that's just the cost of the item on the market. It's like asking why BMW M5 is expensive. And no, ordering a large enough bulk order of BMW M5s will not make them cheaper than a Kia Optima.

Sony is going with the highest density and one of if not they fastest speed-bin version of GDDR5 too.
</off-topic>

 

[Tap In]

I think it would be worth it. They don't even need superiority just parity at least. PS3 overcame a year deficit at a higher price. I think Xbox can do the same and the brand would be better off. They could start hyping it around PS4 release to steal some thunder as well.

what am I reading?

a year? to reach game and entertainment parity?... you guys are severely underestimating something that you don't even have facts for and even the rumors will not put Xbox in the position that some of you are painting.


seriously.

 

[Cyan]

what about 64MB of esram instead of 32MB? would that boost graphics significantly?

Either that or they can increase the RAM to 12GB.

That's the amount of RAM development kits have, so it shoud be the most trivial, easiest addition.

I don't think they are going to change the specs though. PS4 is too capable and powerful.

 

[MfA]

Because that's just the cost of the item on the market. It's like asking why BMW M5 is expensive. And no, ordering a large enough bulk order of BMW M5s will not make them cheaper than a Kia Optima.

If BMW had low margin production lines it could easily retool to produce them AND you could guarantee that those BMW M5s would end up in a market where they would not compete with their normal BMW M5s AND you could provide them with a greater profit than the normal use of those low margin production lines ... then yes, BMW would sell them significantly lower than the market price for a bulk order.

 

[(((interference)))]

About only thing they could do, apart from delaying a year and redesigning the silicon is overclock the GPU and get 1.5 TF out of it - but this'll depend on how much leeway they have in the box's TDP.

Adding more RAM would be silly, since it's slow DDR3 and people were already questioning how useful 8 GB would be if you only have 68 GB/s of bw to work with.

 

[Xenus]

The problem is a 30% overclock is not trivial it would increase the heat and powerdraw quit a bit and finally it would make them have to redo all their QA and check that that it at the new clock wouldn't require more egineering etc to make sure it doesn't fail too quickly. there is a reason clocks usually are revised down slightly and vary rarely up yet alone up significantly.

 

[McHuj]

If you over clocked the GPU, chances are the bandwidth would have to be scaled up so that you could actually use that compute. That would probably also have an affect on the memory controller and the CPU. I also suspect that both the GPU and CPU run of the same clock (whith the GPU just divided by two) so overclocking it, would force a CPU over clock as well. IMO, over clocking is not really possible.

The other thing is with regards to power, overclocking may require a voltage boost. Dynamic power is proportional to the square of the voltage and linear with frequency. Hypothetically, boosting the frequency 30% (1.04GHz) and voltage by as little as 5%, you probably added up to an additional 40+% in dynamic power consumption. I don't think its a coincidence that both Sony and the rumored Durango APU are running at the same frequencies. I bet that was the optimal power/performance point.

 

[McHuj]

Also, I'd like to add that the biggest thing that MS should do is try get as close as possible to matching Sony's OS resource reservations. Before it was going to be a ~5GB vs 3.5 GB durango memory size advantage for games. Are we to believe that will be a ~5GB to 7.5GB disadvantage now?

My guess is Sony will consume more now, but I don't think it will be more than 2GB for all the OS functionality.

If they can match the same memory allocations, all the advantages that one platform has over the other will probably come down to just resolution or fps. I don't think third parties will devote time to anything else.