Predict: Next gen console tech (9th iteration and 10th iteration edition) [2014 - 2017]

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I can't think of anythign that would be sensitive to vibration other than the HDD, which is why you isolate the HDD vs trying to isolate everything else.
Which is fine as long as your isolation isn't able to move. Sticking the HDD on flexible mounts should result in microscopic movements whenever the head moves, no?

A random post on the internet backs me up here, so I can't be wrong if the internet says so. :yep2:

http://forums.storagereview.com/ind...cone-grommets-performance-hit-bad-for-drives/
I ran HDTach about 10 times with silicon grommets and then another 10 times without. I had very consistent results.

on WD4000KD I got 14.7ms on Random Access Time with the silicone grommets and 13.0ms without.
 
Which is fine as long as your isolation isn't able to moved. Sticking the HDD on flexible mounts should result in microscopic movements whenever the head moves, no?

I'm no expert on the physics on vibrations, but if you have a record player sitting on a shelf, and you can feel vibration on the surface of the record player with your finger, you can buy all sorts of isolation devices made of rubber, air cushions or foam. You place the record player on top of them and they'll basically dampen any vibrations so your record player will track better.

I imagine an HDD in a case is the same. The case stays still, and you mount the HDD with some kind of rubber dampener.
 
The head of the record player is in physical connection with the record and follows a linear course. You want to stop vibration passing up through the disk to the needle, so try to isolate the entire unit. In an HDD, the head floats above the platter and moves around. Every time the head moves and then stops, a miniscule force is imparted from the intertia. If the HDD is held solid, that force will be dissipated without motion. However, if the HDD is mounted on elastic mounts, these will absorb a miniscule amount of movement and then return it. If that motion is returned just as the head is moving in the opposite direction, you'll give it a tiny jolt, which could be enough to jump track because the distances are all so tiny. The only way holding a component with moving parts in a flexible container can be better to eliminate vibrations than in a rigid container is if the vibrations coming from the rigid container are worse. If you can isolate those sources, a solid fix on the HDD should be the ideal option. eg. How well would a pendulum clock keep time if mounted on a couple of springs?

If Physics.
 
Would rubber mounts for an HDD even register the force of the head stopping? I'm sure the outside vibration coming to the HDD from the case, or someone bumping your desk is much much greater than internal vibration on the HDD. They must be able to choose a suitable stiffness to the rubber damper to eliminate outside vibration while not being elastic enough to react to the internal forces of the HDD.
 
Would rubber mounts for an HDD even register the force of the head stopping?
As we're dealing with microscopic distances, it's hard to say. Everything's so small (mass of head, movement of head, size of track, motion of HDD vibration) that we can't really appreciate it and need Maths or Empirical evidence. The post I linked to shows someone had experience of seeks being affected by rubber grommets in 2006 or whenever. It may be that the head is too small in reality and it's faults in the disk balance that are the problem. Maybe some HDDs have a slightly different frequency to their vibrations that, coupled with slightly different grommets, cause a poor dampening and significantly affected seek rates? The only real known here, IMO, is that zero elasticity in the mounting means zero vibration from the HDD. But then again maybe the amount of metal/plastic used in a console isn't enough to contain such microscopic vibrations anyway?

I'm sure the outside vibration coming to the HDD from the case
It's more an issue of frequency and amplitude, I expect. Rubber grommets on the HDD will be sync'd with the HDD's own motion, causing more chance of sympathetic resonance.
or someone bumping your desk is much much greater than internal vibration on the HDD
Unless someone's bumping into your desk a few hundred times a second, that's not going to impact average seek rates any. ;)
They must be able to choose a suitable stiffness to the rubber damper to eliminate outside vibration while not being elastic enough to react to the internal forces of the HDD.
Maybe MS are using Vibranium?
 
As we're dealing with microscopic distances, it's hard to say. Everything's so small (mass of head, movement of head, size of track, motion of HDD vibration) that we can't really appreciate it and need Maths or Empirical evidence. The post I linked to shows someone had experience of seeks being affected by rubber grommets in 2006 or whenever. It may be that the head is too small in reality and it's faults in the disk balance that are the problem. Maybe some HDDs have a slightly different frequency to their vibrations that, coupled with slightly different grommets, cause a poor dampening and significantly affected seek rates? The only real known here, IMO, is that zero elasticity in the mounting means zero vibration from the HDD. But then again maybe the amount of metal/plastic used in a console isn't enough to contain such microscopic vibrations anyway?

It's more an issue of frequency and amplitude, I expect. Rubber grommets on the HDD will be sync'd with the HDD's own motion, causing more chance of sympathetic resonance. Unless someone's bumping into your desk a few hundred times a second, that's not going to impact average seek rates any. ;)
Maybe MS are using Vibranium?
will those gyroscopes that are supposed to keep things level help HDDs?
 
As we're dealing with microscopic distances, it's hard to say. Everything's so small (mass of head, movement of head, size of track, motion of HDD vibration) that we can't really appreciate it and need Maths or Empirical evidence. The post I linked to shows someone had experience of seeks being affected by rubber grommets in 2006 or whenever. It may be that the head is too small in reality and it's faults in the disk balance that are the problem. Maybe some HDDs have a slightly different frequency to their vibrations that, coupled with slightly different grommets, cause a poor dampening and significantly affected seek rates? The only real known here, IMO, is that zero elasticity in the mounting means zero vibration from the HDD. But then again maybe the amount of metal/plastic used in a console isn't enough to contain such microscopic vibrations anyway?

It's more an issue of frequency and amplitude, I expect. Rubber grommets on the HDD will be sync'd with the HDD's own motion, causing more chance of sympathetic resonance. Unless someone's bumping into your desk a few hundred times a second, that's not going to impact average seek rates any. ;)
Maybe MS are using Vibranium?

Rubber and silicone grommets act as both spring and damper (think elastomer springs on cars and bikes). Dampers turn energy to heat, reducing interference and the impact of resonance. It's also easier to design an isolated device to manage it's own vibration than it is to make a device that can handle it's own + myriad vibrations with no damping.

Without grommets the kinetic energy is still there, it just transfers into the chassis, generating vibration for other components and generating noise. All vibrations in the chassis also get passed to the HDD.

With fans, optical drives and other HDDs active, constructive interference between frequencies will occur, and these may well cause additional read errors.

Isolating / damping HDDs does not make them more susceptible to vibrations induced read errors, it makes them less. That's why it's some common in well made PCs / servers.
 
It's going to be fairly difficult to make substantial leap anytime soon, especially in the area of costly RAM where people are getting carried away.

I dont expect to see 24 GB of GDDR6 be affordable for a long time. The king $750 1080ti graphics card is only 11 GB.
It's worth noting the high end cards in 2013 only had 2-3 gigs normally. And I think even the Titan was out and it had 6 gigs, still less than ps4.

I think 24gb is rather a conservative minimum for what a next gen console should be. If there are only iterative consoles from here on, and the base ps4 and xb1 still got games (I doubt it, they have to be retired at some point), maybe I could see 16gb. Then just use the extra CPU power for 60 vs. 30 fps instead of more complex game logic ; no need for more memory on the CPU side.

Doesn't have to be all gddr/hbm either, hell I don't know what's wrong with split memory esp. now that eDRAM is out ; split pools would allow more bandwidth.
 
Between ram and vram most gaming pcs have maybe 24gb of memory right now? Consoles have been sitting at 8 and the 1x is now 12gb. I would think 24gb is probably the high end and 16gb is probably what I'd expect.
 
It's worth noting the high end cards in 2013 only had 2-3 gigs normally. And I think even the Titan was out and it had 6 gigs, still less than ps4.
I reckon you're underestimating, I bought an iMac in 2013 which a 4Gb Geforce 780M. I replaced it this year with a 5K iMac with 8Gb Radeon Pro 580. If Apple are shipping those cards, the PC world has been shipping them longer.
 
Prices today are roughly where they were five years ago, see here. They are more than double that of a year ago. Historically the memory market has been a boom/bust market, with every bust we saw consolidation. Last time (2012/13) Micron absorbed Elpida. We're now down to three major memory vendors: Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron. Fewer vendors means less competition. At the same time we see a slow down in Moore's law. I don't think another collapse in memory prices is just around the corner.

Cheers
edit: formatting happening for easier reading

Doubling back the discussion on this comment. So I went back to my receipts to really see how I could be so off. Two receipts in there.
I bought a Gigabyte 1070 in Sept 13, 2016; Same store and item is now increased by $50 CAD today, after 1070TI and 1080TI released, which should have moved prices down.

16GB DDR4 from 2015 from newegg I bought at $89.99 and today, using that same link, the memory is now $250 CAD

I was totally off base because I bought at the extreme low. And since my PC is tricked out and I don't need anything else, I never bothered to double check pricing made a stupid assumption things would keep going down.

Now here's the interesting question I want to pose back to everyone.
What is the successor to Xbox One as it still uses 8GB of DDR3 but the world is
a) limited supply, high demand for DDR4 and GDDR5
b) very few devices left still using DDR3

I assume eventually, suppliers aren't going to want waste their time fabricating DDR3. So prices have to go up, especially if DDR4 and GDDR5 is way more profitable.

Is MS going to take the loss on each Xbox One sold? Or will it be a tech switch to DDR4? Or GDDR5? Or will this trigger the next generation for them?

https://www.pcworld.com/article/319...dram-will-crash-in-2019-gartner-predicts.html
According to this article, Gartner (I don't trust them) predicts ram and flash prices will crash in 2019. If true sounds like a good time to release a new product.
 
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I can see why AMD would be concerned with Nvidia but why Intel?...why would they care about who is winning the graphics race? Are they afraid Nvidia is getting too big?.. that GPU's are becoming very important for a lot of general computing applications?
 
I can see why AMD would be concerned with Nvidia but why Intel?...why would they care about who is winning the graphics race? Are they afraid Nvidia is getting too big?.. that GPU's are becoming very important for a lot of general computing applications?
GPUs continue to grow in marketplace for applications outside gaming, I would be pretty afraid of any competition you didn't see coming. The GPU/Machine Learning/Mining revolution didn't really start all that long ago (compared to the ages of Intel and AMD), and the landscape is changing drastically.
 
GPUs continue to grow in marketplace for applications outside gaming, I would be pretty afraid of any competition you didn't see coming. The GPU/Machine Learning/Mining revolution didn't really start all that long ago (compared to the ages of Intel and AMD), and the landscape is changing drastically.
Yeah and actually come to think of it also would also replace some potential sales of Ryzen-based APU's...which would probably be in Intel's interest.
 
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