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

[Blazkowicz]

I agree that optical is starting to be a mess regarding size and transfer speeds, but I'm hoping for stacked nand to transition soon-ish towards external memory cards, making the cost/GByte low enough that console manufacturers consider using flash cards for retail games during the next generation.

At least for consoles, I still enjoy that weird sense of "possession", and I believe that used games will still be a huge market for many, many people.

Yeah that'd be possible, basically discs right now are pointless since everything is copied to the drive anyway. I really hope for SSD storage come next gen though.

If you expect a memory card to be fast, then perhaps each and every memory card (housing a game) must be an SSD. That's costly to say the least, though if you're gonna make a read-only SSD (save for entirely sequential bulk writing at the factory) you can get away with a simple, unsophisticated controller.

I rather believe we'll still have a big HDD, and bluray drive for games (up to 100GB or 128GB)
What's certainly possible is a "caching" SSD, e.g. 256GB on PCIe, NVMe protocol. Make it replaceable just like the HDD.

 

[Clukos]

A physical drive takes too much space that could be used for a more robust cooling solution, seeing how small the Fury X/Fury are using HBM2 i don't expect Microsoft or Sony having big, bulky consoles for next gen. It's more realistic to expect some sort of card/cartridge type container for the games, that and digital distribution. Take a look at PC, nobody even remembers what a physical drive is, i expect that to carry over to next gen consoles.

 

[upnorthsox]

NAND stacks for cache can be put on the interposer along with the HBM stacks, that'll save you power, space, and a pcie bridge while giving big bandwidth access to it.

 

[Globalisateur]

A physical drive takes too much space that could be used for a more robust cooling solution, seeing how small the Fury X/Fury are using HBM2 i don't expect Microsoft or Sony having big, bulky consoles for next gen. It's more realistic to expect some sort of card/cartridge type container for the games, that and digital distribution. Take a look at PC, nobody even remembers what a physical drive is, i expect that to carry over to next gen consoles.

A 4K Blu-Ray player with 100GB blurays would be very fitting for the next gen IMO.

 

[upnorthsox]

A physical drive takes too much space that could be used for a more robust cooling solution, seeing how small the Fury X/Fury are using HBM2 i don't expect Microsoft or Sony having big, bulky consoles for next gen. It's more realistic to expect some sort of card/cartridge type container for the games, that and digital distribution. Take a look at PC, nobody even remembers what a physical drive is, i expect that to carry over to next gen consoles.

Huh? Where do you guys come up with this stuff?

 

[Clukos]

Huh? Where do you guys come up with this stuff?

I meant that solely for games obviously. Retail PC sales are almost nonexistent. Numbers don't lie. With the way the industry is moving with streaming services, cloud services and digital distribution blowing up, is it illogical to think that in 5 years we won't need a physical drive on a console?

 

[Lalaland]

NAND stacks for cache can be put on the interposer along with the HBM stacks, that'll save you power, space, and a pcie bridge while giving big bandwidth access to it.

I disagree, that adds cost, complexity and moves high write load NAND into the APU where it's failing will trash the entire chip. I do agree that if we see any solid state storage it will be as a smaller cache rather than as the primary storage pool. An NVMe drive in the 64GB size range would work but the risk is that a small drive like that would probably be a single NAND chip and thus even more sensitive to wearing out under write loads.

100GB BD and a mechanical HDD still seem like the most cost effective combo today.

I meant that solely for games obviously. Retail PC sales are almost nonexistent. Numbers don't lie. With the way the industry is moving with streaming services, cloud services and digital distribution blowing up, is it illogical to think that in 5 years we won't need a physical drive on a console?

In developed markets perhaps but with developing markets showing strong growth in wireless broadband it's not hard to imagine a future where a significant % of your user base is on a metered connection. One thing that we can say is all but guaranteed with a gen shift is more and higher quality assets which will drive far larger downloads. If I was on a metered connection and I could avoid 100GB by walking to the store I would.

 

[DieH@rd]

Samsung can currently mass produce NAND stack with 16 layers that houses 256GB of data. If we have that tech today, there is a good chance it will become cheap enough to be used as a basic storage option in 9th gen consoles [let's say four 512GB stacks that use "lowly" SATA3 speeds].

 

[Lalaland]

Samsung can currently mass produce NAND stack with 16 layers that houses 256GB of data. If we have that tech today, there is a good chance it will become cheap enough to be used as a basic storage option in 9th gen consoles [let's say four 512GB stacks that use "lowly" SATA3 speeds].

2TB of SSD storage? For that to be cost effective we would need the cost of flash to tumble by >50% YoY which I regard as highly unlikely and unsupported by historical data for any fabbed chip

 

[Shifty Geezer]

In developed markets perhaps but with developing markets showing strong growth in wireless broadband it's not hard to imagine a future where a significant % of your user base is on a metered connection.

I'm currently on unmetered 12 GBps broadband. I had an 'invitation' through the mail the other day from BT to 'upgrade' to super fast fibre. Costs a little more for higher speeds. The small print said a 40 GB cap. So literally one AAA game download a month, and no BW left over to play that game online without paying more.

If download games were cheaper to offset the increased cost of more expensive connections to get the content, it may make sense, but presently it's poor economics for some of us.

Maybe the solution is an optional drive, like yesteryear? A plug in attachment that increases the size of the console and adds optical support including video playback. For those who want a download only, streaming device, buy the basic SKU. For those wanting media functionality and disk based games, buy a £50 peripheral. With everything dumped to HDD, the optical drive can be optional.

 

[wco81]

There is no need for a solution because there isn't a problem.

The lack of strictly digital downloading of games hasn't hampered consoles one bit.

Now games developers hate that people trade games on the secondary market, which they could eliminate with all-digital systems. But for infrastructure and other reasons, it's not going to happen any time soon.

 

[Rangers]

I kind of wish it would though just so we could knock $30-50 and some bulk off every console.

Consoles used to only need one mechanical drive (PSX) and now they need two (Blu Ray and HDD). That increases costs and bulk. It would be nice to get it back to one.

The (well, one) problem right now is perversely, sales are much better on physical media. Any non-brand new game is likely to be cheaper physically than digitally, unless you catch a digital sale. This is even true on steam as far as I know. We all know of steam sales but the rest of the year Steam are busy charging MSRP for catalog titles that can be found deeply discounted on Amazon in disc form.

I suppose, I'm one who think game prices are too low. Not that I want to pay more, but $60 today for games that are 10X the size and 100X, 1000X, man hours as games of old that cost the same or way more in inflation adjusted dollars. So I see various ways the industry is trying to increase that $60 without directly increasing it, like DLC, microstransactions, etc. Fewer discounts in a digital world would probably be another roundabout way to go about it. Keeping the nominal top line entry fee the same but increasing revenue.

 

[Clukos]

Yeah, i much prefer that these 30-50$ will be invested in a more powerful CPU/GPU rather than a physical drive. And like i said you can still have retail through code activation like steam/uplay/origin do on PC or even cards/cartridges that can hold up to 100-200gbs.

 

[Pixel]

Its kinda staggering that the generation prior to this one they spent $287 on the cpu/gpu (Microsoft Xbox 360), then this generation they spent $100 and $110. The reasons why they don't spend $287 or more now days are obvious and hopefully well known to most members on this forum.

But I think even considering the saving of no ~$15 bluraydrive we can expect again only $110-150 total spend combined on both the cpu and gpu in a single chip solution for the 9th generation, $399 may still be the magic number for consumer purchasing, and MS & Sony may not want to take much of loss on their systems after factoring in packaging etc.

The console market has actually contracted not expanded like they were hoping in the beginning of the ps3/xbox360 and ps2 days. No longer do the execs envision the consumer base can sustain a relatively profitable business model where the consoles are sold at several hundred dollars loss.

 

[Pixel]

Yeah, i much prefer that these 30-50$ will be invested in a more powerful CPU/GPU rather than a physical drive. And like i said you can still have retail through code activation like steam/uplay/origin do on PC or even cards/cartridges that can hold up to 100-200gbs.

They don't pay retail prices for bluray drives. It cost Microsoft ~$15 in 2013 when they purchased the BD drives in mass. Sony saves just a couple dollars because its a founding member of the Bluray Disc Association.

 

[sebbbi]

Its kinda staggering that the generation prior to this one they spent $287 on the cpu/gpu (Microsoft Xbox 360), then this generation they spent $100 and $110. The reasons why they don't spend $287 or more now days are obvious and hopefully well known to most members on this forum.

Manufacturers and developers wanted unified memory and low latency between the CPU and GPU. The only reasonable choice was to integrate the CPU and the GPU in the same die. Both next gen consoles have very large dies (exceeding much more expensive chips of that era). It would have been difficult to produce bigger chips (at sane price per chip).

HBM(2) is interesting, because the memory controller is much smaller than a GDDR5 controller. It also solves the BW issue and improves perf/watt compared to other off die memories, bringing most advantages of ESRAM (without wasting big part of the die to hold the fast memory). This allows you to put more computational units on the same chip. Too bad HBM was not available 2 years ago.

 

[chris1515]

If we are lucky next generation, we will have an APU with power level of an AMD Fury X with better featureset and 32 GB of HBM2 or maybe 64GB of HBM3. I am worried by the process node shrinking slowdown.

 

[London Geezer]

I'm currently on unmetered 12 GBps broadband. I had an 'invitation' through the mail the other day from BT to 'upgrade' to super fast fibre. Costs a little more for higher speeds. The small print said a 40 GB cap. So literally one AAA game download a month, and no BW left over to play that game online without paying more.

Say what?? Where are you again??

I'm on Infinity 2 which is really unlimited. Ok not really-really but I definitely don't have a 40Gb limit. Why would they cap a 12Gbps connection?

And where was my invite??

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Near Woking, Surrey. I'm currently on uncapped 12 Gbps - it's a great deal with TalkTalk (was Tiscali when I subscribed ears ago). Since fibre was rolled out here maybe a year ago, we get junk-mail from BT et al offering faster speeds. But if they cap them, that's ridiculous. How much do you pay for your Unlimited Infinity 2? I'm guessing a lot more than I'm paying for my broadband!

 

[DuckThor Evil]

A 12 Giga bits per second connection That's not a typo is it? What sort of speeds have you seen? How fast is your ethernet port? How much do you pay for it?