Predict: The Next Generation Console Tech

[Rangers]

Not cheap enough. Take any sized SSD drive you want and consider the price halved or even quartered by the next consoles, and you'll see either it's way too costly, or way too small. It'd only be viable as a local cache, like ReadyBoost, for either a performance enhancement over the standard system or as a cheap compromise for a system sacrificing RAM (so design; only difference is your take on it!). Flash isn't going to be a cheap alternative to an HDD in time for next gen's launch. Unless it's really late!

Wouldn't it be viable perhaps as a 16, 20, or even 32GB hard drive?

You could make this the low end "core" model, much better than a model like the Arcade with no built in HDD, yet you could be confident of flash prices falling for the whole generation.

Looking at newegg, I'm not sure these are analogous to what you'd need in a console drive, but USB flash drives run $32 for 16 GB and $65 for 32 GB.

I also recall before being told on B3D that while theyve stayed stagnant for a while (I know because I remember paying I think $25 for 16GB ages ago!), flash prices are due for a dropoff soon.

So at least 16GB seems almost feasible now, and if you reasonably got a 50% price decrease by next gen, much more so. And of course as I say, whatever the initial cost, you could expect it to fall more. So maybe if you started your "core" with 16GB, you could bump it to 32 later cheaply. Again, yeah that doesnt sound like much, but contrast it with the no memory in MS' first Cores, and it's worlds better at least.

 

[Squilliam]

Flash isn't going to be a cheap alternative to an HDD in time for next gen's launch. Unless it's really late!

Flash has worked well on the Wii and Xbox 360 Arcade, has it not? I would suggest that flash isn't going to work too well on consoles which require installs or have any emphasis on large downloadable content, but im sure it has its place like everything else.

 

[Blazkowicz]

HDD have become faster as well thanks to an extremely high density. If you want a 100MB/s drive, don't look further.

Its latency is considerably bigger than that of a SSD, but considerably lower than that of an optical drive, and around what is perceptible by humans. as consoles are typically single user, single tasking and not running a high end database server, I believe it's quite acceptable.

a good indication is netbooks : they are some of the cheapest and lowest power hardware out there, yet most of them use hard drives.
if there's flash, it's either a lowest end machine with SD flash that writes at 10MB/s, or an alpha geek bought a netbook and swapped the HDD with an SSD.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Flash has worked well on the Wii and Xbox 360 Arcade, has it not?

As storage, yes. You can load at 10-20 MB/s and just wait. As a replacement for HDDs, no, they're just not fast enough. That is, the cheap stuff isn't. The fast stuff is as fast in transfer as an HDD and with an order-of-magnitude faster seek rate, but it costs too darned much.

For reference, unless someone has access to proper industry component price lists, compare SD and CF/SSD performance and prices. Going by Newegg, a 16GB SD card is $30 with a write speed rate of 4MB/s. A 16GB CF card has a write speed of 20 MB/s for $40 (SSD's are similar performance for higher price). Alternatively $45 buys you an 80GB HDD with a write speed of ~100 MB/s (hard figure to track down). A comparably fast CF card is ~$200 for 16GB. A similar performance 16GB SSD is >$150.

Now these are retail prices, so there'll be markups, etc. The key distinction is that there is cheap flash, and fast flash, and a significant price discrepency. Fast flash is nothing like cost effective relative to an HDD. For less money an HDD offers far more capacity. Flash will drop in price but not offer the GB:$ ratio or anything even in the same ballpack as an HDD. Given a finite BOM to invest, the cost to add 16GBs of high-performance flash is going to be about the same to add 160+GBs of HDD; there's nothing to gain.

 

[Squilliam]

As storage, yes. You can load at 10-20 MB/s and just wait. As a replacement for HDDs, no, they're just not fast enough. That is, the cheap stuff isn't. The fast stuff is as fast in transfer as an HDD and with an order-of-magnitude faster seek rate, but it costs too darned much.

For reference, unless someone has access to proper industry component price lists, compare SD and CF/SSD performance and prices. Going by Newegg, a 16GB SD card is $30 with a write speed rate of 4MB/s. A 16GB CF card has a write speed of 20 MB/s for $40 (SSD's are similar performance for higher price). Alternatively $45 buys you an 80GB HDD with a write speed of ~100 MB/s (hard figure to track down). A comparably fast CF card is ~$200 for 16GB. A similar performance 16GB SSD is >$150.

Now these are retail prices, so there'll be markups, etc. The key distinction is that there is cheap flash, and fast flash, and a significant price discrepency. Fast flash is nothing like cost effective relative to an HDD. For less money an HDD offers far more capacity. Flash will drop in price but not offer the GB:$ ratio or anything even in the same ballpack as an HDD. Given a finite BOM to invest, the cost to add 16GBs of high-performance flash is going to be about the same to add 160+GBs of HDD; there's nothing to gain.

FYI: Class 2 is 2MB/S minimum, Class 4 is 4MB/S Minimum and Class 6 is 6MB/S. Its all pitifully slow really. However given the speed of the flash its certainly fast enough relative to someones internet connection and its read speeds would only have to match the charactaristics of at worst an 8* Blu Ray Drive. (44MB/S)

I don't think its a question of whether flash is in or flash is out because of storage issues. We have two console manufacturers between Nintendo whom will likely go 100% flash for their single SKU and Microsoft whom will likely use flash in one of their SKUs at least. Sony on the other hand may be in more of a bind because their backwards compatibility may require a HDD as well, but they have shown a willingness to offer backwards compatiblity on some but not all of their different SKUs.

I think the question of flash vs mechanical HDD relates back to the quantity of space 50%, 80% and 99% of users would want. If 50% of people will never need more than say 16GB of space and 80% of people will never want more than say 32GB of space then if providing that storage space is cheaper with flash then surely flash is the desired storage medium for at least that SKU of console.

To answer the question of which storage medium we'd really needed, we'd have to know how much space is actually needed by most people. In terms of internet downloads theres been a movement towards instant streaming of content from Microsoft and the others are following too, so the need to actually store a lot of content on the HDD may cost more than simply providing it on an as needs basis.

 

[MfA]

Regardless if a streaming SSD cache together with a fast Blue-Ray drive is enough to make a HDD superfluous, if download games with SSDs have to compete against Blueray games then download games will lose.

No HDD, no AAA downloads.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

FYI: Class 2 is 2MB/S minimum, Class 4 is 4MB/S Minimum and Class 6 is 6MB/S.

yes, for SD write speeds. Not seen SD read speeds listed anywhere. CF is multiples of base CD speed, 6x = 1MB/s.

However given the speed of the flash its certainly fast enough relative to someones internet connection and its read speeds would only have to match the charactaristics of at worst an 8* Blu Ray Drive. (44MB/S)...
I think the question of flash vs mechanical HDD relates back to the quantity of space 50%, 80% and 99% of users would want. If 50% of people will never need more than say 16GB of space and 80% of people will never want more than say 32GB of space then if providing that storage space is cheaper with flash then surely flash is the desired storage medium for at least that SKU of console.

You are forgetting the performance issue of loading the game! 2GBs of RAM, a figure I'm sure we'll all be disappointed at, is going to take some two to three minutes of loading from your quoted 44MB/s BRD drive. Flash at half the speed will take twice as long. Five minutes before you can play?! Not for me, thanks! An HDD at 100GB/s will drop it to 20-30 seconds, much more reasonable. An HDD install with BRD parallel loading will keep loading times for even 4GBs of RAM (c'mon, console companies, you know it makes sense!) bearable. Optical on its own will be painful. Installs will require substantial capacity if we aren't to add minutes of loading as we replace the internal cache with many GBs of the next game we want to play. Flash cannot offer either at the prices consoles command.

 

[corduroygt]

yes, for SD write speeds. Not seen SD read speeds listed anywhere. CF is multiples of base CD speed, 6x = 1MB/s.


You are forgetting the performance issue of loading the game! 2GBs of RAM, a figure I'm sure we'll all be disappointed at, is going to take some two to three minutes of loading from your quoted 44MB/s BRD drive. Flash at half the speed will take twice as long. Five minutes before you can play?! Not for me, thanks! An HDD at 100GB/s will drop it to 20-30 seconds, much more reasonable. An HDD install with BRD parallel loading will keep loading times for even 4GBs of RAM (c'mon, console companies, you know it makes sense!) bearable. Optical on its own will be painful. Installs will require substantial capacity if we aren't to add minutes of loading as we replace the internal cache with many GBs of the next game we want to play. Flash cannot offer either at the prices consoles command.

Devs could take a hint from Strike Commander and let us play a minigame during the 5-10 minute install onto the cheap flash Once installed, read speeds aren't a problem.

 

[corduroygt]

Regardless if a streaming SSD cache together with a fast Blue-Ray drive is enough to make a HDD superfluous, if download games with SSDs have to compete against Blueray games then download games will lose.

No HDD, no AAA downloads.

One would buy the HDD accessory if they want to buy lots of download games.
Also, instead of the full HDD being an accessory and getting stuck with a 120GB max HDD like the 360, I say make the box a $25 pure profit item, and let the user install any size HDD, so you're not behind the curve with HDD technology advances.

 

[Squilliam]

yes, for SD write speeds. Not seen SD read speeds listed anywhere. CF is multiples of base CD speed, 6x = 1MB/s.

I've seen a good rule of the thumb which is that read speeds for SD are about 2* write speeds. For example: http://www.toshiba-memory.com/en/sd_cards.html

You are forgetting the performance issue of loading the game! 2GBs of RAM, a figure I'm sure we'll all be disappointed at, is going to take some two to three minutes of loading from your quoted 44MB/s BRD drive. Flash at half the speed will take twice as long. Five minutes before you can play?! Not for me, thanks! An HDD at 100GB/s will drop it to 20-30 seconds, much more reasonable. An HDD install with BRD parallel loading will keep loading times for even 4GBs of RAM (c'mon, console companies, you know it makes sense!) bearable. Optical on its own will be painful. Installs will require substantial capacity if we aren't to add minutes of loading as we replace the internal cache with many GBs of the next game we want to play. Flash cannot offer either at the prices consoles command.

Installing a HDD in every console unit essentially raises the price floor by around $50 if you include the cost of the drive, packaging, retail margins and interface/board connectivity. Can they really justify increasing the base cost of a console, and if they do what other components will they sacrafice for a HDD? Consoles if nothing else are a compromise between performance, price and functionality. A console manufacturer generally can choose to focus on two of the three but no more. Can you justify this expense when > than 60% of the consoles out there at present don't have a mechanical HDD?

 

[corduroygt]

Installing a HDD in every console unit essentially raises the price floor by around $50 if you include the cost of the drive, packaging, retail margins and interface/board connectivity.

It's more like between 30-40$, and what do you mean by packaging/retail margins, the drives in PS3's are internal. You will always have to have the interface, because HDD's will definitely be present in next gen consoles, even if they're optional.

 

[Rangers]

Define cheap? They're already soldering 256MB flash chips to the 360 board. If they can get even 4GB for similar prices, that'd be sufficient for title caching and some storage. Then they'll market the fat hard drives for game installs and storing bigger marketplace items.

I've always wondered if MS is going to start doing something like this. Maybe up the flash in Arcade to 1GB, then 2Gb, etc as costs allow. I've always figured you could put a nice call out on the box for it too (now with 2GB memory!)So far they show no inclination at all though. They did increase from 256 to 512MB, but it was probably cheaper. So far they've kept the flash pretty much only to a level to save games.

 

[Rangers]

HDD have become faster as well thanks to an extremely high density. If you want a 100MB/s drive, don't look further.

Its latency is considerably bigger than that of a SSD, but considerably lower than that of an optical drive, and around what is perceptible by humans. as consoles are typically single user, single tasking and not running a high end database server, I believe it's quite acceptable.

a good indication is netbooks : they are some of the cheapest and lowest power hardware out there, yet most of them use hard drives.
if there's flash, it's either a lowest end machine with SD flash that writes at 10MB/s, or an alpha geek bought a netbook and swapped the HDD with an SSD.

Google Chrome OS will supposedly ship only (or at least strongly recommended) on SSD (netbook).

This makes sense as it will make the system even speedier and the whole point of Chrome OS means little need for local storage.

 

[Blazkowicz]

it makes for a speedy boot (no spin time and half-decent random reading)

but after that it's the same as using flash for game saves versus using flash for games .
it's a new class of laptops, with lower specs than netbooks (the distinction I'm doing is of course entirely arbitrary). the SSD is only for cost and building a fanless, solid-state computer (or maybe let's call it the flash drive. it's more like a SD card or a USB thumb and nothing like an Intel SSD)

that said I would like an ultra cheap console with 8GB of cheap, slow flash. running on a <10W power budget. something similar to the Wii but without the optical drive and expensive controllers, and more open. only standard svideo, audio, vga, usb, sd, ethernet.
have it run indie games, casual games, licensed roms and most media playing you don't need a PS3 or ION HTPC for (DVD rips and music)

$99 with two controllers and unlocked hardware == instant buy

 

[assen]

The big advantage of SSDs/fast flash is seek time, and console developers have been learning to avoid seeks like the plague for years (seeks off DVD are 10x the seeks off a HDD).

Microsoft have no incentive to increase the storage soldered in the Arcade even if it costs them $0.01, because they're not getting that $0.01 back: it won't lead to additional sales. "You can play without buying a memory unit" is something worthy of being advertised, "you have space for more savegames" isn't.

 

[Rangers]

The big advantage of SSDs/fast flash is seek time, and console developers have been learning to avoid seeks like the plague for years (seeks off DVD are 10x the seeks off a HDD).

Microsoft have no incentive to increase the storage soldered in the Arcade even if it costs them $0.01, because they're not getting that $0.01 back: it won't lead to additional sales. "You can play without buying a memory unit" is something worthy of being advertised, "you have space for more savegames" isn't.

Once you get to 1GB and such, you can download more Arcade games and the like, without having to erase them as much, and you have access to larger ones.

At 1-2GB, a lot of demos would become open to you.

You can download some Arcade games already on 512.

Oh well it's no big deal.

For anybody in that situation, a used 20Gb HDD can probably be found for under $50, or just a bit more than the old memory cards.

Still, if it's essentially free to Microsoft, I think they should do it.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Devs could take a hint from Strike Commander and let us play a minigame during the 5-10 minute install onto the cheap flash Once installed, read speeds aren't a problem.

However, if you want to play a different game and only have room for one install (16GBs isn't much), that'll be another 5-10 minute install minigame as the cache is replaced. Dunno about you but that'd seriously discourage me from changing the game in the drive! Although I'd be sure to get an HDD console as I like download titles.

I've seen a good rule of the thumb which is that read speeds for SD are about 2* write speeds. For example: http://www.toshiba-memory.com/en/sd_cards.html

Okay, that sounds workable. 20 MB/s read listed there too. Man, that's gonna be slow to load off!

Installing a HDD in every console unit essentially raises the price floor by around $50...

You think another $25 on top of the $25 for the HDD itself? Sounds high to me. I'm in agreement with corduroygt, that you'll have the interface anyway because these companies want owners to upgrade to HDD and buy DLC. So as I see it, it really is a choice of ~$25 on an HDD, or ~$25 on flash.

Can you justify this expense when > than 60% of the consoles out there at present don't have a mechanical HDD?

Only because Wii is sans HDD! Next gen if they get the chance to sell DLC, they'll take it. And if they go with reasonable specs and 16+GB titles on a 2GBs of RAM system, they're going to need one to overcome huge loading delays. Technically and economically I can't see any way to pair 2+GB of RAM to a non-HDD system. Will holographic drives offer a plausible solution?

 

[fehu]

ok ok one thing that i want to clarify

my idea of ssd as cache was really and only as cache, completely transparent to the user, a place that the programmer can use to place data texture etc, and that is feeded from the disc or from the image on the hdd
so it hasn't to be full to start the game, it's only a method to hide load time, think about the vista/7 memory management that load some dll based on usage pattern so that when at 13 you reopen the mail client is faster

so if you have pro-next, can choose as now from running it from the bluray or install it
if you have a core-next you can only run it from the bluray, but at least when the cache is in motion your experience is almost identical
at the moment the cache is on the 360 hdd, and if you don't have it don't have neither the cache

and in a console that will probably have only 2GB of uma memory, access to the disc will be frequent in the form of streaming, and you can't do it at 36MB/s

 

[Shifty Geezer]

my idea of ssd as cache was really and only as cache, completely transparent to the user, a place that the programmer can use to place data texture etc, and that is feeded from the disc or from the image on the hdd.

Yes, that's a valid option been floated a few times. 4GBs of fast flash wasn't cost too much and would offer low access rates and HDD-like transfer speeds, so would be useable as a data cache. You'd still need an HDD in addition to cope with loading the game in the first place, I think. Thus our options are

1) Optical drive, HDD, and RAM - could afford a little more RAM or larger HDD without the 'flache'.
2) Optical drive, HDD, flash and RAM - offering faster small-file access for 'swap-files' than HDD alone, perhaps enabling a more flexible use of RAM.

 

[fehu]

Yes, that's a valid option been floated a few times. 4GBs of fast flash wasn't cost too much and would offer low access rates and HDD-like transfer speeds, so would be useable as a data cache.

It was my fault using the term "ssd", i wasn't thinking about static memory, but all my thougths started with ssd, and I associate fast speed with ssd
there's amemory standard (any type) that is speedy enought to not be a bottleneck for the hdd, but still be cheap?

But 4GB can be too little for backward compatibility due to the ~12GB cache/reserved space in the 360 hdd