Predict: The Next Generation Console Tech

I think you heavily underestimate the profit Sony now makes with BDROM as the standard, not just with consoles, but with movies, televisions, bdrom players etc... Sony makes a small amount off of EVERY bdrom made!

 

Actually, Panaonic gets the largest share of royalties from the Blu-ray patent pool for players. Sony gets the largest share of royalties from the actual discs themselves, and they also produce 95% of all Blu-Ray discs in the world. That's what they won with Blu-ray.

 

And yet pretty much everyone considers BRD as Sony's baby, ignoring the massive support the format had from CE companies and computer companies. This is going OT.

 

I don't believe the AMD fusion bs. It just makes no sense for a next gen console. It becomes very easy for sony or even nintendo to trump them.

I think going with a 32nm barts and a phenom 2 quad core would make for a faster system than a fusion 2 .


I believe MS will use a design based around AMD's 32nm graphics core , perhaps adding in edram to reduce ram costs. They might even go with AMD for the cpu this time also.

Perhaps thats where the fusion rumors are coming from , perhaps amd got both cpu and graphics design wins for the xbox 3 and so everyone is assuming its fusion

 

Yes there is no way this is true. Is fusion 2 even as powerful as 360?

From what I can gather from google, "Fusion 2" is specifically a tablet or netbook chip, and slated to have power consumption less than 9 to 18 watts

Yes, if you think Xbox 720 will draw less than 3 watts, you are on the right track. This "rumor" is entirely stupid, unless MS up and decided less than Wii power (by next gen standards) was a good idea.

Also I have heard MS is locked into power PC architecture for BC reasons.

 

My vision of a tablet-based next-gen comes one step closer...

 

It was spot on? They had yield issues, reliability issues and they were bested by a console which was profitable from day one. I repeat what I said earlier, the next generation consoles will be designed off present power, footprint and costing for both the Xbox 360 revision and PS3 slim. We won't see such powerful 100+W chips in the next generation.

But what about the iPad!?

 

Any Fusion design would be based on a custom chip I think. so you might imagine a Krishna derivative with 4 bobcats, 960SP worth of GPU and a dual channel ddr4 memory controller (or gddr5?) rather than for instance 120SP and single channel ddr3.

 

960 SP is still very weak, especially in 3 years when this would come out. The latest AMD chips have 1600/1920 SP's.

Again, that would have to be a conscious decision by MS to go the Wii route.

 

That site is a dumping ground for all the BS in the world put together.

FWIW, I think next gen consoles will have - for both cpu and gpu - unified memory space, unified cache hierarchy and system level programmability for gpu.

 

960SP is the radeon 6850, which is an extremely powerful card.
go beyond that and you'll have much trouble feeding it with bandwith, unless you go with a 256bit bus ; and your power use will be big as well.

I'm assuming a 28nm, < 100 watt chip with 22 and 16 follow-up shrinks.

of course my opinion might not be worth anything and I may mean "a GPU worth 960SP of radeon 6"

 

Doesn't support controllers, camera interface, TV out, etc. My vision isn't a tablet on which you game, but a console in tablet form which you can game on as a tablet device, or connect up to a TV and game on as a proper console. It's a carefully considered fully documented in these here pages.

 

pretty much all the Apple devices with a display support tv out.

 

Okay, I didn't know iPad supported limited output, but that's missing the point. You can't use an iPad as a console; you can't connect it to the TV and sit back with a controller or a wave at a camera and play a game on the TV.

 

I dunno about "extremely" powerful with GTX 580 and 6970 out there, more like mid-range,...but anyways this is late 2010. Most likely 720 will launch late 2013 (maybe even later).

 

Whatever they do decide with new consoles they are still going to have a fairly limited TDP and footprint. You're never going to see a 200watt 256bit+ graphics card in them. Cayman and GTX580 type cards probably aren't going to fit into a console inside of a 2 or 3 years simply because of power and heat.

 

Well, in the last gen they managed fairly close to top of the line at time of release, at least for Xenos (RSX was a bit different as ps3 released a year later, that fall 8800 cards came out while rsx was 7800 based).

Of course I'm sure it wont be absolute top of line, at the very least clocks will be downgraded, just as RSX and Xenos did. But I would hope it would be better than 3 year old mid range. That would have been equivalent with 360 launching with 2002 mid range. Which I dont even know what that would be, (looks like maybe Geforce 4 MX 440, Radeon 7500?) but not pretty.

 

Beggers can't be choosers! How about connecting the iPad to the TV and using the iPad as the controller as well as driving the games performance? It would be a pretty cheap peripheral to connect the iPad to the TV wirelessly, <$60.

 

It's a somewhat compelling thought. Such a tablet could act as the controller when hooked up to the TV (maybe over a wireless video connection? Wires on such a large object would be uncomfortable). When in a mount for recharge and peripheral connectivity it could be used much like the Kinect system with the camera pulling off similar functions. It's also interesting to think about the game ideas involving two screens, even for mainstream home based gaming, and I'd still have a separate controller for that instance available, one that emulates the touch screen experience (that could get expensive real quick).

Technology has not caught up in that level of performance per watt as well as battery life though, so it's a bit of a dream for the moment.

 

Yeah, and they couldn't buy/make enough EDRAM and GDDR to meet demand, and six months later it turned out the GPU bends the motherboard by the sheer power of its awesomeness, sorry, heat.