Predict: The Next Generation Console Tech

[erick]

I think he means that he wants to see unified memory with 64bit addressing - mainly this implies 4GB or more RAM to play around with. Unified memory means you have to make it fast because the GPU will be addressing it too and it is much, much more bandwidth hungry than a CPU.

Currently, Hynix is the leader in GDDR5 - they have 2Gbit chips operating at 7GHz and producing 28GB/s throughput on a 32bit bus. To get 2GB you have to have 8 of those on a 256bit bus, and the throughput then is 224GB/s (quite close to the bandwidth of the 10MB daughter die in Xenos).

You could have 4GB with 16 chips on a 512bit bus, giving 448GB/s bandwidth. At least bandwidth wise it would then be worthy of next gen, but again, all the advantages of bandwidth go out the window the moment you're constrained by RAM space. Then it becomes a game of degrading your texture quality until it fits.

 

[Gubbi]

Unified 64bit addressing means that the GPU uses virtual addresses instead of physical ones. It would need a big parallel IOMMU to facilitate this.

Cheers

 

[Shifty Geezer]

You could have 4GB with 16 chips on a 512bit bus, giving 448GB/s bandwidth. At least bandwidth wise it would then be worthy of next gen, but again, all the advantages of bandwidth go out the window the moment you're constrained by RAM space.

No, they don't. Lack of RAM would mean one aspect of the whole system will be under-represented, but not that the whole benefit of bandwidth goes out the window. I'd take high bandwidth with proper alpha blending over higher texture quality and poopy alpha effects.

Have you got shares in the memory companies or something, hence the relentless championing of MORE RAM?

 

[erick]

As a system builder of considerable experience I tend to see bottlenecks early on and get frustrated if they're not addressed despite the fact that even harsh bill of materials constraints would allow for it.

Also, I tend to look into the future. I'm probably the first guy in my (of course, quite small) country who built a PC that can play new games 5 years later at HD/Full HD resolutions, without a single upgrade.

 

[MarkoIt]

I think he means that he wants to see unified memory with 64bit addressing - mainly this implies 4GB or more RAM to play around with. Unified memory means you have to make it fast because the GPU will be addressing it too and it is much, much more bandwidth hungry than a CPU.

Currently, Hynix is the leader in GDDR5 - they have 2Gbit chips operating at 7GHz and producing 28GB/s throughput on a 32bit bus. To get 2GB you have to have 8 of those on a 256bit bus, and the throughput then is 224GB/s (quite close to the bandwidth of the 10MB daughter die in Xenos).

You could have 4GB with 16 chips on a 512bit bus, giving 448GB/s bandwidth. At least bandwidth wise it would then be worthy of next gen, but again, all the advantages of bandwidth go out the window the moment you're constrained by RAM space. Then it becomes a game of degrading your texture quality until it fits.

At best they will use a 256bit controller, at with 4 Gigabit chips coming up probably next year, this mean no more than 4 GB.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Also, I tend to look into the future. I'm probably the first guy in my (of course, quite small) country who built a PC that can play new games 5 years later at HD/Full HD resolutions, without a single upgrade.

At what cost versus buying the same level tech 5 years later? There's a price issue here that a console is restricted by. the whole system has to be balanced around a price strategy that'll span 5+ years as the flagship product and anouth 5 years after that as the cheap entry-level gaming platform. However much RAM you have incurs a cost that needs to balanced with the rest of the performance. PS2 shows what amazing things could be achieved with a mass of bandwidth despite the very limited RAM, and where texture fidelity suffered, it's particle effects haven't been superceded. XB shows how RAM helps with better tetures, but BW was severely bottlenecked. You talk of RAM amount in isolation, they just need more more more, but as other say you have to consider the cost of the bus width and have that affects all the other system components, and clock speeds, and cooling costs. You're experience of builiding monster PC rigs is about as useful in designing effective consoles as a rocket scientist's experience designing billion dollar satellite launching patforms will help them design a cheap, light sports car.

 

[Gubbi]

At best they will use a 256bit controller, at with 4 Gigabit chips coming up probably next year, this mean no more than 4 GB.

Why are people so fixated on the data bus width of existing GDDR chips ?

Disabling half the data bus pins on existing dies can't be that hard. We already have clamshell DDR3 dies where the data bus width is effectively halved per die (ie. double the capacity for a single drop bus).

Sony has gone with a boutique memory design in their past two consoles and it isn't the cost of the memory system that hobble the PS3.

If MS decides they want 4GB GDDRx on a 128 bit bus, they will find a DRAM vendor to supply it. 75 million 4GB XBOX 720 is equivalent to 1.2 billion 2Gbit dies, that's a lot of business.

Cheers

 

[erick]

At what cost versus buying the same level tech 5 years later? There's a price issue here that a console is restricted by. the whole system has to be balanced around a price strategy that'll span 5+ years as the flagship product and anouth 5 years after that as the cheap entry-level gaming platform. However much RAM you have incurs a cost that needs to balanced with the rest of the performance. PS2 shows what amazing things could be achieved with a mass of bandwidth despite the very limited RAM, and where texture fidelity suffered, it's particle effects haven't been superceded. XB shows how RAM helps with better tetures, but BW was severely bottlenecked. You talk of RAM amount in isolation, they just need more more more, but as other say you have to consider the cost of the bus width and have that affects all the other system components, and clock speeds, and cooling costs. You're experience of builiding monster PC rigs is about as useful in designing effective consoles as a rocket scientist's experience designing billion dollar satellite launching patforms will help them design a cheap, light sports car.

As a point of contention - the same spec RAM (2x1GB DDR2 800MHz) that I bought in 2006 for 230 EUR can now be bought for 23.00 EUR.

This should say something about the long-term viability of having large quantities of RAM in your system. A 10x reduction in price over 5 years is quite good, no?

We would have $39 Xbox 360s on sale now if every component in consoles got cheaper at the same rate.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

As a point of contention - the same spec RAM (2x1GB DDR2 800MHz) that I bought in 2006 for 230 EUR can now be bought for 23.00 EUR.

This should say something about the long-term viability of having large quantities of RAM in your system. A 10x reduction in price over 5 years is quite good, no?

Sure, if you're willing to launch at $1000. 2GB of DDR2 wouldn't be much use in the current consoles. The BW isn't there. 2GBs of GDDR3, the RAM they did go with, would have cost how much in 2006? Or they could have added 2GBs DDR2 alongside the current RAM, but still at significant cost beyond just the RAM pricing.

 

[erick]

Did you consider that RAM manufacturers are also willing to sell at a significant discount for a major client with a product that will use their components for the following 5-10 years? I bet that would bring the initial cost down a lot.

Btw, the 512MB GDDR3 @ 700MHz in X360 cost $65 in 2005 (12,4% of the whole BOM of $525). That does not seem like too much.

I'd say that by skipping the optical disc, which will become obsolete as download speeds exceed the read speeds of optical media (probably around 2016), there should be ample room to put in extra RAM.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Did you consider that RAM manufacturers are also willing to sell at a significant discount for a major client with a product that will use their components for the following 5-10 years? I bet that would bring the initial cost down a lot.

From $200 down to $50??? the discount will be off the profit margin of the supplier. If they make $1 per chip ordinarily, they may drop that down to 80 cents for a bulk order. As there's an open market for RAM, margins are already razor thin, so the actual savings you could negotiate are going to be very limited. Every dollar you save as the console company is tens of millions for the whole console life, so it's worth doing, but there isn't the opportunity to get mega bargains on RAM and get 2 GBs for the price of 512 MBs or the like.

Btw, the 512MB GDDR3 @ 700MHz in X360 cost $65 in 2005 (12,4% of the whole BOM of $525). That does not seem like too much.

Right. So had MS gone with a more future-safe RAM amount, 2GBs, that'd have cost at least $195 more. The launch price of XB360 goes from $400 to $600, or MS take an extra $200 loss per unit sold. That'd be good for business...

I'd say that by skipping the optical disc, which will become obsolete as download speeds exceed the read speeds of optical media (probably around 2016), there should be ample room to put in extra RAM.

Wrong. See the thread on alternative distribution for discussion on this, but there's no way a download only console can work next gen (2013/2014 release) for a whole host of reasons. Also that would save all of $20 on the BOM, which isn't going to buy much fast RAM of the flavour being used. The space saving is immaterial as RAM is just a few small chips on a board. It's not as if the consoles have to pick the RAM size based on how buig the designers made the case!

 

[LightHeaven]

HDD/SD cards are storage, not memory. Even though you can do things like mmap.

And even then, that's not what he's talking about.

Yeah, i know, but I was thinking along the lines of windows` ready boost or something like that.

But that was assuming a single large memory pool, i didn't see the need for virtualization. I guess the catch is that he is not talking about having a single gigantic memory pool, right?

 

[function]

Right. So had MS gone with a more future-safe RAM amount, 2GBs, that'd have cost at least $195 more. The launch price of XB360 goes from $400 to $600, or MS take an extra $200 loss per unit sold. That'd be good for business...

The motherboard would have needed to support 32 memory chips!

 

[erick]

Shifty,

1. My orginal thought was that the X360 should have had not 2GB, but 1GB of RAM. That would have been possible to pull off. Sure, $65 + $65 is a lot, but 1,5 years later it would be $35+$35, 3 years later it would be $17,5 + $17,5 ... you see where this is going. Besides, its not like most consoles are sold in the first 3 years. Most are actually sold towards the end of the lifecycle, when prices come down. If you look at sales numbers, in the first 3 years X360 had sold just a smidgen above 15 million units.

2. If John Carmack is already doubting if MS will add an optical drive to their nextBox, what gives? If the nextBox does not launch with a completely new and awesome optical disc format, and unless they want to pay Sony for Blu-Ray, what other choice do they have?

Besides, the necessary infrastructure is already in place: Xbox Live!, big enough HDDs. Live! is already used to distribute games that weigh in at several gigabytes. After that its just a matter of scaling the infrastructure.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

By infrastructure I mean telecoms. Average BB speeds are less than 8 gbps, with large numbers of current gamers suffering lower than that accompanied with limited usage policies. Consolse will come with BRD drives, with perhaps an optional drive-free SKU for those in the position of enjoying the download future. But there's a whole other thread for that.

As for 1GB, the console would be better off, but not future proof. At some point RAM will be too small. Every dollar is balanced out, and every few dollars does matter. You have to draw the line somewhere.

 

[Rangers]

Shifty,
2. If John Carmack is already doubting if MS will add an optical drive to their nextBox, what gives

Where do you get that? I think he just speculated that it might be possible for a console to ship with no disc drive next gen, but he didn't mention Microsoft.

I think next gen is one gen too early for DD only.

 

[erick]

Naturally you have to draw the line somewhere, it's just that RAM, especially in a fixed hardware machine, is the cheapest way of futureproofing. And it really does come down in price very, very well.

 

[wco81]

Most of us are consumers so why wouldn't we want more RAM? Of course price becomes an issue.

Would we pay $50 more for 4 GB instead of 2 GB? $100 more?

Would we pay another $100 for 8GB instead of 4 GB? $150 more? $200 more?

 

[function]

In UK, at launch, the 360 could be had for £210 (the "Core" unit). Removing VAT gives you about £179. Retailer margins would be a part of what was left too. Memory alone was (according to iSupply) about £36 of that (and may even have been more in the months leading up to launch and the iSupply report).

According to Epic, MS said the decision to up from 256 memory to 512 cost them "a billion dollars" and you can see why. They made the right choice, and I don't think you can accuse them (or Sony) of skimping on memory.

 

[Rangers]

According to Epic, MS said the decision to up from 256 memory to 512 cost them "a billion dollars" and you can see why

A great falsehood, in keeping them competitive with PS3, I'm guessing it net saved them, who knows how many dollars, let alone cost them anything. 360 price is still almost shockingly high (449 Star Wars pack?, still 399/299/199) and being technically competitive is a huge part of allowing that. If 360 had launched at 256, call me crazy but I'm not even sure 360 would still be around. If 360 was the machine of always worse looking ports (and exclusives) due to only 256 RAM, they would have had to compete much more on being cheaper. I'm guessing at the least the hard drive equipped 360 would have had to stay 50 below the similar PS3. So instead of 299 for 250GB 360 today, maybe 199?

So it's all a tradeoff and my guess is the more RAM saved MS who knows how much money.