Predict: The Next Generation Console Tech

[Proelite]

Not even close....

If it's not going to be close, I am commiting seppuku.

 

[bitsandbytes]

Is it absolutely set in stone that the Xbox 720 has switched to AMD Jaguar for the CPU?

I'm just wondering now if Kryptos is just the GPU from AMD and Oban is a IBM CPU. The rumours are probably deliberately confusing so I'm not sure any more.

 

[anexanhume]

Not insurmountable. Not easy by any means, but it can be done. The tricky bits would be highly optimized VMX128 code. Might be able to offload some of that to a couple of CUs doing GPGPU. A full emulator solution like the 360 is unlikely, but there are other ways of solving the problem.

Quite a few guys, and they were paid normal developer salaries, although I suspect they got good bonuses that year. They were so valued that for years their official titles in the company directory was "Emulation Ninja". Most of them still work in the Xbox org, along with Dave Cutler, who wrote the NT kernel.

It's not about the developer salaries though, it's about the testing effort involved. Every backcompat title had to have thousands of hours of testing before it could be added to the list of allowed titles, and every update to the backcompat subsystem required a full test run through all previously incompatible titles to see if any of them could now be moved into the compat list. Luckily they had the concept of versioned backcompat, or previously compatible titles would have had to be run through the new emulator too. That still happened for titles that had some issues, so that they could be moved to the new emulator version if they improved performance.

Effectively, every title added to the compat list cost the company a hundred thousand dollars, not counting lost game sales because now people were playing an older game instead of buying newer ones. The benefits of adding a game to the list was _maybe_ an old xbox diehard user would now switch and buy a 360 (on which the company would lose money) and then play their old game (from which the company no longer made any money - with exceptions like Halo 2). For new users it was essentially irrelevant.

*insert missing gloating smiley*

 

[Brimstone]

Is it absolutely set in stone that the Xbox 720 has switched to AMD Jaguar for the CPU?

I'm just wondering now if Kryptos is just the GPU from AMD and Oban is a IBM CPU. The rumours are probably deliberately confusing so I'm not sure any more.

I haven't seen any airtight evidence what the cpu is. It comes across as strange for MS to flush PowerPC down the drain in favor of x86 when LIVE and friend lists is one of the major strengths of the 360.

 

[tunafish]

I haven't seen any airtight evidence what the cpu is. It comes across as strange for MS to flush PowerPC down the drain in favor of x86 when LIVE and friend lists is one of the major strengths of the 360.

There seems to be a pretty strong power law distribution of players on games on LIVE. Getting ports just for the top 10 or 20 should capture most of the playerbase. And while successfully emulating XB360 on the speculated hardware would be really hard, a port really shouldn't take much time at all, especially considering that almost all of the games have PC versions.

 

[Ruskie]

Not there anymore Yesterday was my one month anniversary at my new non-microsoft job.

Oh, well at least it looks like you had "fun" at MS. One more thing...How long does your NDA last?

 

[ERP]

Oh, well at least it looks like you had "fun" at MS. One more thing...How long does your NDA last?

There is usually no expiry on work NDA's

 

[tunafish]

And also, the terms of the NDA are typically covered by the NDA, which is why he didn't say that his NDA will never run out.

 

[anexanhume]

And also, the terms of the NDA are typically covered by the NDA, which is why he didn't say that his NDA will never run out.

But is the fact that the terms of his NDA are covered by NDA under NDA?

 

[Brimstone]

There seems to be a pretty strong power law distribution of players on games on LIVE. Getting ports just for the top 10 or 20 should capture most of the playerbase. And while successfully emulating XB360 on the speculated hardware would be really hard, a port really shouldn't take much time at all, especially considering that almost all of the games have PC versions.

Perhaps...my confidence in Microsoft pulling it off is low. Microsoft borked voice chat between PC and console players in Shadowrun with a dashboard update. Then there was that dashboard update that was erasing achievements...that eventually got sorted out.

 

[Ruskie]

And also, the terms of the NDA are typically covered by the NDA, which is why he didn't say that his NDA will never run out.

Thats interesting, it didn't seem that way when this gen was starting.

 

[NRP]

with exceptions like Halo 2

This one was huge. It's the reason I jumped to the 360 when I did.

 

[Rangers]

Is it absolutely set in stone that the Xbox 720 has switched to AMD Jaguar for the CPU?

I'm just wondering now if Kryptos is just the GPU from AMD and Oban is a IBM CPU. The rumours are probably deliberately confusing so I'm not sure any more.

oban is probably a figment of charlies imagination. that guy is a joke.

its not set in stone durango uses jaguar, just the most common and imo likely rumor.

 

[liolio]

Not insurmountable. Not easy by any means, but it can be done. The tricky bits would be highly optimized VMX128 code. Might be able to offload some of that to a couple of CUs doing GPGPU. A full emulator solution like the 360 is unlikely, but there are other ways of solving the problem.
---------------------------------
Quite a few guys, and they were paid normal developer salaries, although I suspect they got good bonuses that year. They were so valued that for years their official titles in the company directory was "Emulation Ninja". Most of them still work in the Xbox org, along with Dave Cutler, who wrote the NT kernel.

Interesting anecdote I laughed at the "Emulation Ninja" pretty amazing

It's not about the developer salaries though, it's about the testing effort involved. Every backcompat title had to have thousands of hours of testing before it could be added to the list of allowed titles, and every update to the backcompat subsystem required a full test run through all previously incompatible titles to see if any of them could now be moved into the compat list. Luckily they had the concept of versioned backcompat, or previously compatible titles would have had to be run through the new emulator too. That still happened for titles that had some issues, so that they could be moved to the new emulator version if they improved performance.

Well how did that compared to Sony solution? That is the real question.
I expect MSFT to have a pretty exhaustive lists of the games that both sold in large enough quantity and are still used by buyers today. I would suspect that the list is not that big. Actually even for some big titles is would be pretty useless, CoD titles are release on a yearly basis => there is not that much of a point to be able to play last year version.
Though they moght be game worse porting (the guitar heroes kind of titles people play every once in a while for example and have invested a lot in DLC).

Effectively, every title added to the compat list cost the company a hundred thousand dollars, not counting lost game sales because now people were playing an older game instead of buying newer ones. The benefits of adding a game to the list was _maybe_ an old xbox diehard user would now switch and buy a 360 (on which the company would lose money) and then play their old game (from which the company no longer made any money - with exceptions like Halo 2). For new users it was essentially irrelevant.

Well I do not agree with that equation, an old game played is not a sale missed, by any extend.
The library of a new system only grows that fast. People have invested on their 360 it might not be the cleverest way to secure them as users that to throw away all the investments they made. There are a lot of xbox users now.
I find it also a bit bothering for the people that downloaded "plain" games. They go without a physical support, they can't pirate, or sell their games second hands, so they are the "best costumers" you can have and you don't plan to offer them a working solution for any of the games they bought. It is a bit rough when for editors and MSFT alike support "not physical" sales.
It set a bad precedent that could alter the way digital distribution is perceived by a wide audience.

I see that somebody (not you) really cleverly laughed after reading your post but I'll ignore that behavior. Even though it costs MSFT money if they can makes some games (plain and Xbla) available on their new system they should.
If it is cheaper they should may be offer some 'compensation' in one way or another (giving money on those users accounts in proportion to the money they spend on downloaded games or something). But that could snowball pretty fast and that is imo a bad solution some people have spent really few so would get 0, they would have to set thresholds of some form, i guess it would turn into a mess.

Overall as they know the really few games (imo might not be that much, usually some party games are used for a long time, racing games can too, fighting games, FPs but they are release every year a bit moot) that are still played and those that are played but release on yearly basis, I think they can make a pretty sane arbitration. People would indeed lost content but mostly it would go unnoticed as the few games that are still used (by a sane amount of people) would be accessible. Really far from the worse solution, and this gen could be one of the first time in a long somebody would launch something without any form of support for previous product, pretty much a jump in dark, quiet the entrepreneurial decision, consequences are not known one can only guess.

So short summup if MSFT found it worse it while jumping from the xbox to the 360, the effort is much more worth it now that they have sold a lot more systems, have made a name for them-selves in the gaming sector. (and again thanks to Live, the list could well possibly be lesser than what it was for the first xbox). I think those that dismiss the argument as nonsensical are just afraid because another brand is unlikely to be able to pull this out. (and I'm not pointing at you anexanhume I have not read enough of your post to guess what your bias are if you have any it is more of broad statement).

 

[anexanhume]

My point is pretty simple. Microsoft has put themselves in a leadership position. They have to work less hard to show their product is just as competitive if not better than their rival's. They can count on their rival not having it due to the financial impact and their tight situation.

Thus, they are not likely to alienate gamers or lose sales due to lack of compatibility. Now they can monetize previous generation games by cherry picking the ones they do port (at potentially minimal effort) or forcing the burden onto the original publisher as we see with all these HD releases.

I just don't see a scenario where we get backwards compatibility for disc games. Perhaps select XBL content.

 

[liolio]

My point is pretty simple. Microsoft has put themselves in a leadership position. They have to work less hard to show their product is just as competitive if not better than their rival's. They can count on their rival not having it due to the financial impact and their tight situation.

Sorry but they have leadership only in US (not that bad you would say I agree) and what you say is by far not the best attitude to either consolidate it or expand it. For their rival, Sony, I think the issue is not money, after all as some people pointed out (including me) the list of relevant games is not that big, it is more that, I may be wrong, emulating the Cell sounds like a hell of a challenge / too much of a challenge.

Thus, they are not likely to alienate gamers or lose sales due to lack of compatibility. Now they can monetize previous generation games by cherry picking the ones they do port (at potentially minimal effort) or forcing the burden onto the original publisher as we see with all these HD releases.

Say Sony is cheaper (as I wish they were), what intensive the users would have to stick with the brand? You have free online, the games you had and still use are not use (or you are ok with many device next to your tv in the living room, I'm not). Trying to rip your costumers will only get you bad press, Sony waited quiet a while before those HD version of ps2 games were released.
Some lvl of BC would not prevent say EA to make money revamping the Mass effect trilogy.
See not everybody is rich, a system is expansive at launch, one can only buy that much games on top of the initial investments, actually only that many good games are available at launch and so on.

I just don't see a scenario where we get backwards compatibility for disc games. Perhaps select XBL content.

Well that doesn't make much sense now you want them to make that big investments for the games that have likely sold the less out of the bunch and that may have generated the less money.
Imo is not consistant, I did not read the others posts after your comment (/free post) in response to BKillian's post but I do agree with say tunafish's pov we are talking not that many games may be a top 20 for disc games and another for the XBLA.
At 100,000$ the working game that is 40 millions, even it goes up to 100 millions (or a couple hundred) it could be worse it, securing costumers is never a bad thing, giving them a pretty sane upgrade path too, and last and MSFT still have some work to do in Europe at least wrt their brand image imho, that would not hurt.

 

[arijoytunir]

Regarding the kotaku article ; the next gen consoles are similar to second best pc of today ! That means that it is similar to gtx 680 since hd 7970 ghz is the most powerful single gpu today. This also answers the questions on why the next gen game demos where using a gtx 680 . Also the 8870 is rumoured to be similar or more powerful than the gtx 680 and also may be used in next gen consoles . Next gen is in good shape !

 

[JasonLD]

Regarding the kotaku article ; the next gen consoles are similar to second best pc of today ! That means that it is similar to gtx 680 since hd 7970 ghz is the most powerful single gpu today. This also answers the questions on why the next gen game demos where using a gtx 680 . Also the 8870 is rumoured to be similar or more powerful than the gtx 680 and also may be used in next gen consoles . Next gen is in good shape !

I will keep my expectations low so I can be pleasantly surprised when specs are revealed.

 

[Acert93]

"2nd fastest" may refer to chips; e.g. the 7970 and 7950 are Tahiti where as the 7870 and 7850 are Pitcairn.

I think it is much more likely, if the rumor has any legs, they are talking about a Pitcairn 7870/7850 class GPU than a 7950. We could all wish (hey, it came out in Jan'12 and while large at 365mm^2 shifted CPU/GPU budgets, mature process, blah blah) but I don't think either MS or Sony cares enough about core gamers, or feels competitive pressure, to cater to such.

 

[Docwiz]

As you said, MSFT can use "live" to make up for loses (though it takes away some costumers imho), they have a neat advantage wrt to software and software environment, they have Kinect which is a reasonably known brand (for the mass public), they have smart glass, they have a lot of traction in US, they also have more money.

I was thinking of this today. Now this is just something random, but what if Microsoft allows people to play online for free for normal game titles, however they sell the console and subsidize the Xbox 720 with support of MMO type online games, along with TV/Movies/Music. So that instead of buying a new console for $400, you can now buy it for $250 at launch.

Sorry, nothing to do with hardware specs, but it just popped in my head.