Predicting the Xbox-2

[chaphack]

http://www.redherring.com/insider/2002/0624/xbox062402.html

The losses aren't unexpected, but they do show that Microsoft expects to lose more money the more machines it sells. When Bill Gates approved the Xbox in the fall of 1999, he was told that the console could lose $900 million over eight years and that if Sony cut its prices aggressively, then Microsoft could lose $3.3 billion. After much hand-wringing, Mr. Gates approved the box because he felt Microsoft needed to face the threat of the PlayStation 2 and hook gamers on Microsoft products.

The threat grows bigger with IBM and Linux on the bandwagon.

BRING IT ON SONY!

 

[Deepak]

I wonder if Sony/MS/N have some clandestine understanding among themselves to launch their consoles in 2006, so that they make as much profits as possible.......just speculating!

 

[Phil]

BRING IT ON SONY!

That's probably what Ken has been saying, not Bill.

 

[Brimstone]

I come to the opposite conclusion. At launch, the actual power of the system will probably not affect the graphics greatly, at least not as much as the huge developement costs of making next-gen games. Since the Xbox"2" will most likely be easier to program (Windows/DX + x86 is pretty familiar stuff compared to a totally new design like Cell), the Xbox"2" may end up looking just as good and even possibly better than the PS3 at launch.

This more powerful PS3 may not change that, so what may happen is a $299 system looking just as good as a $399 system

Thats what i saiid before!
A 399 console is never a good thing. You are selling not only to hardcore tech geeks but also simple casual gamers. Features creatures full it might be, but never a good thing for everyone...

Let me restate something. Just putting in an extra chip and raising the price isn't the point. The idea is to capture attention and reinforce that Sony has a vison and is the leader of the video games market. Sony doesn't follow the rules, they make the rules. Instead of the $300 price paradigm, Sony demonstrates their vision by marketing that a $400 console is what is needed. They bring up things like extending a consoles life span and wanting to give devolpers maximum power to elevate the gameplay experience. They advocate Sony wants to give gamers more of technology of the future like blu-ray today rather than tomorrow.

Sony is like a rock star saying to a jam packed stadium of fans "we love you all and we wish we could play all night for you. Without you the fans, Sony would be nothing, thats why we are being so ambitious with the PS 3. We want to give you everything you deserve and more. The PS 3 will cost $399 because we won't give anything but the best to our fans. You deserve nothing less than 110% from us and thats what Sony is going to give to you." The lights dim and Sony procedes to play their latest radio friendly rock ballad that Fanboy packed stadium has helped become the number one song requested on radio stations coast to coast. As Sony plays the ballad, Sony Fanboys in a state of euphoria have large flames coming from their cigarette lighters gentley waving back and forth as they sing along with the song called "Dual Cell Utopia".

 

[London Geezer]

well, considering the internal videogame-market-rate-of-exchange, for which 299 US dollars magically translate into 299 UK pounds, i would be pissed right off if PS3 or any next gen console will cost 399 UK pounds. because, as we all know, if it's gonna cost 399 US dollars it WILL cost 399 UK pounds....

it's just ridiculous how am i gonna eat???? :?

 

[Josiah]

Sony is like a rock star

 

[Simon F]

Sony is like a rock star

What? As in Sonny and Cher?

 

[London Geezer]

IF I COULD TURN BACK TIMEoooooooowwww......

IF I COULD FIND A WAooooooooowwwwwwwww.....

 

[chaphack]

Let me restate something. Just putting in an extra chip and raising the price isn't the point. The idea is to capture attention and reinforce that Sony has a vison and is the leader of the video games market. Sony doesn't follow the rules, they make the rules. Instead of the $300 price paradigm, Sony demonstrates their vision by marketing that a $400 console is what is needed. They bring up things like extending a consoles life span and wanting to give devolpers maximum power to elevate the gameplay experience. They advocate Sony wants to give gamers more of technology of the future like blu-ray today rather than tomorrow.

Sony is like a rock star saying to a jam packed stadium of fans "we love you all and we wish we could play all night for you. Without you the fans, Sony would be nothing, thats why we are being so ambitious with the PS 3. We want to give you everything you deserve and more. The PS 3 will cost $399 because we won't give anything but the best to our fans. You deserve nothing less than 110% from us and thats what Sony is going to give to you." The lights dim and Sony procedes to play their latest radio friendly rock ballad that <bleep> packed stadium has helped become the number one song requested on radio stations coast to coast. As Sony plays the ballad, Sony Fanboys in a state of euphoria have large flames coming from their cigarette lighters gentley waving back and forth as they sing along with the song called "Dual Cell Utopia".

Nice joke post.

 

[nonamer]

After some consideration, I find the dual GPU idea, in any console, would be impossible. It would not just be adding a second GPU; you would need to add more RAM, a faster CPU, etc., not to mention the huge amounts of heat such an addition would add. The extra heat would mean it'll be bigger, have more cooling fans, have bigger/more heat sinks, and be a lot noisier. Probably not a good idea if you think about it.

PS: How much heat do you guys think these next-gen systems will produce anyways? I'm guessing 100-130 Watts since that would be comparable to what a PC would produce now.

 

[wazoo]

Sony is like a rock star saying to a jam packed stadium of fans "we love you all and we wish we could play all night for you. Without you the fans, Sony would be nothing, thats why we are being so ambitious with the PS 3. We want to give you everything you deserve and more. The PS 3 will cost $399 because we won't give anything but the best to our fans. You deserve nothing less than 110% from us and thats what Sony is going to give to you."

Funny, because that is exactly what Ed fries and co said at the Xbox launch. This was the no compromise console with everything in the box. The important thing is not what you say, but how you say it.

Sony Fanboys in a state of euphoria have large flames coming from their cigarette lighters gentley waving back and forth as they sing along with the song called "Dual Cell Utopia".

What is nice with Sony fanboys is that if the games are crap at ps3 launch, it does not mean the ps3 will be crap but that the games will be better the years after, like they bought the idea that the ps2 was difficult to program such that they could see improvements overs years

 

[jvd]

After some consideration, I find the dual GPU idea, in any console, would be impossible. It would not just be adding a second GPU; you would need to add more RAM, a faster CPU, etc., not to mention the huge amounts of heat such an addition would add. The extra heat would mean it'll be bigger, have more cooling fans, have bigger/more heat sinks, and be a lot noisier. Probably not a good idea if you think about it.

PS: How much heat do you guys think these next-gen systems will produce anyways? I'm guessing 100-130 Watts since that would be comparable to what a PC would produce now.

You would need more ram but not a faster cpu. For heat with two gpus you don't need one ultra fast gpu. You can have two clocked slightly lower (most likely using less power and getting better yields offthe lower clocked gpu ) You would also be able to use less expensive ram.

Using power vr. The tech already uses tiles for rendering the image. So each chip would split up the tiles. Basicly doubling the fillrate. Doubling the pixel shader power and vertex shader power. IT will work. It will just be a little more expensive. But you will get more power if its done right.

 

[Brimstone]

Sony is like a rock star

What? As in Sonny and Cher?

No, Sony is more like "The Beatles" and the Playstation 3 will be their equivilent to a "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" album release.


I guess we could associate Nintendo as the equivilent of Frank Sinatra.

 

[megadrive0088]

After some consideration, I find the dual GPU idea, in any console, would be impossible. It would not just be adding a second GPU; you would need to add more RAM, a faster CPU, etc., not to mention the huge amounts of heat such an addition would add. The extra heat would mean it'll be bigger, have more cooling fans, have bigger/more heat sinks, and be a lot noisier. Probably not a good idea if you think about it.

Impossible? hardly. I disagree.

even the most pessimistic would say it is unlikely, at worst. sure a second VPU/GPU would need more memory, but not a faster CPU.
look at NAOMI2. it has two extra graphics processors. 1.) the ELAN T&L unit. 2.) the 2nd PowerVR2DC / CLX2 rasterizer. but it has the same exact 200 Mhz SH-4 CPU as the NAOMI and Dreamcast.

what a 2nd GPU/VPU would need, to maximize performance, is its own bus to memory. past consoles have had more than one graphics processor. the NeoGeo, the Saturn, the PCEngine SuperGrafx. true, they were not sucessful consoles, but they were released and all had more than one graphics processor.

The heat issue can be sloved by keeping the clockspeed relatively low. to say, 500 Mhz (by 05-06 that will be low) - heck I would even argue for using FOUR VPUs/GPUs. since MS can afford it, and since NO known CPU (that isnt vaporware) will even come close to the 1 TFLOPs CPU of PS3. MS will have to, once again, fight back with a killer GPU or GPUs. my dream senario of four GPUs is probably extremely doubtful. but two GPUs.. I'd say there's a 50/50 chance of it.

 

[notAFanB]

even the most pessimistic would say it is unlikely, at worst. sure a second VPU/GPU would need more memory, but not a faster CPU.
look at NAOMI2. it has two extra graphics processors. 1.) the ELAN T&L unit. 2.) the 2nd PowerVR2DC / CLX2 rasterizer. but it has the same exact 200 Mhz SH-4 CPU as the NAOMI and Dreamcast.

what a 2nd GPU/VPU would need, to maximize performance, is its own bus to memory. past consoles have had more than one graphics processor. the NeoGeo, the Saturn, the PCEngine SuperGrafx. true, they were not sucessful consoles, but they were released and all had more than one graphics processor.

but then have horrible sync issues, even Naomi2 tended to duplicate textures across it's GPU memory pools.
(I'm sure someone can elaborate on this).

 

[Simon F]

but then have horrible sync issues, even Naomi2 tended to duplicate textures across it's GPU memory pools.
(I'm sure someone can elaborate on this).

That was used to keep things simple in order to use 2 CLXs as rendering chips but it wouldn't be strictly necessary for a more sophisticated system.
For example, the local ram on each chip could behave like a big cache and it could request blocks of data from a single central pool whenever it needed it. That would make it a bit like the 'virtual texturing' systems that fetch data (and 'cache it') from AGP whenever it's not available locally.

 

[notAFanB]

but then have horrible sync issues, even Naomi2 tended to duplicate textures across it's GPU memory pools.
(I'm sure someone can elaborate on this).

That was used to keep things simple in order to use 2 CLXs as rendering chips but it wouldn't be strictly necessary for a more sophisticated system.
For example, the local ram on each chip could behave like a big cache and it could request blocks of data from a single central pool whenever it needed it. That would make it a bit like the 'virtual texturing' systems that fetch data (and 'cache it') from AGP whenever it's not available locally.

I agree, however if it is trivial to implement the why not do so (or is it really just to avoid some R&D and testing?).

 

[Josiah]

heh, doesn't anyone remember Voodoo 2 SLI? 8)

 

[keegdsb]

heh, doesn't anyone remember Voodoo 2 SLI? 8)

Do you remember how much it costed to have that setup?

 

[jvd]

but then have horrible sync issues, even Naomi2 tended to duplicate textures across it's GPU memory pools.
(I'm sure someone can elaborate on this).

That was used to keep things simple in order to use 2 CLXs as rendering chips but it wouldn't be strictly necessary for a more sophisticated system.
For example, the local ram on each chip could behave like a big cache and it could request blocks of data from a single central pool whenever it needed it. That would make it a bit like the 'virtual texturing' systems that fetch data (and 'cache it') from AGP whenever it's not available locally.

Simon . Using the hammer chip. It would be possible to connect a gpu to each of its ht and then use a bus to connect the two gpus to each other. That would provide more than enough bandwith for everything .

Plus the cpu wouldn't need more than a 128 megs of ram which will be extremly cheap in 2005/6 .

I can see a dual gpu going into the xbox 2. I can see it because that is the cheapest way to improve performance. Adding a faster cpu will do nothing. Adding more ram will do a little but not enough. Two gpus will do more than enough.

Also powervr has sound cards too don't they ? Or another branch of the company does.