Xbox One Architecture Panel *Main Console HW Points* Transcript

interesting, are those anything novel or just standard stuff? i assume the latter.

interestingly they seem to almost stress the esram latency, but it's so vague and dumbed down it's hard to tell.

 

Those are just the move engines we've known about for ages.

 

"We added lot's of memory both system memory and flash cache in order to have that simultaneous and instantaneous action."

First time hearing about the flash cache how much flash cache are they talking about or is this just the esRam?

 

Yeah I was wondering about that reference too.

 

http://www.denali.com/wordpress/index.php/dmr/2010/04/26/what-is-a-flash-cache

Is this what he's talking about?

 

if this is what he's talking about, what would be the positives of it in game development?

The points from the panel are pretty vague, but there are interesting tidbits thrown in. I'd love to know more.

 

Could be, and it could be in RAM.

 

Actually this is probably why the 500 GB hard disk isn't user-replaceable: it's not a normal hard disk.

The Xbox One is probably using a hybrid hard drive: flash memory used as a cache to speed up load times, combined with a rotational hard disk for capacity.

Probably something similar to this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178339

 

Oooh, that would be really nice, depending on size. Sounds a little too good to be true though. If so why haven't they talked this up?

 

In the sense of HDD caching? I can't think of any circumstance where that would be useful for a game in a next-gen console.

HDD caching is great for desktops/servers, with multiple applications, or applications that start/stop all the time. For a game, I can't see how that would help.

(you could dump the hibernate data into flash RAM during shutdown to provide an accelerated startup - but that wouldn't really be a 'cache').

It may be he's refering to the ESRAM essentially being a "system-managed cache". That would work basically the same as that article describes, but for RAM->ESRAM rather than HDD->flash/memory.

 

I think that if it was a hybrid drive, they would have mentioned it as a selling point.

 

What is the win for putting a flash cache in RAM? I get why you'd put a flash cache on a HDD. The ESRAM makes sense, because it has its own faster bus. Is it possible he called the ESRAM flash for some reason?

 

I didnt notice before the ops per cycle was given for the cpu. So much for that secret sauce for cpu.

That whats going to be in my ps4 but its the 1TB version....

 

Looking at the 1TB version it only appears to have an 8GB cache... The 750GB comes with a 64GB cache. Not sure why that is.

 

Transistors in the cloud is really awkward way of describing the vCPU and vRAM allocation you contract for with MS. From the silence on what the actual resources available in the cloud are and the Titanfall devs post about negotiating pricing with MS I'm going to say "how much you have = what you pay for".

I'm going to nail my colours to the mast and say you're getting 0GB of SSD storage. That's a real benefit and I can't see MS choosing to do this and then not trumpeting this from the high heavens. Even at the volumes MS would be buying 128GB of NAND + controller logic is not cheap and would probably rival the cost of the APU in any BOM analysis. I'm going to presume he meant a scratchpad in RAM either from the memory reserved by the O/S or just in main RAM.