Xbox One (Durango) Technical hardware investigation

[Xenio]

I'm sure whoever wants to read my post will do it for its content, not for my name. You have been commenting and quoting rumors from the most fanatic sites of the net, and probably are the only one expecting the console be better than the PS4.

What was that brilliant quote you post here a few days ago about arguments and attacks

sorry SUPERSONYFORTHEWIN but I've never stated that durango or orbis are expected to be better or worse each other (instead I've stated that if infinity will be 1.2 I will buy a ps4) and your post history are full of "I don't think that durango [add some positive speculation here]"

anyway for those who gives 100% of probability to 1.2 TF, if you know this, why you are not under NDA?

 

[Cyan]

I'm afraid the fact that EDGE contacted various sources that agreed with vgleaks tells us that the leaked 1,2 performance number should end up being quite accurate.

Of course, changes can be done, but performance os not going to be 4x what every rumor claims, not even 2x I believe.

Hola SKYSONY!!

Well, I am more inclined to believe the vg leaked specs are the correct ones. There are many rumors claiming different things from multiple sources, none of them have confirmed the truth.

Among other things, the fact that the new console will feature not just one GPU has other rumours have said. Instead they say the new console will use 2 GPU’s, one gigantic APU, and so on and so forth.

From my point of view, it's easy to see why it's so difficult to know exactly til 21th this month.

Developers are very happy with the capabilities of these new machines, so that's good news.

Mark Rein recently pointed out that the new consoles are going to achieve new kinds of gameplay experiences because of their technology.

Q-Games (Pixel Junk series) also say that next generation graphics encourage new gameplay ideas, and they praise the technology of the PS4 and Infinity.

http://www.siliconera.com/2013/05/10/q-games-president-next-gen-graphics-encourage-gameplay-ideas/

Final specs have still not been determined -not even for PS4- and whether they are the *expected* specs or not, we should know pretty soon.

 

[Strange]

sorry SUPERSONYFORTHEWIN but I've never stated that durango or orbis are expected to be better or worse each other (instead I've stated that if infinity will be 1.2 I will buy a ps4) and your post history are full of "I don't think that durango [add some positive speculation here]"

anyway for those who gives 100% of probability to 1.2 TF, if you know this, why you are not under NDA?

Trolling like that isn't going to get you very far as far as discussion is concerned. If the silicon is designed to be ~1.2 TF, there's pretty much nothing they can do to change the silicon, even as far back as in mid-2012 (or even early 2012).

OCing is probably the final possibility for a performance bump.\

I'm not under NDA because I didn't sign any.

 

[SKYSONY]

Hola SKYSONY!!

Well, I am more inclined to believe the vg leaked specs are the correct ones. There are many rumors claiming different things from multiple sources, none of them have confirmed the truth.

Among other things, the fact that the new console will feature not just one GPU has other rumours have said. Instead they say the new console will use 2 GPU’s, one gigantic APU, and so on and so forth.

From my point of view, it's easy to see why it's so difficult to know exactly til 21th this month.

Developers are very happy with the capabilities of these new machines, so that's good news.

Mark Rein recently pointed out that the new consoles are going to achieve new kinds of gameplay experiences because of their technology.

Q-Games (Pixel Junk series) also say that next generation graphics encourage new gameplay ideas, and they praise the technology of the PS4 and Infinity.

http://www.siliconera.com/2013/05/10/q-games-president-next-gen-graphics-encourage-gameplay-ideas/

Final specs have still not been determined -not even for PS4- and whether they are the *expected* specs or not, we should know pretty soon.

Hola compañero

I still hope we can see at least one of the two next gen console have powerful specs. I wish MS up the game and present different specs from the leaked ones, but if the vgleaks are legit, I find it difficult for MS to change them a lot.

But it would be a nice surprise to the find more RAM, or a better GPU on Infinity, plus a more optimistic restrictions for the OS than the rumores 3 GB of RAM. I am convinced that rumor, as with the always on-line stuff, is just BS.

Regards,

 

[eastmen]

do not believe his lies

Hmmmmm

 

[Xenio]

Trolling like that isn't going to get you very far as far as discussion is concerned. If the silicon is designed to be ~1.2 TF, there's pretty much nothing they can do to change the silicon, even as far back as in mid-2012 (or even early 2012).

OCing is probably the final possibility for a performance bump.\

I'm not under NDA because I didn't sign any.

it's no trolling at all.
I find funny and ironic that someone is sure about the 1.2 number, because who knows cant' talk, and who talk can't know.

Some like to believe it can be rocket-science 5 TF, some like to believe it can be worse as possible compared to ps4, but in reality this is about people, not durango.
9 days till dawn, and all of this will end

 

[the ugly cat]

one thing i'm not sure of is where you get that January 2013 date.

the vgleaks specs are valid i believe, but there's no conclusive way to solidly date them that i've heard.

These tags, must be just winding me up



384 bit doesn't seem viable, would require total redesign right? 8GB/68GB/s can only correspond with 256 bus I assume.

Exactly the leaked specs are from January last year not this year!!!

 

[Cyan]

The Blizzard guy, Corey Pelton, is at it again. (he is the one who recently claimed that the new Xbox had always had GDDR5 since the very beginning)

Nope. I'm standing by the GDDR5 claim. Guess you'll find out, in a couple weeks

Also, the Twitter handle "@Vustadumas" redirects to the account of a Blizzard Cinematic Animator.

Thanks mistercteam for the links.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=57366358&postcount=3402

 

[SKYSONY]

The Blizzard guy, Corey Pelton, is at it again. (he is the one who recently claimed that the new Xbox had always had GDDR5 since the very beginning)

That would be such a nice upgrade to the specs. Couple that with a better GPU and it could be a good hardware.

 

[the ugly cat]

The Blizzard guy, Corey Pelton, is at it again. (he is the one who recently claimed that the new Xbox had always had GDDR5 since the very beginning)





Thanks mistercteam for the links.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=57366358&postcount=3402

I belive him beacuse the VGLeaks specs are a year old and Im sure microsoft had multiple designs of the new xbox!! To think they only had one SKU is crazy!!!

 

[Betanumerical]

I belive him beacuse the VGLeaks specs are a year old and Im sure microsoft had multiple designs of the new xbox!! To think they only had one SKU is crazy!!!

Microsoft did have multiple designs, Durango and Yukon. but there is only so far you can take a design, to get something from being on paper to actually having a shipping ready APU takes a very long time (think 1 year +) and in that time if you make any major changes you start the entire process over again. The information you are talking about (being only one of vgleaks sources, also EDGE and eurogamer (i think?) have corroborated the same information and specifications from other independent sources) is actually from February last year and not January.

Taking this into account I cannot understand how anyone could logically support a random comment from someone who isn't even working with the machine, over multiple sources who have corroborated different information.

 

[MrFox]

The rumor of Kaveri's controller supporting both DDR3 and GDDR5 is too interesting to ignore
http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2013/3/5/amd-kaveri-unveiled-pc-architecture-gets-gddr5.aspx

 

[Xenio]

The Blizzard guy, Corey Pelton, is at it again. (he is the one who recently claimed that the new Xbox had always had GDDR5 since the very beginning)

Quote:
Nope. I'm standing by the GDDR5 claim. Guess you'll find out, in a couple weeks
Quote:
Also, the Twitter handle "@Vustadumas" redirects to the account of a Blizzard Cinematic Animator.



http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=57366358&postcount=3402

if it ends with GDDR5+eSram I'll be amazed. eSram for particle/physic effects and gddr for textures/frame buffer, for a total of 278-294 GB/s of aggregate bandwidht. But anyway I think that we'll have one of those, not both. only a couple of weeks..

 

[Shifty Geezer]

one thing i'm not sure of is where you get that January 2013 date.

Exactly the leaked specs are from January last year not this year!!!

Nope. January 21st 2013.

Website vgleaks.com is claiming a world-wide exclusive by revealing the full spec for the upcoming next-generation Xbox, codenamed Durango. While there is obviously no official substantiation for the information posted, key elements of the spec match the overall outline of the hardware we have received from trusted sources and the leaker has come forward with proof about the origins of the information - and it appears genuine.

VGLeaks released the specs, Digital foundry (and EDGE) independently corroborated them.

9th February 2013.

Can you believe the rumours?

How can you trust the information you are reading? Perhaps we should assess the quality of the data we have available and explain why we have confidence in it. From our perspective we see three different unique sources of information all saying much the same thing. Firstly, and most importantly, there are our own contacts in the games business, some of whom are working on next-gen console titles as we speak.

In the case of the brush-strokes of the Durango and Orbis specs, not only do we have double-sourced information of our own, but we also have an extra form of backup in the form of these other leaks.

it's no trolling at all.
I find funny and ironic that someone is sure about the 1.2 number, because who knows cant' talk, and who talk can't know.

Imagine you know a hardware engineer working on Durango, and you ask him for information. He says, "sure, as a mate, but I'll be breaking NDA so don't go giving anything away or I might get into trouble." He tells you the exact specs, and you want to share with the world, but you're not going to break his confidence. The best you can say is, "I know that's true," and, "someone I know says that leak is true." You are not going to say, "Mr. Blogs who's designing the Durango APU showed me a copy of the documents. I've posted them on this website for all to see." At least, not unless you're a complete bastard who'd screw over your mates.

That's what we have with the likes of DF. Richard Leadbetter has been in this biz quite a while, and he has friends and people in the industry. That has to be taken on faith as, short of personally seeing him chilling all pally with devs in a bar somewhere, it's impossible to prove. But if you can accept that premise, than the source is as good as an engineer friend of your own telling you the facts.

Anyway, this thread is basically at a dead end. It's supposed to be discussing the hardware, and was doing a good job for a while there until we hit another bout of rumours. I'm going to close it up until the 21st as the validity of the rumours discussion belongs in the rumours thread. Maybe then we'll either get hardware specs worth talking about, or nothing and it'll have to be discussed what the hardware is Wii U like (no specs, just lots of faith and circular arguments ). If we get some awesome hardware leak like the SHAPE info again, I'll open the thread early to discuss that tech (what it can do, and not whether it really exists or not).

 

[DieH@rd]

5B transistors for all "custom chips" inside the console [APU, Kinect chip, etc]. Weird marketing, totally not mentioning any specifics.

Anyhow, is the PSU integrated or does it uses external brick?

 

[Grall]

Anyhow, is the PSU integrated or does it uses external brick?

It's certainly huge enough to be able to fit a PSU in there but I actually don't think it will, because of the proprietary power plug shown on the back. It resembles a standard "figure-8" 2-pin plug as seen on lots of AV/computing gear, like PS3 slim for example, mac mini etc, but it's upsized and has what I assume is a metal grounding strip along the outer edge of the recessed connector.

Really disappointing if MS was to build such a giant piece of hardware and not be able to squeeze a PSU in there.

Also, what is the small round connector next to the ethernet socket on the rear I/O panel of the device? Looks like a 3.5mm audio jack, but I don't really see what reason such a connector has to exist on the XB1, or at least not on the rear of the console like that where it's very hard to reach and awkward to plug into...

 

[Acert93]

The architecture panel mentioned almost nothing at all about the actual architecture, but what little was mentioned follows the leaks we've seen. GPU was claimed to offer 768 operations/clock for example, with no mention of actual clock speed. The lack of specifics can be interpreted as a silent confirmation of current rumors, as if specs had been bumped signficantly to reach parity with or even surpass PS4 then why would MS not have mentioned that?

Yes, I saw the 768 ops/clock as well which confirms a 12 CU (768 ALU) AMD GPU--VGLeaks dead on. They also mentioned the CPU and co-issues and 8 CPU cores (again, agreeing with the leaks) and 8GB of memory.

MS obviously didn't wish to disclose specs because they would garner very negative pub BUT in their notes they clearly affirmed almost every element of the VG Leaks--there were no major HW surprises.

The 5B trannies is extremely misleading. The SOC is nowhere near that.

SRAM is 6 transistors per bit. I did the math earlier but 32MB SRAM is like 1.6B transistors.

The 7790 (800+ ALU AMD GPU) weighs in over 2B transistors and 8 Jaguar cores (extrapolating from Llano) probably add another 500M -- so we are over 4B right there.

Then considering other functions (Audio, memory controller overhead and cross communication, all the I/O technology) and whatever other silicon they threw in there and ta da ~ 5B.

The cynic in me says they really, REALLY mis-spent those 5B transistors. Sony may have a SMALLER APU which has more compute power AND more bandwidth.

And MS wants to push out Illuminiroom which will require even more rendering resources. Seems like a frankenconsole it does everything -- especially TV -- and gaming definitively took a back seat. It is still in the car but gaming is not driving it.

 

[MrFox]

The 7850 is 2.8 billion, which is the same as the 7870, so maybe they have shown the same creativity with the specs, and counted the transistors of the disabled CUs?

Also 1.6B for the ESRAM would be only for the cells, there's possibly a big overhead to connect them into a usable high speed array. (no idea what that would be, though)

 

[DuckThor Evil]

Yeah the 5 billion transistors sounds quite a waste, but I guess that's the price they had to pay for keeping it at 100W, while still trying to keep it somewhat competitive. So for the modest power target, I believe the design is probably very good, but for the transistor budget it's quite underwhelming. A bare minimum as far as gaming is concerned imo.

I like the case design, controller and many of the OS-features, but would have greatly preferred a 150-200W power range for the console. Very mixed feelings about this...

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Thread Reopened!

We didn't get specs, so the official line is that they are as per the leaks. 1.2TF SOC, 12 CUs, 32MBs eSRAM, yadayada. As this is a technical thread, anyone holding out for 'secret sauce' will have to present serious evidence, otherwise it'll just be noise and they'll be evicted. I'll move some posts over from other threads.