Xbox One (Durango) Technical hardware investigation
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Usually the only difference between Final and Beta kits is the box and a few bug fixes in the silicon. And in MS's case usually the availability.
None of which is likely to result in new information.
I don't have an Xbox One devkit, but I would guess the dev kits have either 12 or 16GB.
If there is any validity to the increased memory rumor and I would largely discount it, it's because the existing board already supports the configuration needed and the parts required are commodity enough that sourcing them in millions of unit quantities at short notice isn't an issue.
This is pretty much how the 256-512 thing came about with 360, the devkits always had 512MB in them, all MS did was ship retail units with the same configuration. But that happened earlier in the cycle than this. MS Devkits continued to only have 512MB of RAM until MS revved the board in the retail units to accommodate more.
If there is any validity to the increased memory rumor and I would largely discount it, it's because the existing board already supports the configuration needed and the parts required are commodity enough that sourcing them in millions of unit quantities at short notice isn't an issue.
This is pretty much how the 256-512 thing came about with 360, the devkits always had 512MB in them, all MS did was ship retail units with the same configuration. But that happened earlier in the cycle than this. MS Devkits continued to only have 512MB of RAM until MS revved the board in the retail units to accommodate more.
Michellstar
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As far as we now the beta kits have already 12GB.
Ms could choose to use devs kits pcb´s with the extra ram for retail units, just like they did with the 360, didn´t they?
We assume that a dev only has access to 5GB for games, and the extra ram (not counting the so part) is for debugging, etc.
The thing with X1 config, VM, split resources and so on, would it be possible for MS to up the games ram allocation with just a software update, and still having 1gb left for debugging?
How was the development of 360 games before having 1gb xbox360 dev-kits ??
Not I'm sure it's possible if they can source the components.
I just don't think it will happen, doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
Whatever memory you put in there you have to read data off disk to fill it if you say the average HDD read speed available to a game is 50MB/s and it's compressed to say 50% so you get an effective read speed of 100MB/s (and IMO it's probably lower than that) then it takes you 4E9/100E6 or 40s to fill that additional 4 gigs of memory best case.
Now I guess you could use it as a big cache, but you won't get the same value out of it that way.
I'll go out on a limb and suggest the beta and forward dev kits only have 8GB in them. The system reservation allows them to accomodate debug code by just modifying the game VM parameters to allow more of the 8GB to be used. This was not possible on the 360, thus the need for more memory in the devkits.
Then I would rule out a jump to 12GB as feasible, unless MS has a source for millions of 6Gbit DDR3 chips. Anything else would require a board redesign, which I guess is feasible, but seems very risky at this point in development.
If the board is designed for that sure, but if the devkits have 8GB and the pictures show 4Gb chips on the front of the board it likely isn't.
If you redesign the board at this point you likely invalidate a lot of testing, and that's expensive from a time and money standpoint. Time being the important issue at this point.
Additionally if Devkits have 8GB you're not going to have very many games utilising the extra RAM when you launch.
By "system reservation" you mean the 3GB for the OS?
If the game is cached in the HD's Flash anyway they will (re)load with SSD like speed. Sure, caching in memory would still be faster but I don't think that will make much real difference to the user experience.
liquidboy
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It makes massive differences... Seeing how tombstoning and recovering virtually went thru generations on windows phone 7 -> 7.1 -> 8.0 where 8.0 is instantaneous ... I can first hand say it makes a massive difference.
Being able to switch on full running apps in milliseconds, faster than the eye can blink, makes moving around on windows phone and between apps such a great experience.
I'm guessing they want that same experience on XB1, moving between apps/games/content (transmedia) without the OS and UI skipping a beat!
I may be mistaken but the game VM is a combo game app and OS.
AFAIK, that is mistaken.
There's 3 players involved:
Player 1: Hypervisor
Player 2: App(s)/OS VM
Player 3: Game VM
The hypervisor is bare bones thin layer that sits on top of the raw hardware and manages the VMs.
The Game VM has 5GB RAM allocated to it.
The App(s)/OS VM has the ~3Gb RAM allocated to it (minus the tiny overhead of the Hypervisor layer).
What was being mentioned was that on a devkit with only 8GB of memory, in order to debug and develop code, the Hypervisor will have different resource allocations. The Game VM could perhaps be given 7GB RAM allocated to it. The App(s)/OS VM will not be extensively used (as a consumer would use it) when Game Developers are debugging/developing, so it could perhaps be given slightly under 1GB RAM allocated to it.
At least that's how I parsed what was said.
Do 8Gbit chips exist? If it does then they could simply replace half the 4Gbit chips with 8gbit ones. If the memory used by the OS is essentially 'parked' when a game is played it probably wouldn't make any difference in practice having mismatched module sizes.
Micron surely doesn't' make 8GB 2133 chips and I don't think 8GB 2133 DDR3 even exist, correct me if I am wrong of course.
MS would have to go for 1866 DDR3 and it has lower clock rate.
They can buy more 4GB 2133 DDR3 but that could cause some serious delays in the production.
MS would have to go for 1866 DDR3 and it has lower clock rate.
They can buy more 4GB 2133 DDR3 but that could cause some serious delays in the production.
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They could use 8 bit wide chips instead of 16 bit. These are available from micron with essentially the same specs as the ones they already use.
Eight MT41J256M16HA-093 on top
Sixteen MT41J512M8RH-093 in sandwich
That would make them dissipate less heat, it would need just a bit of board rework, and all chips would be single-ended so no worries about frequency or load.
Later revisions could replace the sandwiches with 8Gb parts.
Eight MT41J256M16HA-093 on top
Sixteen MT41J512M8RH-093 in sandwich
That would make them dissipate less heat, it would need just a bit of board rework, and all chips would be single-ended so no worries about frequency or load.
Later revisions could replace the sandwiches with 8Gb parts.
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