Xbox One (Durango) Technical hardware investigation

The issue with memory paging on the apps is about what it does for HDD access guarantees.
Worst case mechanical disc seek times are in the 30ms range (if your reading from say the outer edge and the page file is on the inner edge).
So you add a potential 60ms plus the read/write cost to your potential latency for any issued HDD access.
You already have that issue if the video buffer is streaming to HDD.
They could certainly do it on the App side but not without it having some impact on the games side.

 

WHat I'm wondering (and this goes for both upcoming consoles) is if I'm not in game, do the apps have access to the full amount of RAM? Other than the OS portion.

 

That's why I said I would keep the game and OS locked in memory and only do it for the apps.
If the game is on screen, there is no need for swapping, hence no impact. And a switch to the game or bringing up an OS/app overlay is still fluid.

 

Don't know for the PS4, but for the One, No. The apps run in a different VM, and the memory amounts allocated to the VMs don't change during normal operation.

 

It's pretty obvious that if you want instant return to a game, apps cannot use game memory. Besides, trying to refresh 5-7GB of data from the hard drive would take 50-70 seconds, which isn't very instant at all.

And what app would need that much memory anyway?

 

It depends what that extra memory is allowed to be used for, which part of the OS is in charge of it when no game is running or suspended. This applied to both consoles.

It could be allocated as a generic cache by the i/o subsystem and be reclaimed instantly when the game VM starts. This is pretty much how it works on Linux (don't know about windows), any "free" memory is used immediately as cache and is reclaimed instantly when real allocs happen. It could also be an intermediate area to push dormant apps which have already been committed to disk, this can also be reclaimed instantly when the game starts. (would be covered naturally by the disk caching anyway)

Also, a browser can use a truckload of memory for acceleration purposes (page rendering cache, etc...), and they could provide a hook to apps so they can allocate into this pool and it doesn't matter if it's reclaimed.

 

People, do we realize that there are ZERO NADA NESSUN NO possibility x 12GB of RAM !?!?!?!
An upclock is a thing, but add 4 more gb.... Come on!
I know that such speculations are fun and costless but are completelly out of this earth!

 

Citation needed.

 

You could tombstone apps, if nothing else, to an amount of built in flash. That was my theory of what the PS4 would do when it was rumored to have 16gb of flash memory. No contention with the hard drive and fast enough for ~2-300mb apps.

Xbox.com?

 

He asked for a citation for zero possibility. A spec sheet on Xbox.com is not a guaranteed refutation of 12gb. It's a spec sheet nothing more. It can & will change based on a number factors. As much as you want the rumor to be false doesn't mean it proves anything. Personally I could care less either way. But some here do & as long as the conjecture is technically sound(I think it is), why not let people talk technically about it?

Tommy McClain

 

Panello was asked by kbsmoker/USC man on GAF to reconfirm 8GB since Panello would only talk about announced stuff. Did he ever give out a reply to that question?

 

I wouldn't expect anything until Marc Whitten or someone higher up announces it. Gamescom is probably is best for something as big as a RAM upgrade.

Tommy McClain

 

No, I think it was after the post you quoted. Once he re-asserted that he could only talk about announced stuff USC Fan (kb smoker) cleverly asked him to re-confirm 8GB of RAM since, after all, it'd been announced as such. I was wondering if Panello ever responded to that since it'd potentially shed light on the possibility of 12GB. Honestly if MS did 12GB I feel like it'd only be to troll Sony. I really don't see an actual competitive advantage there. Then again, I do suppose the marketing advantage and the reaction to the PR would be quite something to behold after 6 months of Sony fans boasting about GDDR5.

I personally don't see it happening.

 

This post was basically the last post in response to the one I posted above. In other words, no, he didn't mention anything about RAM. IMHO, I think MS will make some cool announcements, but I agree a RAM upgrade is not something I'm expecting especially if Sony has reserved the same amount of RAM as Microsoft for the games & OS.

Tommy McClain

 

There was zero possibility of 8GB in the PS4 too. I'm not holding my breath, but don't insist things you don't know about are certain.

 

Memory that's not actually storing anything useful is just wasted memory and burning power for no good reason.

Any memory that is being used for a read cache can nearly always be reclaimed instantly at the time it needs to be reused for something else. So the policy of the kernel is in general never to throw away anything it read from anywhere, until it actually has to: code pages, data pages, file system metadata, etc. It does keep a small pool of unused memory for emergencies just in case something needs some memory really rapidly.

You can watch a little graph of the kernel balancing the memory usage in Task Manager starting in Windows 8, (and the Resource Monitor starting in Windows 7).

That is basically how it works on Windows. It's been that way since the first version of NT released 20 years ago. It's gotten more sophisticated since then but the basics are still there.

 

Xbox One controller passes the FCC.

https://apps.fcc.gov/oetcf/eas/repo...mFrame=N&application_id=333860&fcc_id=C3K1537
https://apps.fcc.gov/oetcf/eas/repo...mFrame=N&application_id=625076&fcc_id=C3K1537
https://apps.fcc.gov/oetcf/eas/repo...mFrame=N&application_id=333860&fcc_id=C3K1537

Request for Confidentiality:

November 21 == Release date? (yeah I'm reaching)

 

AIRON sounded pretty certain to me, how much more certain can he be?

I think people always assume things are done just as a reaction of their competition and not for other reasons.

Example:
MS Management - We've seen some really interesting things done with Kinect and sign language, we want to have that as part of the core OS in about 2 years time.

OS Team - Well we've given ourselves enough space but, not for something like that, we need another .5 - 1GB of memory.

Options they put forward:
A) Take it from game vm, even at this late stage.
B) Drop their idea.
C) Add 4GB, take 1GB for OS, give rest to game vm.

4GB that's crazy for a console OS, madness I say, but well game vm does have 8GB, hmmm not so bad after all really.

Lets see if any game developers could actually make reasonable use of it before going for C though, otherwise just not worth it.

Obviously a totally manufactured scenario, just saying could be a combination of reasons why adding 4GB becomes worth the cost. Not holding my breath though, just saying dismissing because they have equality with a competing platform isn't reason in itself.

 

Surely adding more memory would require a different number of chips to be used thus impacting both the motherboard layout and the memory interface. Things that I would assume are fixed at this stage. That is unless anyone can explain how this would be possible without changing the number or chips or how that change could be accommodated in the current design without other fundamental changes?

 

I think most people who believe it's possible (regardless if they think it will happen or not), is basing it on if the final dev XB1 has 12GB in it or not.
If final dev kit did, then no it probably wouldn't be a big change at all, as the board used in the retail box will more than likely be the same, just different components populated.