Xbox One (Durango) Technical hardware investigation

[aaaaa00]

Yep, mainly a load of bull. Yes, the Hypervisor can allocate memory between the VMs, but as far as I know, it does not dynamically reallocate the VM sizes.

I'd assume that many years into the life of the Xbox One, if a marquee multi-plat title said "we need 7GB or we can't ship on your platform", it would be possible for the Hypervisor to suspend and write out the entire Apps VM to disk, or to shoot a bunch of running apps and shrink the Apps VM on the fly.

Hyper-V on Windows Server can already dynamically adjust the memory consumption of the guest OS partitions up and down, so this is not a stretch if the Xbox One is based on the same code.

Yes that would sacrifice instant switching of apps (they'd have to be tombstoned which takes longer), but if the choice is not getting Call of Duty XII or getting Call of Duty XII, Microsoft will probably decide they want the title on their platform.

 

[MarkoIt]

I'd assume that many years into the life of the Xbox One, if a marquee multi-plat title said "we need 7GB or we can't ship on your platform", it would be possible for the Hypervisor to suspend and write out the entire Apps VM to disk, or to shoot a bunch of running apps and shrink the Apps VM on the fly.

Hyper-V on Windows Server can already dynamically adjust the memory consumption of the guest OS partitions up and down, so this is not a stretch if the Xbox One is based on the same code.

Yes that would sacrifice instant switching of apps (they'd have to be tombstoned which takes longer), but if the choice is not getting Call of Duty XII or getting Call of Duty XII, Microsoft will probably decide they want the title on their platform.

It's kind of the opposite -> If you want to make a bazillion dollar with your nCoD on my platform, make it fit on 5 GB. And damn, be sure that they will.

 

[Warchild]

The Xbox One is going to feature a "special mode" called Hyper-V (based upon Windows Hyper-V 2012) which is going to allow developers to use up to 7,5GB of memory for games. (I remember mentioning time ago there was an unique mode allowing developers to use more than 5GB for games if need be)

[/SIZE]

Source:

http://gamingbolt.com/xbox-one-the-one-feature-that-nobody-seems-to-be-talking-about

I remember reading about this in a giantbomb thread. How the xbox could potentially give developers 7.5gb through its hyper-v function. But i never gave much thought to it, is it possible?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

If you read the replies to Cyan's post, you wouldn't need to ask that.

 

[3dilettante]

I remember reading about this in a giantbomb thread. How the xbox could potentially give developers 7.5gb through its hyper-v function. But i never gave much thought to it, is it possible?

It's possible in the sense that Hyper-V could allow for allows for a virtual machine to be created with a full-sized memory allocation, if as the platform designer Microsoft didn't decide otherwise.

The size of the memory allocation is a design decision, and can be implemented in a myriad of ways with or without Hyper-V.
Hyper-V doesn't massage away the physical reasons for why the allocation was made the way it is.

 

[betan]

Hypervisor's memory re-allocation might be useful for turning retail units into devkits.

 

[SanGreal]

The 360 launched 8 months after 2005 GDC...late November if I remember correctly. :smile:

Launch as in, when they revealed the system and announced the specs, not the release date

 

[brasnial]

As it now seems to be a excepted fact that the chips in kinect are of Microsoft's design .
What chance is there that there CPU and GPU are new deigns owned by Microsoft .
I only ask this because Microsoft have filed a lot of patents in last few years to do with CPU and GPU architecture.
Plus we have had a few rumors of AMD staff working for Microsoft in a lease format I.E Microsoft paying all there wages while they work at Microsoft for Microsoft .

Then yield problems ....plus finding out things about the chips when the get back from production line .....like the esram increase in performance ..up clock of GPU plus a few other little bit and pieces of information .

I guess we will soon find out as I've heard on more than one occasion NDA come to a end in September .
Plus there's always hot chips where Microsoft are up to speak about there tech which can only mean one thing kinect talk or GPU and CPU talk .

My gut instinct is that Microsoft are using there own designs for every chip in there box and only paying suppliers for manufacturing there chips .

 

[Shifty Geezer]

My gut instinct is that Microsoft are using there own designs for every chip in there box and only paying suppliers for manufacturing there chips .

So you believe they aren't using Jaguar, nor even x86 (they don't have a license from Intel), nor GCN, having invented their own new GPU architecture?

 

[Brad Grenz]

The chance is zero. We know for a fact AMD designed and is producing the chip.

 

[brasnial]

So you believe they aren't using Jaguar, nor even x86 (they don't have a license from Intel), nor GCN, having invented their own new GPU architecture?

Maybe they are licensing or in partnership with the companies you name shifty .....it just seems to me looking at all the rumors from a logical starting point that there is far more here than meets the eye .

Now I'm sure Microsoft would love to have a line of chips they could use in phones tablets games machines .....after all that was Sony's dream at one stage with the cell .

There's plenty of smoking guns I,E rumors now there is never smoke with out fire the question is how much is just smoke and how much is fire .
I'm mainly just a collector and player of games but logically it seems Microsoft are having far to many problems with there chips for them to be just modified off the shelf chips .
Again maybe I'm giving chip engineers to much credit here but surely modifying chips would not lead to the kind of problems Microsoft seem to be having with yields.
Maybe I'm just putting two and two together and getting three or just maybe we are looking at company making its first moves into chip design with partners .
I don't know maybe its not worth talking about maybe it is I'll let my fellow site users decide .
Anyway we will soon know one way or the other

 

[Rangers]

I'm mainly just a collector and player of games but logically it seems Microsoft are having far to many problems with there chips for them to be just modified off the shelf chips .

what problems? links?

 

[brasnial]

what problems? links?

Well the biggest hint rangers would be the latest new about release countries .now I no they have said kinect has played a roll in this but my guess is that's not the whole story .
As I'm 100 % sure that Microsoft would love to be releasing everywhere a sale is a sale to a company like Microsoft or any company for that matter including Sony .

Now if you new you were down on production levels for what ever reason then you would want to dedicate stock to your strongest markets which is what Microsoft are doing by the way .

Now I agree don't release Xbox one unless it functions the same in every market .....but maybe its not just kinect maybe they are struggling to manufacture enough to go round .

A new chip design kind of works with the news the other week about the update to there drives which lead to gpu upgrade .

I'm just fishing ranger putting it out there as a conversation starter there is no doult in my eyes that Microsoft have a great chip set on there hands and I base this on what my eyes are telling me when I watch videos of uncompleted games

 

[Betanumerical]

A new chip design kind of works with the news the other week about the update to there drives which lead to gpu upgrade .

I'm just fishing ranger putting it out there as a conversation starter there is no doult in my eyes that Microsoft have a great chip set on there hands and I base this on what my eyes are telling me when I watch videos of uncompleted games

We know what the GPU update was, it was a clock speed update.

They don't physically have enough time to majorly change the GPU architecture, and they haven't had that time for a while now.

The reason yields could be bad are listed in another thread, IIRC one of the main factors was the huge amount of embedded SRAM, that amount of embedded SRAM would (to my understanding) make a very large die.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

There's plenty of smoking guns I,E rumors now there is never smoke with out fire

Yes there is. Chemical smoke involves zero combustion. You can set off a chemical smoke reaction in a house and people will think it's on fire. Likewise, you can post random nonsense on Pastebin or elsewhere on the internet and convince people there must be some real cause for your smoke.

I'm mainly just a collector and player of games but logically it seems Microsoft are having far to many problems with there chips for them to be just modified off the shelf chips .[/qute]What problems? We've had one unsubstantiated rumour of poor yields months back. That doesn't count as problems.

 

[Cjail]

My gut instinct is that Microsoft are using there own designs for every chip in there box and only paying suppliers for manufacturing there chips .

Do you have evidence to support this?
If not then it's immaterial for the discussion.

 

[Cranky]

Do you have evidence to support this?
If not then it's immaterial for the discussion.

The evidence is indirect. MS does have lots of high caliber talent just to make a new Kinect sensor, especially since they bought 2 entire TOF companies and their engineers to work on the that.

I do expect that both GPU and CPU to be heavily modified.
CPU - significantly enhanced next gen relative to jaguar with some form of multithreading.
GPU - modified VI part.

 

[Cjail]

Kincet 2.0 is designed by MS but it doesn't mean that the entire XBO is made with MS "own designed chips".

Modifying the GPU/CPU is not the same as, I quote, "using their own designs for every chip".

 

[brasnial]

Come on its possible Microsoft have already design two chips that we know of one being in kinect the other being there sound block .

Now all I'm saying is in my opinion going by so many mixed up rumors that hint at problems with yields and such there is a small possibility of Microsoft having R and D there own CPU or GPU .

My head says 50 / 50 my gamer heart says 80 / 20 but that's because i'd love to see what a software company would inpliment when designing chips .

We know Sony a hardware company invested in designing its own chip the cell it would be more exciting if one or the other did try something new .
As we know for definate sony modified off the shelf chips that only leaves Microsoft who we know have been designing there own in the form of shape and with evers in kinect .

Hot chips and time will tell only a little while to go come the end of September we will know one way or the other .so this is the last month that we can speculate .

 

[Scott_Arm]

Kincet 2.0 is designed by MS but it doesn't mean that the entire XBO is made with MS "own designed chips".

Modifying the GPU/CPU is not the same as, I quote, "using their own designs for every chip".

They designed their own audio block and their own CMOS for Kinect 2. Those two things look to be the only custom silicon designed internally.