Xbox One (Durango) Technical hardware investigation

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They don't need to take a bloodbath. The RAM in the PS4 is easily a hundred dollars more BOM than the RAM parts in Durango. Considering the rest of the BOM will be similar, camera, controller, hdd, similar TDP, and a larger SOC, it will be Sony bleeding red if they want to compete on price.

 

What's to say Micrsoft won't change their specs accordingly. Unless they had different versions of consoles to chose from and, if that were the case, they could respond by adopting the cutting edge architecture...

 

Because its far to late to actually change your specs majorly in any way shape or form.

 

On topic of ESRAM, it is known that it has a low latency.
It is known that GPUs are good at hiding memory latency, but, AFAIK, that is done through cache prefetch, which is easy in graphic applications, as memory access is usually linear, and hiding cache latency is performed through "barreling" - cycling several threads over on single execution unit - one thread requests memory, the next step is done by another thread, and a few more, and by the moment the requesting thread gets a next step, data has already arrived from cache. Cache, however, is small and is not explicitly controlled, so if prefetch fails, you get a long wait till data arrives from main memory, so your thread has to skip many cycles. If the access pattern is random enough, cache would be much less of a help, as it would be often missed. For maximum utilisation of GPU, one probably has to trick prefetch to load a "working set" into L2 cache and then do all the work with that set. But, it isn't very big.

The ESRAM is much bigger and is controlled explicitly, so a programmer could pre-load everything that is needed for current frame (or tile) and would never have any misses beyond ESRAM, maximising efficiency.
That, however, supposes that algorithms used would request data from memory in a highly nonlinear pattern. One could speculate that in proper DX11 compute shaders that would be quite common - more so in physics, probably, but could be in graphics as well.

Does anyone has info on such algorithms, or at least info on how often GPU caches are missed in modern games?

 

Please try to keep the VS Console discussion out of this thread.

 

They probably have multiple Prototypes of Hardware. I hope they choose the powerful one.

 

Do you know what the hardware specs of the new xbox are? Or just confident based on the accuracy of the leaks we've seen so far?

 

Why vgleaks is not doing an article based on the Durango CPU?

 

May be there is nothing to say.

 

I do know what the hardware specs are. Or at least what they were in November last year. But my statements there were based purely on the VGLeaks documents.

 

It is important for the system, and it was on the poll.

Interesting... Someone (supposedly he knows something about nextgen xbox) told me that "Durango" is not the codename for next gen xbox since mid 2012. I don't know if it is true or if it mean anything.

 

So, what is the latest prevailing opinion on Xbox 720/Xbox 360 backwards compatibility? Does the idea offered by the slides leak sometime ago about the inclusion of PPC cores for BC still hold any relevance?

Thanks.

 

The leaked document (last year) show backwards compatibility (hardware). But it is an old document.

 

Definitely it is important but either way their source has been shunt before he told them anything on the matter or there is not that much to say about vanilla Jaguar cores.

As I think of it it could also be "click" management with the Ps4 events

 

But possibly still holds valid

Pure backwards compatibility is such a great card to play...

 

Why? The 360 already had backward compatibility for the most popular Xbox games. I doubt most people bought the system for that reason alone.

 

bgassassin has recently said no back compat, and the Edge article also mentioned it (and they got the 8GB in PS4 right)

 

Would it be hard for them to put the Xbox 360 SoC in the next Xbox?

 

Because... They want to entice the 20 million paying Xbox live members that everything they have invested remains?

If the price is ~$299-$329- those 20 million XBL gold subscribers will make the Durango one of the hardest pieces of hardware to get... We have never had such a potentially large evolving ecosystem effect as we may have with the next Xbox (like iOS devices)

The power of backwards compatibility is absolutely KEY for casual gamers

And let's not forget that it helps monetize the back catalog as retailers stop selling the games... They can just sell 360 games on live without having to alter their code in any way. They are shifting towards DD... Great way to hit the ground running