Xbox Series S [XBSS] (Lockhart) General Rumors and Speculation *spawn*
- Status
Well, I was speaking in terms of performance-related hardware. In addition to a much smaller SoC and less RAM, you have cheaper cooling, power supply, case, half the SSD storage and no BluRay drive. Plus, the idea of subsidizing a digital-only console is a lot more attractive. Consumers can’t buy used games or borrow them from a friend, and you pretty much always end up using Microsoft’s retail giving them a much bigger cut. The current rumor for PS5 pricing is $100 less for the digital edition which points to the same kind of situation.
Yeah. Wouldn't surprise me if neither of them have full RDNA2. We'll know soon enough.
Just imagine the Lockhart being behind the SeriesX & you can't see it until they move the Series X.
Could be like Xbox 360 S reveal. Tommy McClain
The CPU doesn't take much space in the SOC, maybe 50 of the 380 SOC for Series X? So cut the remaining 330 in half for 165 GPU, add the 50 CPU and you're at 215. Fairly close to the rumored 200 for LockHart.
If XBSX is only $400, despite the largest silicon budget ever in a console, an elaborate construction and cooling, and a sizeable and fairly speedy SSD. Are we thinking LH is $200 and XBSX is $400?
cheapchips
Veteran
I think $200 would really be pushing it for Lockhart, assuming break even. The average for SoC, memory and SSD would need to sit below $60ish. That's some aggressive purchasing.
I can't think of another instance where both a premium product and the loss leader were sold at a big loss.
This is assuming that $460-$520 BOM estimate is accurate, of course.
My thinking is MS designed to go for as low as $400 due to PS4's success at that price. If they launch @ $400 then they won't need to launch Lockhart. I'm pretty sure that's why they have stayed quiet on Lockhart this whole time. But now with MS knowing what Sony has nows feels comfortable with launching XSX north of $400. That would allow Lockhart @ $250-$300 depending on how high XSX goes. Phil Spencer has said they were going to be "agile" on price. Only way Lockhart gets to $200 is if it's based on using All Access between $22.99 & $23.99/mo for 24 months.
Tommy McClain
Xbox360 and xbox360 arcade.
Janne Kylliö
Newcomer
Just because PS5 is less powerful that XSX doesn't mean it's gonna be cheaper to produce. Yields, cooling solution, SSD cost etc. will be different and will affect costs. My suspicion is that the PS5 will be more expensive to make and thus will cost more.
And I very much doubt that the diskless PS5 will be $100 cheaper than the regular model, that's just a fanboy dream.
And I very much doubt that the diskless PS5 will be $100 cheaper than the regular model, that's just a fanboy dream.
cheapchips
Veteran
I decided to do another terrible mockup while on a boring conference call. This is how a 5x15x30cm box would size next to Series X. Not sure you could go much thinner than 5cm and have room for a quiet S like fan and heatsink.
Last edited:
Sony didn’t want to have a drive at all, even on the PS4. Reality torpedo’d it last time, and the BC feature, as well as the lack of support for 4K BD, a popular option among early adopters would make them look bad. The actual cost savings on PS5 digital removing the drive is about $20 at manufacture, and that’s estimating high, and including the disc playback license.
There are no new generations for MS. Its best to think of these three consoles as phones. You have the affordable phone and the high end flagship phone . Then you will get a new high end phone and the old high end phone drops down in postion and the affordable phone because low end / end of lie and then a new high end comes out.
it will be the same for MS in the console world imo , it will just be a 3 year cycle for ms, You have LH , XSX both of those consoles drop in price most likely with a new micron process of 5nm which paves the way for a 5nm navi 3/4 with zen 4/5 to come in and sit at that high end. When the next one comes out LH will most likely EOL out of the market and XSX will now be the lowest end console at age 6.
With xcloud and the like it doesn't make sense for MS to keep the same hardware sitting there for a long time. Xcloud will keep getting refreshed because the more ML and the more instances each blade can run the more people they can serve , the more money they can make.
Ugh. Much prefer the little cube idea.
Anyone have any insight into how often cloud server installations typically get refreshed?
Last edited:
If this product exists, it’s going to priced more like a Kindle or an Echo than a PlayStation. There’s very likely a lucrative subscription on the other end of each sale for Microsoft.
I think you’re right long term, but it seems clear to me that Microsoft is drawing a very clear line right now that they want to be the start of that future. They have essentially codified a feature set and performance baseline across console and PC with DX12U, and they’re erasing XBox One from the lineup with Lockhart.
Because of how disproportionately slow the HDD and CPU were in the current gen (particularly obvious with One X), they need to start one last generation, one last all new platform, before they can start the forever-gen that you’re describing.
That's hard to say, considering how new the field is, but there were major server upgrades when steps in CPU efficiencies happened, such as what happened in late 2015 to early 2016. That's how I got my Dual-CPU Intel Xeon E5-2670 CPUs for $90 a piece and 128 GB ram for dirt cheap and motherboard for equally cheap. Retail price at the time was still hundreds upon hundreds of dollars. Facebook upgraded to v2 or v3 CPUs because of the power reductions. Their servers flooded the market then.
Here's a thread from the file server forum: https://forums.unraid.net/topic/44374-90-xeon-e5-2670-26ghz-8cores-16threads/
For price comparisons at the time in 2016: these processors at $70 ($140-$150 for 2), or v3 processors at $1700 ($3400 for 2)
Amazon brings out updated server types every 2 years or so. You can still use the older ones back a couple of generations, so probably a 4-6 year life, with rolling updates every 2 years. The big cloud players are constantly adding capacity so it may be that older hardware makes up a small proportion.
- Status
