Xbox Series X [XBSX] [Release November 10 2020]

To someone who doesn't know anything about consoles I think you could pass off the Series S as a One S pretty easily. Series X would be harder to silently replace...unless you swap out a sub-woofer or something lol... but then you'd have no sub-woofer...

PS5 is completely fucked...."Honey what's that spaceship thing?"
 
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I'm not a lover of memes but when I saw this retweeted I had to check it actually came from the official Xbox site. I really felt when I saw the hours-later tweet from Phil Spencer. A lot of Microsoft's marketing team will have worked really hard on the planned reveal for next week and it was screwed over by a leak.

Why of the consequences of COVID-19 is leaks in general this year and I think that's a good thing.

PS5 is completely fucked...."Honey what's that spaceship thing?"

Given how hot the thing is going to get, "it's a heater".
 
Or maybe the leak was part of the reveal plan.
I'm the first to admit that Microsoft's communication method is terrible, although their social media (twitter) team are on fire lately, but even this is a stretch.

I genuinely think when a team have worked on a product for so long, it sucks for its existence to be leaked. Can you imagine the absolutely meltdown that would be happening right now had Series S never leaked and it just came completely out of the blue.

I'm being deprived of that meltdown. In September 2020, I need that meltdown. :yep2:
 
Can you imagine the absolutely meltdown that would be happening right now had Series S never leaked and it just came completely out of the blue.
Yes, I can imagine, and while I'm absolutely in conspiracy territory here, I think that it would be so disruptive and confusing that would have damaged the launch (and ruined the lunch), while the leak let the idea of a slower nextgen console slip in, accept it, and be reassuringly talked later.
 
I'm the first to admit that Microsoft's communication method is terrible, although their social media (twitter) team are on fire lately, but even this is a stretch.

I genuinely think when a team have worked on a product for so long, it sucks for its existence to be leaked. Can you imagine the absolutely meltdown that would be happening right now had Series S never leaked and it just came completely out of the blue.

I'm being deprived of that meltdown. In September 2020, I need that meltdown. :yep2:

But just think of all the attention and interest the Lockhart discussions have created since the rumors began. At least the technical world was abuzz, though most consumers don't pay attention to this deep level stuff.
 
But just think of all the attention and interest the Lockhart discussions have created since the rumors began. At least the technical world was abuzz, though most consumers don't pay attention to this deep level stuff.
Tech world wont buy XSS but instead XSX... So XSS is quite a big surprise. I see it sold like bread in supermarkets at 199 euro/dollars quite soon....
 
Tech world wont buy XSS but instead XSX... So XSS is quite a big surprise. I see it sold like bread in supermarkets at 199 euro/dollars quite soon....
I doubt that, I read they are taking a bigger hit on the XSS and it has less scaling due to the probable size of SoC and other components (along with it being digital only).

Just seems a stretch to reduce price by a third any time soon.
 
But just think of all the attention and interest the Lockhart discussions have created since the rumors began. At least the technical world was abuzz, though most consumers don't pay attention to this deep level stuff.
Did we really need a third console to add to the speculation? Series S coming out of the blue would have been so much better :yes:
 
I doubt that, I read they are taking a bigger hit on the XSS and it has less scaling due to the probable size of SoC and other components (along with it being digital only).

Just seems a stretch to reduce price by a third any time soon.
That's weird. I read that it will be very cost reducable and likely $199 by 2022. :)
 
That's weird. I read that it will be very cost reducable and likely $199 by 2022. :)

That's speculation. A large part of MS's Hot Chips presentation was showing how difficult it was to cost reduce modern consoles due to smaller nodes coming both less frequently and at a significantly higher cost compared to previous node transitions.

That means that you can't rely on significant cost reductions for many of the components. You can make an SOC smaller on a smaller node which traditionally would have given you a large cost savings. However, transitioning to smaller nodes is now more expensive due to higher node cost and higher cost to optically shrink your current design to the smaller node.

MS stated that it was more cost effective to design a new SOC at a smaller node than to transition an existing SOC to a smaller node. That was one of the reasons that they created the XBSS. In many ways it's a proof of concept.

Memory prices are also not decreasing much over time. This is why we don't see a larger increase in the memory pool size of the next gen consoles. It also means that there won't be much, if any, cost savings WRT to memory chips when a traditional mid gen console would come out.

SSD's are currently one area which is still seeing appreciable cost reductions over time. But much of this is due to 3D stacking along with the transition from SLC to MLC to TLC and now to QLC. Unfortunately while 3D stacking doesn't affect the longevity of NAND cells, each step down from SLC to QLC reduces the effective lifespan of NAND cells and in turn the NAND chips themselves. So we get more affordable SSDs that have shorter effective write lifespans

Fortunately for consoles, they can minimize writes to the SSD so that even QLC should be able to last for the typical life of a console As long as users aren't constantly swapping out GBs of games everyday.

TL: DR - we're getting to a point where unless there's a new paradigm shift in the semi-conductor industry we may no longer see a traditional midgen "shrink" that brings an appreciably cheaper console.

Regards,
SB
 
The SOC shrinking to 5nm is the biggest one perhaps - sticking to 128-bit was probably a necessity to facilitate a 100-120mm^2 die down from ~200mm^2.There will be a cascade effect on power/motherboard components with the 5nm switch.


Then there's the clamshell arrangement, which just needs a single 4GB chip when such capacities are more common.

XSX will be harder to cost reduce since the GDDR6 is pretty much fixed in place. The main SOC will probably hit around the 240-250mm^2 mark once shrunk down from 360mm^2, but it'll be a while before the cost / mm^2 catches up to a mature 7nm.

I don't know what the options are for the SSD portion - higher density? Not sure what the impact is on I/O ala memory chips.

hm...
 
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