Microsoft XBOX ONE

[Foxgod]

I'm not saying it will have 8 cores, but being a console means they stand more chance of being well used due to the standard hardware.


It would also sell consoles, I mean unless the PS4 also has eight cores too MS have some serious advertising and bragging power there.


I can just see the forum arguments now... BUT WE HAVE EIGHT CORES!!!

Indeed, it would be powerful for marketing, Sony did it with the ps3 by advertising they have teh cell, which can do 10.000 theoretical petaflops!!!


Lots of people jumped the Cell bandwagon, and 7 years later it turned out the actual difference between the cell, and the xeon in the 360 is minimal at best.

 

[Caine]

I'm not saying it will have 8 cores, but being a console means they stand more chance of being well used due to the standard hardware.


It would also sell consoles, I mean unless the PS4 also has eight cores too MS have some serious advertising and bragging power there.


I can just see the forum arguments now... BUT WE HAVE EIGHT CORES!!!

Ah! So that's why you want 8 GB

 

[Foxgod]

I'm not saying it will have 8 cores, but being a console means they stand more chance of being well used due to the standard hardware.


It would also sell consoles, I mean unless the PS4 also has eight cores too MS have some serious advertising and bragging power there.


I can just see the forum arguments now... BUT WE HAVE EIGHT CORES!!!

Ah! So that's why you want 8 GB

Nah, thats to be future proof, what if 2 years after the launch of the pandora, android goes 64 bit and becomes the standard for handhelds, because all tablets and smartphones go 4+ gb ram.


Then people will complain that Craig wasnt thinking ahead enough during the design of the P2.

 

[Caine]

I was just joking, let's not start this discussion here again.


[edit]@below: Ugh, that ought to teach me not to joke about sensitive topics.


Guys, please stop the RAM discussion. This is a thread about the "Xbox 720".


[/edit]

 

[Exophase]

Nah, thats to be future proof, what if 2 years after the launch of the pandora, android goes 64 bit and becomes the standard for handhelds, because all tablets and smartphones go 4+ gb ram.
Then people will complain that Craig wasnt thinking ahead enough during the design of the P2.

Pandora 2 will NOT be 64-bit, 8GB of RAM does NOT imply this!


How many times do I need to repeat this?

 

[Foxgod]

Nah, thats to be future proof, what if 2 years after the launch of the pandora, android goes 64 bit and becomes the standard for handhelds, because all tablets and smartphones go 4+ gb ram.
Then people will complain that Craig wasnt thinking ahead enough during the design of the P2.

Pandora 2 will NOT be 64-bit, 8GB of RAM does NOT imply this!


How many times do I need to repeat this?

Well, maybe Craig will wait to 2014 instead of going for the A15, who knows


But youre right that it is more likely that he goes for an A15 with adres extension.


But to be truly future proof, i would wait for ArmV8, if they really come out in 2014, depends on what info we get on the next Arm next year.

 

[vcoleiro1]

Back on topic please

 

[Exophase]

It's not a good idea to wait for something that doesn't even have a product announcement relevant to what you're designing..

Back on topic please

Yeah alright ;p


I wonder what kind of processing is needed for Kinect. That's a pretty specialized application and I doubt they'd want to drop a bunch of general purpose cores just for that. Unless it's not an inherently parallel problem (I suspect it is, or at least can be for a pretty small number of cores) it'd be better for them to stick to using some number of specialized cores for it.


I guess the other question is, is Kinect supposed to come standard with the unit now?

 

[Foxgod]

It's not a good idea to wait for something that doesn't even have a product announcement relevant to what you're designing..

Back on topic please

Yeah alright ;p


I wonder what kind of processing is needed for Kinect. That's a pretty specialized application and I doubt they'd want to drop a bunch of general purpose cores just for that. Unless it's not an inherently parallel problem (I suspect it is, or at least can be for a pretty small number of cores) it'd be better for them to stick to using some number of specialized cores for it.


I guess the other question is, is Kinect supposed to come standard with the unit now?

Offtopic:


Well, you can start designing on paper, and change plans when it turns out the V8 may come out later on, but i made a new topic to discuss this.


Ontopic:


Kinect1 already got its own chip as far as i understood, i think itsl ikely with all the new features they want to implement, such as VR goggles etch, that Kinect two will also feature its own set of brains.

 

[Caine]

I guess the other question is, is Kinect supposed to come standard with the unit now?

It would surprise me tremendously if it didn't.

 

[Foxgod]

I guess the other question is, is Kinect supposed to come standard with the unit now?

It would surprise me tremendously if it didn't.

Rumored is that there will be gamer packages and media packages, the media packages will be marketed as a console that can do it everything, to justify the higher price for having kinect included.

 

[Inferno's Reaper]

A thing to note with the whole cores & system specs thing. That's all fine & good, but if the software behind it is rubbish then the system will be too. The more complicated the software becomes, the more resource intensive it tends to be & thus the more resources wasted. More so if they don't get ye holy firmware & everything good enough to use the hardware adequately in the first place.


That's assuming the other aspects of the hardware's worthwhile anyway. It's not just a matter of how many cores or how much ram, but a matter of the quality. You know, the stuff the average consumer going to a bestbuy to get system upgrades doesn't know to check.


But, I digress

 

[Null]

A disturbing rumor is that the Xbox 720 and the Playstation orbis will have used game blockers. Basically a method to prevent you playing a used game unless you buy another license. If this is true, it will suck hard.

It almost seems like they don't want my money.

 

[Batou456]

But AMD's 8 cores (and I hesitate to even call them full cores) are relatively large [&] expensive

That's not really justified and largely irrelevant besides unless you really think Microsoft is going to go x86 this round. IBM's POWER 7 processors have used an 8 core arrangement at well over 3GHz on their 45nm process. Given the processes that should be available in 2014+ it's not inconceivable they could produce a variant of that suited to console use with the full 8 cores. Tearing out the out of order engine or otherwise would not be required to make it work this time, although I have no doubt server specific functionality would not be present in their console variant.

and so far offer close to zero gaming advantage over their 4 cores.

Which is related to a combination of the operating system and programs thread generation/management. Given it's on the table from the vendors they're likely to actually buy from, it doesn't seem at all unreasonable they're investigating the utility of doing so.

And what could you use them for related to gaming? Physics and AI code certainly wouldn't suffer from having more cores to work with in terms of handling more dynamic environments and number of relatively intelligent enemies. That in turn contributes to creating more immersive environments and better gameplay with some of the most popular genres on the XBox. I'm surprised at the questions you're asking about 8 cores, given you agree Intel is likely not going to be the vendor of choice and other options shouldn't have to neuter their cores in order to have a console octocore in 2014+.


Actually let's flip this around, given you've made a point to pursue this purely on the basis of what's the possible utility of more cores with minimal emphasis on race to execute and responsiveness. What aspect of game design legitimately has issues where single thread performance that is super critical, versus any modern processor, that's not the result of poor coding practices? Graphics are embarrassingly parallel, managing de facto spreadsheets is highly parallel, AI code enables parallelization, and Physics code tends to enable parallelization especially if we're talking a setup involving tesselation grids.

 

[Exophase]

I do think there's a good chance MS is going x86 this round, given how many rumors have said this, as well as that one leaked document that would be one hell of a thorough fake. POWER 7 is server grade and really not suitable for consoles, I mean if you think many-core IB gets too hot and uses too much power then you wouldn't want to go anywhere near POWER 7, that's > 200W and requires water cooling.


I'm not trying to say that 8 cores are useless, they're just a big compromise vs other things and these days consoles really can't even keep up with high end PCs in terms of transistor budget. You really have to pick and choose very carefully, and we're talking about what's left over after (typically) spending a fair amount of it on embedded RAM. A lot of the stuff you might think to throw on extra CPU cores can be offloaded somewhere else instead; even physics and perhaps AI and anything that can be made decently data regular is better suited to compute shared with a GPU. A bunch of cores is nice on the desktop where you have all sorts of independent developers doing all sorts of things with them but with gaming the problems are more limited and you can get more bang for your buck with less general purpose processors, especially if the console developer does a bunch of library code for it like Sony did with Cell.


(mind you I'm not advocating another Cell)

 

[2bit]

Just dreaming but I'd rather have a portable 360 then a 720

 

[vcoleiro1]

Apparently someone supposedly sold a Xbox Durango dev box for $20,000 on ebay. The story below:


http://www.kotaku.co...nt-kit-on-ebay/


Ebay listing:


http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&_trksid=p4340.l2557&rt=nc&nma=true&item=221100568971&si=5GouyjCR8%252BhJ1rPZBjj1Iul7PoM%253D&viewitem=&orig_cvip=true&rt=nc#ht_500wt_899

 

[Sugar_Kane]

That's a lot of money to pay out for something with no description, no guarantees and no feedback... clearly must have been bought by one of the tech blogs

 

[Fzero]

Or a rival firm maybe?


Wouldn't Sony or Nintendo like to get their hacking hands on this box?

 

[Exophase]

I find it confusing that this is even being allowed to happen. Surely a legitimate dev-kit would only be sold under heavy NDA and a licensing agreement that prohibits selling it on eBay. It's probably possible for Microsoft to determine who it was assigned to, but even if they aren't they should be able to shut down the eBay sale. It's the legal equivalent of buying or selling stolen goods. I wonder if MS's apathy towards the situation is indicative of it not being their hardware.