Will the Xbox 720 run Windows 8? | Hacker News Reader

Will the Xbox 720 run Windows 8?

extremetech.com

17 pointsprimatage18 comments

This goofy stuff shows up every time there's a new Microsoft console (or console Microsoft is involved in.)

It won't happen.

The whole point of a gaming console is that developers know exactly what they have available in terms of processing power and memory. As soon as you let a general purpose OS run behind the scenes, you give up that control, and with it, the ease of use and quality user experience that comes from (in theory) never having to worry about a game running out of memory and crashing, or running sluggish because of background processes.

Multitasking outside of the gaming processes is something that will always be kept to a minimum in order to keep the experience as flawless as possible for the user. Right now, you can do the bare minimum required for the basics of today's gaming environment, which is downloads, voice chat, friends lists, etc. These processes use minimal known CPU, and a finite but known amount of memory, and that's why it's a console and not just a Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo branded computer.

"As soon as you let a general purpose OS run behind the scenes, you give up that control"

That's less true than it used to be. The PS3 certainly reserves resources for the top-level OS, I assume the XBox360 does too. The next generation could easily carve out resources dedicated at the hardware level for the top-level OS while exposing constant hardware resources for the games, and with the further progression of Moore's Law they could definitely have a usable top-level OS without starving the game level.

(Theoretically this reservation could be done by a software hypervisor, but I suspect that if you're actually designing this in from scratch, it's easier to "secure" the system with actual dedicated hardware.)

It's still true, because the PS4/Xbox720/Whatever run limited hardware specs that basically wouldn't allow enough ram/cpu available for a general purpose OS running at the same time to come even close to replicating the speed of an actual desktop system. On top of that, the processors these game systems use suck for desktop style applications.

Right now, the PS3/360 reserves somewhere between 30-50mb of system ram, and only requires that game processes yield occasionally on one of their multiple processors. That's a far cry from having full desktop power available at the beck and call of the OS.

The price point of consoles will limit the ability for that to happen all by itself. You aren't going to see 4gb of ram in the next consoles, frankly I'll be happy if they even allow 2gb, but I've been hearing it probably won't even be that high.

"It's still true, because the PS4/Xbox720/Whatever run limited hardware specs that basically wouldn't allow enough ram/cpu available for a general purpose OS running at the same time to come even close to replicating the speed of an actual desktop system."

Nonsense. You don't need quad-core 3GHz machines with 4 GB of RAM to run a general-purpose OS. You don't need anything close to it, and you certainly don't need anything close to that when you're running things that, even if written for a "general-purpose OS", will still at least have an optimized mode for this very common case. You're not going to run an unmodified Firefox 2 with its GBs of memory use on these things. Carving out resources equivalent to a 2011 mid-grade smartphone on a machine that won't exist for at least one more year and probably two won't be that hard.

Even "Windows" doesn't have to be that hard to run, if it isn't running every service a desktop needs and the vast swathes of reverse-compatibility code.

How quickly people forget what you can do with even just 256MB of RAM, half-a-gigahertz, and some hardware graphics acceleration.

We're talking about putting a consumer OS on a console, here. We're not talking about 'what can be done' with limited hardware, we're talking about the viability of a consumer using an OS on limited hardware as if it's full hardware. We're not talking about making a custom version of firefox, we're talking about actually using Firefox.

I didn't say Firefox, I said Firefox 2, the memory leaking piece of crap. There's no reason that you won't be able to run Firefox 7 or whatever on the XBox 720. People have forgotten that you don't need huge machines to run this stuff. Anything you see running on a tablet or smart phone today is perfectly feasible on a carved-out, hardware-dedicated element XBox 720, proof by observation (it exists!). Moreover, it's not like I'm hypothesizing the existence of a Microsoft mobile OS... it exists.

In fact this makes the whole Windows Mobile play make sense in a way that it doesn't in any other way; on its own it stands 0 chance of taking over the phone market. Oh, I get it now! Microsoft hasn't let go of a unified OS running on desktops, tablets, consoles, and cell phones. They just realized that they can't just slap the desktop OS on a cell phone and call it a day, but in fact they need to go the other way; take their tech base, build the mobile OS, then extend it for the desktop case for desktop uses.

Hey, that could work.

You realize that even tiny netbook computers have a gig of ram in them, right? I mean, I don't want to keep this argument going forever, I just think you are woefully overestimating the slice of power that could be spared from a console without making the whole venture kind of pointless.

I wouldn't assume there will be a "general purpose" OS running. I'm betting that the desktop-like manager will be treated like another application in a loosely coupled way, so that the only thing running behind the game is the kernel.

That sorta seems like a no-brainer to me.

Sure. That's radically different from "Running Windows 8" however. Simulating a Windows 8-like environment? Sure. Not the same thing though.

This is something I've been musing about for a couple of years now... ever since I wondered what the next-gen consoles might be like, given their convergence with PCs.

What I would really like to see is the reverse of the title - for Windows 8 to run XBox 720. I'd like to see the 720 become a software platform, which could run on both dedicated console hardware and a more traditional PC. The software platform could define a very strict minimum-hardware specification, which would set a consistent base-line for everyone.

And by minimum-hardware specification, I'm thinking much like the strategy with Windows Phone 7. Whilst there is a choice in handsets from different manufacturers, there are some very strict minimum-requirements. Manufacturers are allowed to go above and beyond these requirements, but at least there is a consistent base-line, leading to a very well done development experience (contrast with the 'fragmentation' of Android, or the current Windows development experience, where you have no idea what to expect, except for maybe the little bit of expectation you have from hardware supporting a given version of DirectX).

So Microsoft could continue to produce their own dedicated hardware units that meet the minimum spec, but anyone with a PC that meets the 720 spec could also play the same games and use the same peripherals.

Of course PC hardware would continue to improve with time, but the 720 minimum requirements will be static, so a game should run the same on all Xbox 720 hardware implementations.

(Potentially, game developers could be allowed to make use of the better hardware when it is available to improve graphics, but only as an optional extra where available, and only if the game will still run on the minimum 720 spec. This could be dangerous though if things became too inconsistent, from the gamer's point of view).

So what I'm saying is that games would be certified to run on the 720 platform, regardless of what form that platform takes (so long as it meets the requirements).

Then maybe 2 or 3 years down the line (whenever the next-next-gen 'Xbox 1080' comes around), all that would need to happen is for a new minimum-hardware requirement be defined, with a new Xbox 1080 certification for games. Backwards compatibility with the 720 would be trivial.

Of course, this is just my idea. As good an idea as I think it is, maybe I'm missing something

How is what you described any different than a PC, with the exception that Microsoft is producing the hardware in addition to HP/Acer/etc?

With PCs as they are now, there's no base-line, no consistency in what the hardware can do. Sure, games might have minimum and recommended specs, but they're not perfect, and its often a blurry area.

What I was getting at would make it black and white. Either my Win8 PC could play Xbox 720 games, or it wouldn't. So A Win8 tablet, probably not, but a powerful Win8 gaming rig, sure.

Contrary to the other posters, I think this may actually happen: a little research will show that the xbox 360 OS is based on Xbox OS. Some people say this is a fork of Windows 2000, some people say it is from scratch.

If it's true it's based on Win2K, given the current Windows code base is still very portable - we knows x64 and MIPS are maintained already - it makes sense to have a unified code base and update the NextBox.

Wouldn't it be more according to the pattern to call it Xbox 360360 rather than Xbox 720? It went from "Xbox" to "Xbox" + "360" not xbox 180 to xbox 360... so it stands to reason the next release would be "Xbox 360360" or since it is Microsoft we're talking about maybe "XBox 360 R2 Professional Gamer Edition X10"

Xbox 0 * 360

Xbox 1 * 360

Xbox 2 * 360

...etc

Likely not, but if at all I would expect a stripped down version. It will more likely be an iteration on the current xbox OS.

Short answer: no

Long answer: They will keep the UI convergence moving in the same direction, but the underlying kernel will most definitely be Xbox specific.

Actually I believe quite the opposite: kernel will continue to be NT based, but the shell will be completely different.

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