The Xbox One: Hardware Analysis & Comparison to PlayStation 4
anandtech.com
anandtech.com
- PS4 and XBox One are going to be similar hardware wise, with the PS4 having an edge in raw power and the XBox One having an edge in "cleverness" (e.g. memory caching) and power consumption (lower).
- Microsoft is re-using Hyper-V in a very awesome way(!).
- HDMI passthrough is Microsoft's "ace in the hole."
- Developers are going to have a great time this generation thanks to how similar the hardware is (identical in many cases).
I really want to know how Microsoft is able to run two hypervisors and offer GPU acceleration to both concurrently. Is this part of AMD's new CPU+GPU on one die magic, or is this something we'll see on the PC?
I suspect that HDMI passthrough will be a frustratingly unfulfilled promise, as it is with Google TV.
Recent GPUs are virtualizeable (using multiple command queues); this is mostly targeted for VDI or cloud gaming but unused in PCs. http://www.nvidia.com/object/enterprise-virtualization.html
There are tons of edge cases you run into when you don't have full control of the tuning stack. As one example (I can think of dozens easily):
Family has a single-tuner old school Scientific Atlanta DVR (still very popular with cable operators despite being horribly obsolete). They set it up to record a show, it is currently recording said show, person interacting with the Xbox One does something to change the channel to one different than the one being recorded on... oops! There is no way for the Xbox One to know this is a potentially destructive operation for the DVR. At worst the DVR changes the channel and loses half your show, at best the DVR is smart enough to prompt you about this and stop the channel change, but how does the Xbox One know this occurred? There are some high-end DVRs with APIs that exist in an attempt to deal with situations like this but they are very few, very far between and there are no standards for them.
Corner cases like this present themselves all the time with these HDMI-in/HDMI-out devices like Google TV and they are inherent problems with the current state of set-top box technology. No matter how many resources Microsoft throws at this, the end result will still be kind of lame a lot of the time and a far cry from the seamless experience you see in the on-stage demos.
What if this wasn't classified as a corner case? As you said - most MSOs are running either an old Moto or old SA as their standard box. Because headends are either Moto or SA there are actually very few unique STBs in the field. And of those, they are all versions of the same OS that either Moto or SA have been using for a long time.
If MS just threw a bunch of resources at common SA and Moto boxes to enumerate and add special code to handle these cases... could it work? Would it be a better experience? Is it worth it?
Unless, of course, the pass through works when the device is turned off... However, I haven't heard any mention yet that it does (does anyone know if it will support this?).
And plus, if you had any other multimedia devices (e.g. a Blu-ray player), wouldn't you still need to use the other inputs on the television anyways?
Microsoft's betting the farm on the idea that a consumer will leave the xbox on 24/7 in a low-power state and have it as THE hub for all things digital entertainment. Your TV goes through it for advanced features such as TV channel guides, extra content, etc. You play games on it. You chat, take video calls and the like on it via Skype. You steam music/movies to it as your media player. All of it is controlled via the Kinect gestures and voice recognition. It is also why they're planning to push updates/etc. through in idle times (e.g.: overnight) when the device is left in low power but able to do basic tasks.
Basically, MS wants to take the beachhead they established with the first two generations and expand it. They want the Xbox One to go against the Apple TV and XBMC media centres and the like to become the all-encompassing portal of your entertainment.
Sure the hardware will be similar, but what use is that if the APIs to access the hardware are totally different? I think the odds of Sony using DirectX in their SDK are pretty slim.
The hard part of the previous generations multi-platform had been in getting to the same level of performance. E.g. 360 had a pretty weak CPU and a superior GPU compared to PS3 so the distribution of things done on CPU and GPU was completely different between these two targets.
What an awful idea. Thank goodness I saw it at the last minute.
I agree! I hate their navigation UI. In general drop downs should only be used for familiar lists (counties, states, etc.) However, some of their articles are very detailed and has numerous pages and they need to provide a quick access to individual pages. One work around is to provide a simple "Next >>" at the bottom of the article. It would make it a lot less confusing.
Having said that, it is still bad design/usability. They could easily fix by keeping the model of separate pages for each topic, but moving the content from the drop down to an index at the bottom of each page, and also use prev/next buttons.
http://www.anandtech.com/print/6972/xbox-one-hardware-compar...
Microsoft actually confirmed that 3GB will be reserved for the OS while only 5GB is available for games. Check out the video at 9:44
http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2013/05/21/in...
i thought the ps3 was more widely used for streaming?
it's pretty fscking ridiculous that you need to have gold membership AND netflix membership to stream with the xbox.
Not by a LONG shot.
And you don't need gold membership to use the Netflix app on xbox. Also, the Netflix app for xbox is much better than the PS3 app.
http://forums.xbox.com/xbox_forums/xbox_feedback/f/2602/t/37...
Having said that, as I pointed out elsewhere, it's now how many things your device does, but how well it does the thing that'll define its function. If it's an entertainment system, it's how well it entertains people. If it's a videogame, it's how fun the games it plays are.
Although I personally have little love for Visual Studio, most Windows developers would never leave it.
Were it programmable in Lisp, I suppose developers would use it to read e-mail and chat on IRC ;-)
Modern day indie developers are making products which we would have called AAA games in 1998 and many of them are selling extremely well (just see Kickstarter). I think they have a HUGE role to play this generation, and holding them hostage in the "app" sandbox will be a massive mistake.
If either Microsoft or Sony opened up their SDK to indie developers, and created some kind of arrangement where these developers could sell digitally for a fee, I think they will effectively "win" this round. And I do not mean "apps." I mean full power of the console level stuff.
I find that particularly interesting in light of his sort of decrying the digital-social culture we've developed in the last decade. Strange guy with a lot of really different opinions; was a lot of fun.
The Xbox including the new Kinect definitely lowers margins, but if Kinect becomes an integral part of the gaming experience it will be a sound bet.
Indeed. Bundling it is the best way to ensure the Kinect is used in every title.
Currently, the Kinect is a peripheral, which means that developers can't assume that it's there. If they want to use it, they have two options: be a full-on Kinect game that doesn't make sense without the device, or have controller-only options for everything. That's a lot of pain. But if they can assume that the Kinect is always there, there's no tradeoff.
I understood that SRAM was only really 'expensive' in that it chews up masses of die space (which isn't a bad bet going forward because there'll inevitably be a new version at some point with a smaller process)
clearly, websites that do this are shooting themselves in the foot in terms of UX, for the sake of pageviews and ad impressions. Is there now better way?
When I worked for a publisher there was a long debate over UX vs page views and ad impressions.
I think Google has rules around how you can load ad's also so it might not be posible to do anything dynamic. Google has all the ad inventory so is the dominant player.
Nintendo's only shot right now is to cut price on the Wii U.
Just remember that historically the magic number for console sales is $199. That's why the Xbox 360's entry price is $199 now and the Wii worked so well at $249 with a bundled game (basically $199 console + pack in game).
Mobile devices the sweet spot is more like say $150, which is why the DS did better than the PSP, 3DS than the Vita and so on.
Price makes a huge difference on consumer products and getting to certain price points can be the difference between success and failure other things being basically equal.
I've had this setup (with a slightly slower AMD proc) for over 2 years, and I've been running BSNES, Dolphin, PCSX2, Nestopia, and MAME fairly regularly. Today's announcement informed me that I've been enjoying much of the next-generation gaming experience already, without any of the DRM Sony and Microsoft promise to include with their systems.
You can't be serious. Although you can very soon be enjoying the next-generation gaming experience, what's exciting to me about this as a PC gamer is that all next gen games will be designed with x86 in mind, which should make porting trivial compared to this generation.
And these days they mostly don't even bother to do anything...
I'm an early adopter of the same hardware you're all going to be enjoying this christmas, and many of the same games. Plus, I get a Virtual Console offering that Nintendo/Microsoft/Sony only wish they could match, and a television experience with Sickbeard/XBMC that not even Netflix can match, let alone whatever soon-abandoned toy Microsoft will be including with the XBO.
You're absolutely right; Microsoft/Sony adopting the X86 platform for this generation is a perfect storm for Valve; release a Steambox running linux, and you can minimize the cost of porting to 20% of what those same efforts would require coming from a PPC architecture.
Can you point me towards any documentation on AMD using VLIW cores? I thought the VLIW movement died with Transmeta. Also, if you could provide me with documentation that AMD isn't using the same-gen GPU cores in the XBO/PS4 that they put in the A10 (Southern Islands - Radeon 7XXX), I'd really appreciate that as well.
I wouldn't dare boot windows on a 256MB PC. it wouldn't run. However, I could do the very same thing with a Linux PC (you know, a PS3) without much issue. In fact, while typing this, I used Chef to deploy a 256MB VM running Lubuntu 13.04. :)
so, I'm not sure what Very Long Instruction Word being implemented in the A10 cores has to do with whether or not I understand basic arithmetic, so I'm going to assume you don't have any information on that, and will disregard that part of your grandparent post accordingly.
I'll take your silence about how the A10 is a much faster CPU than the low-power equivalent in the XBO/PS4 as agreement to these statements. Seems all we're doing is haggling over how much faster the GPU(s) in this unit are compared to the A10. I haven't found anything on AMD's site explaining these cores. I'd ask you to point me toward some documentation, but I expect you to return with an ad hominem again.
I'll also take your silence about how much more efficient linux can be with 256MB of RAM than windows as your agreement to these facts.
Still looking forward to any Jaguar-related documentation that you can find on AMD's site that covers my questions. thanks in advance.
Sony PS4 has a better CPU and GPU