starcraft said:
Three years from now and a long way from this generation's beginnings already, you better hope 60FPS is the standard. Tell me Squilliam. Do you believe that the next set of consoles will follow tradition and be expensive whilst maintaining a power advantage over the best PC's (for a month or two) of the day? Or do you think they will go the Wii route and minimise power to minimise price?
|
I think that the next generation hardware will be defined by 'how' it is intended to be used.
For the next generation of consoles I predict will be a continuation of the a mainstream interface ideal which was championed by the Wii. But they will take the whole idea to the next level and they will use the new interface to leverage their multimedia capabilities as well. For this they will move beyond the Wiis movement and pointer interface and they will likely incorporate a pair of cameras/with microphones to allow the console to read both movement and 3d gestures, facial expression and respond to verbal commands, furthermore its likely they will all be investigating full 3d stereoscopy or virtual reality as a possibility for the next generation. The main issue is to capture the publics imagination like the Wii has done whilst taking the whole interface between consumer and console to the next level.
On the multimedia side they will likely carry the torch further by attempting to make the console into even more a digital hub than before. Therefore functions such as digital TV recording, direct download of tvs/games/movies, will be all included and taken a step beyond the current capabilities. I believe that they will try to integrate this functionality within as many devices as possible. As the interface technologies can be leveraged by other consumer electronics devices such as Cable tv/Satelite decoders and TVs especially I would consider it a distinct possibility that the Xbox 360 or 720 might soon find its way into a cable box near you. If you consider how you "talk" to your TV with a remote, wouldn't an open hand approach be even better if you could just talk or gesture at your tv to change the channel? They will still use an SKU system which allows different functionality at different price levels and I wouldn't be surprised if the top Xbox 720 SKU has Windows 7 installed on release.
The ideal console would likely try to be as simple as possible from the beginning. The Xbox 360 has a chipset, GPU, ED Ram, CPU, 8 ram chips and a few other assorted chips. I would expect them to attempt to reduce that complexity as much as possible and a single multi-chip module sounds just about perfect to fit this criteria. If they can incorporate the GPU with fast cache (ED ram/equivelent), CPU and fewer ram chips into the design they would vastly simplify the layout/power regulation equipment on the motherboard. Furthermore a design like Larrabee would take the unified Ram concept further by giving developers one pool of resources to allocate as they see fit. Lastly they would likely choose a design which was easy to develop for so the games can get up to speed relatively quickly with a lineage going forward so the console can maintain a consistance architecture from generation to generation. X86 is an example of an architecture which has been maintained for over 20 years.
In terms of performance I would expect they would go for a realistic target of between 100-150w TDP for the console at launch rather than the current generation which had 200w consoles on release and thats too much IMO. So the generational differences will be somewhere between the Wii and the Xbox 360 is compared to the last generation. This is dictated more by the interface requirements than anything else. Voice recognition/Motion capture via optics would require a lot of CPU cycles. So to answer your question, they won't be as powerful as the high end PCs of the day but they won't have to be as the consoles will dictate the games which can be played on those high end PCs anyway. So we're looking at consoles which will be 3-4x more powerful than the top of this current generation.
Tease.
