What do you want from the XBOX 720?

[Squilliam]

nightsurge said:

Megadude said:

Squilliam said:

What do I want the Xbox Evolution to be?

I want to get rid of slow loading optical drives, Blu Ray tops out at 36MB/Sec @ 8 speed, so no loading times and no streaming hiccups and replace that with flash media and downloads where developers can use 120MB+ per second transfer time with lower latency.

I want the console to be able to hibernate so when im finished playing a game I can turn it off, but when I turn it back on I can jump straight back into the game in under 30 seconds where I was previously.

I want the hardware to be quiet and cool with about 150W power usage from the console at launch.

I want the GPU to be something absolutely amazing, I want it to prove that the Cell is a dead end architecture and that GPUs are the true rulers of stream computing and I want it to be extremely powerful with over 2Tflops of floating point performance.

I want the system architecture to be so efficient that it makes the PC architecture look clunky and inefficient. I want the CPU/GPU to be combined on the same die so the GPU can be used how its specialised and feed back the physics/animation data back into the CPU with extremely low latency.

I want the interface method whatever they decide to use make absolute sense from the moment I pick it up, so I will know instantly that they have a winner.

I want the console itself to be simple and I want to be able to buy one for $250-$300 for the basic Arcade model.

I don't want too much.

 

Ugh everything you want for the 720 seems to always have to focus on 1uping the PS3. Aren't we tired of these console clones? I'd like to see somthing new and innovative for the 720 and have MS use their power and influence to get the support it deserves. 

And a bluray drive will be fine. By 2012 I bet they could slap a pretty fast one in there for fairly cheap and 1tb blurays should be coming out by then. Flash drives? 

But also this system will need to be able to play Crysis on MAXIMUM settings at 60 FPS before people would consider juming to it en mass.

 

I'd get one, if the price was right.

Do you always make a 360 topic somehow related to the PS3?  If anything this would be like 7-uping the PS3 because this would be leaps ahead.  They already have 64GB and 128GB flash drives, which for games would truly show Flash memory's advantage in transfer rates.

Also, a recent update released about a week ago said that SSD prices will likely drop by half in the next year, so by 2012 I see no reason not to use a blazing fast SSD in the "NextBox".  Sure they can throw in a Blu-Ray drive if Blu-Ray is the mass market media format by then, but if you are using a Blu-Ray drive you can't fully install games to the hard drive because the size would be too big.  Flash drives would be simple, small, easy to swap, and blazing fast read speeds with 0 noise because there is no optical drive to spin.

Then, as one analyst said on ExtremeTech, it would be very simple for MS to create a CPU that has 6 cores and 12 threads (basically just like cramming 2 Xenon's together) or 12 cores and 24 threads, because this would exponentially increase the power of the system, ensure it is still very familiar and have the least learning curve (all developers currently use programming that scales to "n" number of threads anyway), and would make backwards compatibility with Xbox 360 a breeze.

And lastly just use a newer, more powerful GPU.  Quieter and more efficient cooling, and voila a perfect and powerful system with a max price of about $400 to build, yet easily 2-4x as powerful as the 360, which would be more than capable of playing Crysis at Enthusiast at 60FPS.  Really the only thing holding the 360 back from playing Crysis right now is the GPU, and even then the CryEngine 3 will look almost as good as Crysis and will run on 360/PS3 just fine.

Wafer and die cost projections

The forecasts discussed in the preceding sections combined with additional factors not discussed here lead us to forecast wafer and die costs. For 22 nm linewidths produced on 300 mm wafers in 2012, we forecast a wafer cost of ~$9000, resulting in a quadruple-core Pentium 4t die cost of ~$16. For 22 nm linewidths produced on 450 mm wafers in 2012, we forecast a wafer cost of ~$13,000, resulting in a quadruple-core Pentium 4t die cost of ~$10.

http://www.semiconductor.net/article/CA632496.html

The same applies for Flash as well, the cost would drop ~40% per chip on top of the increases in production due to switching to 34nm and then 2xnm flash and beyond.

The advantage with using an SSD format on a console is that they don't have to fit a controller on the actual flash game. Its cheaper to integrate the flash controller inside the console itself. Furthermore they can package the console smaller, save the $20 cost on the optical drive, save $35 on not having to use a standardised HDD, save $5 on warranty repairs on average and make money on the hardware at launch to offset the increased cost of media.

The RV740on 40nm is already 3-4* more powerful than the Xenos. Its also about the same thermals as well and about the same size. By next year they will be able to install a GPU which is alone more than 5* more powerful on the same die area used now on consoles which cost $200. They could easily sell the Arcade for $250 sans HDD/Optical drive and make $50 profit on the unit itself and sell the Premium for $350 with a large high speed/capacity HDD and again make a profit on the unit itself.