Volition: ‘We deal with limitations on a daily basis’ with PS3 | Xbox 360

[SvennoJ]

Kynes said:

mrstickball said:

Kynes said:

mrstickball said:

Can you link me to where the original Xbox had 128MB of ram? The official technical specs have it listed at 64MB. I know some people upgraded, but the stock version only had 64, AFAIK.

It had 64MB of ram, but in 128 mbit (16 MB) chips, with 4 chips for a 128 bits channel. 360 has 8 chips, each 64 MB (512 mbit) , for a total of 512 MB in a 256 bits configuration. Each chip has a 32 bits channel.

Ah, I see. At any rate, though, one should still assume that due to Moore's law, we should see a significant increase from last generation. Moore's law is doubling every 18 months, give or take. 6 years would equal 8 doublings, which should mean a pretty notable increase.

Foundries haven't been capable lately to keep pace with the Moore's law. I think  2-4 GB is a reasonable number.

It's slowing down though, there are limits. Otherwise we would have 12 to 16 ghz processors already and 60k rpm hdds. I also doubt the next hardware is going to have 24 processor cores, or 64 cell spus.

Memory and hdd size can keep pace, but it's no use it you can't process it all fast enough. Memory bandwidth is the biggest problem, get the data from/to the right core(s) fast enough.

Graphics cards can keep pace since they take the biggest advantage of parallel processing. Looking at the gtx 590, they're up to 1024 cores now, but still no more then 1.2ghz processor speed. And 365W power consumption! Run that in quad sli and it's like running the microwave on high continuously lol.

Developers already have trouble to split their code into taking advantage of 3 cores or 6 spus. Splitting the code up to use 24 cores will require a new way of making games.

Edit: quad config 'only' takes 730W, just 2 cards. It's already 2 cards together apparently.