Wii U vs PS4 vs Xbox One FULL SPECS (January 24, 2014)

[JEMC]

Sirius87 said:

JEMC said:

You mean something like Intel's Smart Response? Maybe with a small one, something like 30/32 GB to store texture or things like that, but it would still present problems, like NAND degradation.

Imho NAND degradation is pretty much a non issue in the consumer space. At the moment standard 25nm MLC-NAND (no need to go for TLC for such a small amount of storage) most of the time is rated to endure 3000 write cycles (and as you can see here: http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?271063-SSD-Write-Endurance-25nm-Vs-34nm some can withstand a lot more). Even if you go to something like 19nm in the near future this still will allow around 2000 cycles.

Assuming 32GB of NAND, 2000 P/E cycles  and a avarage write amplification of 3 (probably worse than what's encountered in real world) you can write 10GB of data each day for like 6 years. And who the hell installs a new game (or partial gamedata) with a size of 10GB each day?

 

I'm pretty sure that the PS720 won't have internal HDDs included, and you can just plug in your own external drives (but I'm assuming USB3 for PS720) and so both will have a small amount of NAND similar to the WiiU. How small the amount will be will depend on how they want to use it. If they allow mandatory installs to NAND than of course more will be needed (I'd go for a reserved swap area on the NAND but no real required installs). But you can also just go with a larger amount of DDR3 Ram to store more game data which is still a lot faster than NAND (initial load times of games may be longer in this case of course, as the data has to be written to the RAM at the start).

NAND problems will depend on how Microsoft and Sony decide to use it.

If they use it like WiiU or the PS3 superslim do, just for storage purposes, then it will be fine for most users.

But if they take the approach I said and use it to improve performance by installing games (or part of them), then they will have a problem unless they over provisioning a lot (something unlikely given that they will try to cut costs as much as possible), because game installs will take a lot of space, and the more games you play, more data will need to be installed. And we are talking about more than 10GB per game.

Also, those 2 or 3000 cycles you talk about are before NAND loses its capability to be written, but they will start to be slower a lot sooner than that, and thus performance will be affected. What will happen with the games coded to take advantage of the theorical speed of that NAND when the real speed is slower?

And then there is the "garbage" problem, which will also affect performance if they don't find a way to use TRIM or a good garbage collector.