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Adinnieken on 23 May 2013
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KBG29 said:

I keep trying to figure out what MS did with XB0 that gives everyone the idea it is more capable than PS4 at multi-media. PS3 already had live TV and DVR capablilties with PlayTV and Nasne. It would only make sense that these same features would be present on PS4. Sony already talked about the PS4's ability to mulitask, and it seemed to be on par with what MS showed. 

From what I see both will offer;

Picture in picture multitasking
Instant pick up on Games/other medias

Can anyone pick out something that XB0 showed that Sony has not already mentioned or showed for PS4? All I can think of is Vocie control and gesture control. Is that what is making the difference? 

The way the Xbox One works is you have a very small, specialized OS that controls two virtual machines.  One of these virtual machines operates a specialized but general OS, where the Xbox One apps run.  This is a Windows 8 compatible VM.  The other virtual machine operates a specialized Xbox OS.  This is where the games run.

Because the games are running in one VM and the apps are running in another VM, there is no multi-tasking.  There also aren't resource walls.  The computing and memory capacity can be dynamically allocated to either VM as required.  The only OS that is running in a somewhat fixed set of resources is the HyperV OS that everything runs within.

It's unlikey that Sony has the capability to impliement a VM in much the same way.  Most likely they would have a host OS, with a virtual machine.  Because of this, the host OS would have a set amount of memory and CPU power it would require. 

When Microsoft demonstrated the Snap feature, for instance, what you were seeing was the presentation of the two virtual machines side-by-side. 

I kind of want to know more about the HyperV OS, and whether or not that actually is the OS that Xbox LIVE runs in or if Xbox LIVE runs in the Apps OS?  What Microsoft did was really cool, and it kind of shows off what they're possibly planning for the future with PCs.  That of a PC OS being a HyperV OS and having the cores essentially dynamically allocated based on resource needs of each VM.