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walsufnir on 05 June 2013
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DirtyP2002 said:
walsufnir said:
DirtyP2002 said:

I am not a tech-guy, so here is my question:

The Xbox One is powerful, but not the most powerful machine the world has ever seen. MS did not hire idiots for hardware engineering, why are there heating issues? When I see the Surface pro for example, it comes in a much smaller package with a i5 CPU, 4 GB RAM plus a lot of basic-stuff a tablet needs (Full HD screen, 128 GB storage, Bluetooth, WiFi, USB 3.0, speaker, 2 built in cameras, etc). All this in a 900g, 0.53" thin device.

So what exactly makes a console struggle, when there is WAY more space for the hardware and a big fan? Sure there is a disc-drive and a more powerful GPU, but why is this a problem these days? If you say a console is not a SoC: Why not? (I don't even know if it is)

As I said I am not a tech-guy at all and this might sound stupid, but it would still be cool if you could educate me. It is just strange that we get smaller devices getting more and more powerful and a much bigger non-portable device is getting problems.


"The Xbox One is powerful, but not the most powerful machine the world has ever seen. MS did not hire idiots for hardware engineering, why are there heating issues?"

 

Because they pack APU *and* esram *and* memory-controller into one package, that's why. Remember? 5 billion transistors... And no, it is not an soc: This would include the whole system on the chip but there are still other things "outside" the main-chip: RAM, SHAPE, north-bridge...

So why did MS go this way then?


Well, in constrast to some guy here who said that esram is ms' way to rival $ony, let's start from the beginning:

MS and $ony both began development years before. MS had quite a comfort situation - the hardware was quite easy to program for, rather cheap to build and they had, like always, good dev-tools while $ony had a dev-disaster with ps3 - complicated hardware, bottlenecks, unfinished dev-tools.

The problem is that MS thought "their" way is the right - they make some changes to hardware, keep their good dev-tools and offer more tv-/app-stuff.

Of course the hardware was a concern and they built esram to the chip because they knew of 3d-hardware and -software and knew that low-latency, high-bandwidth-memory will improve 3d-calculations. They also had in 360. You can't say they didn't put much effort in the system-design - the SHAPE-chip seems to be far more capable than any other competitor, freeing the APU completely from audio-processing. Also, the esram-ddr3-solution is not a bad one, just not as good as $ony's solution.

$ony had to improve almost everything from ps3 dev- and hardware-wise and made a bold move with using gddr5 - it was only luck that prices got so low that they can now include 8 gb gddr5-ram. But "Das Glück ist mit den Tüchtigen" :)

To judge the decisions now is easy - I think MS would have taken another path to develop the console which seems to be a problem by now also in terms of dev-tools. Some hinted that MS is not as ready as $ony is which doesn't mean they are worse, of course.

The thing with "all in one package is because of performance - if you include everything in one chip you don't have long delays for data and of course MS hopes that over a few years they can vastly improve cost, size and heat with this one package, allowing for a smaller console and less power-consumption.