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Machiavellian on 30 June 2013
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ethomaz said:

And the rumos begins or re-begins... from Reedit.

So this article at the top of /r/games sounds pretty rosy. They're claiming the esram on the XBO can actually push 192.0 GB/s. That sounds really great...

Except if we read the actual statement, it is this.

However, with near-final production silicon, Microsoft techs have found that the hardware is capable of reading and writing simultaneously. Apparently, there are spare processing cycle "holes" that can be utilised for additional operations.

No, they didn't wake up one morning and realize there was an extra data line in their memory module, so lets drill down to what that actually means.

Apparently, there are spare processing cycle "holes" that can be utilised for additional operations.

In other words, no, it isn't capable of bidirectional data transfer. Their trying to push through a few extra memory operations, but the it's still strictly read or write.

Now, look at the actual numbers. I have to give credit to R_K_M and Boreras for pointing this out. I'm just aggregating, so I'm going to direct quote.

If I am not mistaken, that just means that they lowered the clock from 800 to 750 and are using the bi-directonal bandwith number for marketing when everyone else is using the bandwith number in one direction. - R_K_M

you're right the numbers do match up perfectly for that (750 (GPU clock) * 128 (bus width)*2(read&write during same cycle) = 192.0 GB/s --- if it were 800 MHz you would get 204.8 GB/s) - Boreras

So we can basically confirm that cboat was correct. The numbers tell the truth. The esram has been downclocked, and Microsoft's PR department is trying to spin it as an increase in total bandwidth based on some cycle tricks that are probably being exaggerated.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1h9ix3/so_did_microsoft_just_spin_a_downclocked_esram/

I don't believe in downclock.... I believe in yields issues and that's what cboat said (he never said anything about downclock) but the numbers are wrong... the math don't compute and I will believe that the article is wrong with the numbers... if not then I need to begin to believe in downclock.

Downgrade or not... MS is trying to PR marketing bullshit again.

I still do not get why this is a MS PR marketing ploy.  It seems incredibly silly to believe someone in marketing is thinking that telling developers they have this extra bit of bandwidth will be the means to get this information out to the interweb were it will make some magical difference to people who will purchase the console.

In the grand scheme of things, this means absolutely nothing to consumers and instead means more to developers.  Why would MS BS people who are making games for their system just to make a few nerds believe the X1 has some secret magic sauce.  Developers will completely nix such a thing in the matter of days as they attempt to utilize the extra bandwidth so such PR Marketing sounds bogus to believe this is a marketing ploy.

Even in the article from Eurogamer it states the developer who was testing this out could only yield 133GBs.  So it does seem that developers are able to go beyond 102GBs but nowhere close to 196.  As time goes on, who knows maybe they will get to 156 or better.  I believe the key here is that there are a lot of speculation about pieces of hardware no one has any real clue how it works.

 

As to the cloud, if MS is sending that one belly up, spending almost a billion to get another datacenter up for X1 and Office 365 is a pretty expensive way to throw something away.