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Machiavellian on 30 June 2013
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ethomaz said:

Machiavellian said:

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.

The Microsoft techs said they can get 133GB/s with alpha transparency blending operations to the source (dev)... the source (dev) didn't make any test.

Here is a quote from that part of the article.  After reading it again, I actually do not know if this was from MS tech or a developer as its not clear which one in this paragraph

So how could Microsoft's own internal tech teams have underestimated the capabilities of its own hardware by such a wide margin? Well, according to sources who have been briefed by Microsoft, the original bandwidth claim derives from a pretty basic calculation - 128 bytes per block multiplied by the GPU speed of 800MHz offers up the previous max throughput of 102.4GB/s. It's believed that this calculation remains true for separate read/write operations from and to the ESRAM. However, with near-final production silicon, Microsoft techs have found that the hardware is capable of reading and writingsimultaneously. Apparently, there are spare processing cycle "holes" that can be utilised for additional operations. Theoretical peak performance is one thing, but in real-life scenarios it's believed that 133GB/s throughput has been achieved with alpha transparency blending operations (FP16 x4).

Eithe way it sounds more like info to Devs then some PR stunt from some marketing department on trying to deflect negative perception of the X1 on the sly.  If anything, MS would like for all info to just fade away as it keeps debates up and going which doesn't win them any favors.  I am sure MS would like to keep things about the games and their features then go into hardware stuff where most people do not understand anything that is going on and only speculation and misinformation exist.