freedquaker said:
The main reasons why there are two OSes operating at the same time on XB1, for example, are a) To be able to run regular apps and games at the same time with full multi-tasking, and without each system interfering with the other b) To be able to write closer to the metal with games, with a stripped down games focused OS. c) Having the fully fledged OS for apps, but without compromising the games performance. So basically the XB1 is running two OSes (or somewhat very low level Virtual Machines) at the same time. This is an incredible enterprise! But the big downside is the memory requirements, and disc access.
PS4, on the other hand, initially wanted to go with much smaller and less ambitious goal in multi-tasking. The games would run in their own protected and low level environment, while the apps would be handled by the OS separately. On the other hand, the additional RAM brought a lot more possibilities to Sony. I, honestly, don't know much about their implementations at this stage, and I am sure, PS4 would be perfectly fine 5.5-6 GB of memory as of this moment, and the remaining memory seems totally unused (at the moment).However, Sony will undoubtedly utilize this in the future, some of the possibilities are... a) Additional simultaneous apps, features... b) VR, c) PS Now d) Emulation e) PS Vita related f) Release some of this memory back to developers g) GPGPU related etc... |
I agree with that, lot of features could be added, and that's for technical reason they will use memory. But more generally speaking, and I think you understand that, there is mutual impact between memory evolution and applications evolution. Applications grow bigger, they add more feature that requires more memory, that's the technical reason for more memory... but also adding more memory create new opportunities to create applications and features not even though to date, and does not yet represent a real technical reason.
There were a shift for example in development when we come to the point that memory quantity was big enough to make micro management not necessary in most developments (ie outside embedded, OS, and games) and allowed to use memory heavy consumer language like java. But applications grew so big and wide that we now have in memory database that use immense quantity of memory and some memory expiration management... For just one website I worked on, even ssd was not fast enough for data loading and we had in memory disk... application was Gb of memory with data cache... and we had in memory database for some data. The more you have memory, the less you care using a lot of it, and the more you need, that's the path that could lead to a lot more memory in PS5 , including OS/feature side. Or not, if we really reached a maximum... but I'm yet to see it after 20 years in computing.
I'd like to clarify a little more about OS and features. So far for computers, there is the OS and applications (including games), that shares the same memory. The user is expected to have enough memory or close some applications to free some memory to run the OS and the game he want. He can add memory if it's still no enough. And there is most of the time disk swap to be able to handle more memory than physical memory (trade off is that the computer become very slow). The OS memory is not a memory reserved at start, it's really at realtime what the OS is using, exactly the same way the applications use memory.
So far on console, we have a clear different paradigm. Games have a guaranteed and fixed amount of memory. OS will reserve from start the memory decided and run itself and features inside (using everything or not). So OS memory reservation can be a lot bigger than the OS memory footprint we can measure on computers.