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exdeath on 22 May 2015
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Bofferbrauer said:
DanneSandin said:

Ok sounds reasonable. What do you think Nintendo should do then? What format would fit them if they wanna bring back cartridges? Seems like you know what ur talkin about

Some yet nonexisiting form factor.

If the portable console should read the same cartridges: Somewhat bigger than SD cards cards overall, but very different form ( think about GBA cartridges flattened to SD card thickness just as an example; such a broad format would allow more connectors on the cards and along with it, a higher transer rate). If not, a more classical cartridge could be used with more space for later extensions and more connectors for even more transfer speed, but at a higher production cost.

This would give Nintendo several advantages: Custom-made for their needs, full product control, and along with these, a physical copy protection as there are no readers for them exept the consoles and the Software Development Kits (that doesn't mean no other copy protection would be needed, it would just be another layer of protection).

@exdeath: It's true that the fastest SD cards also have a higher transfer speed than Blu-Ray discs, but these SDXC cards are also relatively expensive in production. That's why I said "for the most part". Also, a theoretical 20x Speed Blu-Ray drive would be just as fast.

In any case, these transfer speeds are very slow and not really on par with the needs of video games, where a 200+ MB/s Transfer speed would be very useful. For comparision: SATA III has a theoretical maximum of 750 MB/s, SATA-Express in the latest Intel-PCs almost reach 2GB/s, USB 3.0 theoretically could reach 625 MB/s, double that for the new 3.1 standard (USB however does loose quite a bit on their overhead), so 90 MB/s are ridicilously small to the capabilities of modern standards


SATA 6G is 550-600 MB sec in practice.  Address, interrupt, and control data are now headers and packets, eg, everything is data in a serial bus.  There is also 8/10 encoding of the data to keep in mind.

Yeah 90 MB/sec is nothing (I use 2.5 GB/sec SSD arrays and 10 gigabit Infiniband)  but its still 1000x faster than a disc when you start seeking.  Though it's probably not that important on a console where the game is built from ground up to stream sequentially off the media and not like a PC where theres lots of random I/O and misc. scanning and searching going on all the time.

Sata Express needs to be a thing faster.  SATA 6g is such a bottleneck and the only way to get around is it multiple channels.