elektranine said:
Wow so much speculation/fantasy right there... Almost don't know where to begin: 12gb DDR4 -> the xbone uses ddr3 so switching to ddr4 is pretty much out of the question without a complete motherborard redesign along with new northbridge/southbridge chips. Also they would lose double data rate making the memory alot slower as 12gb is not a power of 2. Note: It cost MS over $1 billion USD to redesign the Xbox 360 from 256mb ddr2 to just 512mb ddr2. Not going to happen realistically. 128 Mb Edram -> Would require a complete redesgn of the xbone's APU. Not to mention that the xbone's 32 MB esram is the single most expensive part driving up the cost of manufacturing the box, So increasing the esram size to 128mb would be pretty much impossible from an ecomonic standpoint, and the performance benefits from doing so would pretty much nil. Also note that the esram makes up nearly 50% of the xbone's apu die size, one of the reasons for the xbone's large cooling fan, making it so large. If they throw in esram 4x the size, even with process shrinking, that would result in a even larger die size with even lower yield rates. The xbone's APU is known to have below industry standard yield rates specifically because of the esram being thrown in so increasing the esram would be a crazy design decision to do. 2x Better gpu -> Again would require a complete redesign of the APU. How would you double the gpu terraflops and also 4x the esram without exponentially increasing the APU die size and along with that the heat generated, power required, and lowering the yield. Heck this would also require updating the PSU design as well. You also ignore the fact that industry has not kept up with moore's law so all of this would be impossible. With all that additional heat generated they would need a liquid cooling solution, far too expensive. overclocked CPU -> This is the only thing that is sort of possible had they not already overclocked the APU in the first place. You can't just overclock the cpu by itself, since its a APU package you have to also overclock the GPU and memory controller as well. They've already done this in attempt to reduce PS4's performance lead but it has proved to be not very efficient as doing so increased the power consumption and heat generated, why they needed such a large cooling system. So doing this again would probloble not be done. So all of this is done in a years time and is announced before the end of the year. I think not. Not unless you expect to pay $1200 for an Xbox.
Also this assertion that Playstation is copying MS needs to stop as the facts and history do not support that at all. |
Already discussed the copying thing. That's over.
As for the rest of your post. Yes it is my own speculation. Phil Spencer was the one that announced they are looking at Upgradeable Xbox rather than a big upgrade every 7 years. Also he pointed to the Phone market in this regard. So by my speculation I would guess at something like every 3 years. So 2016 as I said above. then 2019 maybe 16 gb ram, 2 x generational gpu over the 2016 model, a newer CPU rather than just overcooking. Etc.
That was their words. And I guarantee it wont be anywhere over £399. They made it clear they wanted smaller upgrades more frequent as opposed to 1 big one every start of gen. With games scaling up or down in visuals depending on which version you have. He also made it very clear they would not do add on hardware as upgrades. So with all said and done I think my 3 years guess would be about right.
