Next Gen Tech (NGT): STORAGE

[Pemalite]

Intrinsic said:

But thats exactly my point though... and why I even listed the bandwith as 500MB/s.... in hindsight I should have put ~500MB/s. Thats because its really hard to find anything that averages that theoretical bandwith. Not just with SATA but anything for that matter. Hence why its called a theoretical limit.

If you wish to be factually accurate, you should have stated "Up-to" 600MB/s. Not 500MB/s.
Doesn't matter what you achieve in the real world.

Intrinsic said:

The cache thing seems like a great idea.... but wouldn't that just make the console more expensive to make. Or does that allow them cheap out on what kinda internal drive they would use? So maybe have something like 128GB/256GB internal cache over a PCIex4 lane?

Everything you add increases costs.

However... 8-16GB of TLC NAND is pretty cost effective these days, you wouldn't need 100GB+ of the stuff if you are only using it for caching.
Then that does allow them to use cheaper mechanical disks... And still likely come under the price of an M.2/NVMe drive.

Intrinsic said:

Oh, and that last point, wouldn't taht be kinda like the NS setup (or the embedded option in the OP)? Have some sort of embedded cache but all users connect a standard SATA drive to the console. The console will probably come with one anyways.

Not sure what you mean by "NS Setup".
The most accurate way of putting it is... An SSHD, but with the NAND not on the drive itself and capable of caching all drives.

Or an SSD Cache drive like the Sandisk Ready Cache/Corsair Accelerator/Intel Smart Response/Optane Memory.

shikamaru317 said:

 And considering it would take about 7-8 tflops just to pull off native 4K on PS4 quality graphics, that only leaves a spare 4-7 tflops to put toward graphical improvements, not exactly a huge improvement. Basically what I'm expecting for next-gen is Witcher 3 pre-downgrade graphics running at native 4K, maybe a bit better. Personally I'll be happy with that, though I'm sure some people won't. But it's better than letting PS4 and XB1 act like anchors on game development until 2022-23 imo. 

You can pull off 4k with less flops than that.
It really is a bullshit number, almost as useless as using "bits" to try and work out a consoles performance.

A Geforce 1080 @ 8 Teraflops can provide a better experience than Vega 64 @ 10 Teraflops.

The amount of flops doesn't tell us what a GPU's Fillrate, Geometry, Bandwidth capabilities and so on is... Which are also important for running games at 4k.

Intrinsic said:

Currently, the fastes consumer bluray drive is a 16x drive.... thats a theoretical peak of 72MB/s.

Even if by next gen that number doubles and they can afford to put that kinda drive in a console, it still won't be as good as what we can potentially get with even a sata 3 based drive solution. 

That Theoretical Peak is likely only achievable towards the outside of the disk as well.

Shadow1980 said:
Wouldn't better file compression and faster Blu-ray drives obviate the need for mandatory game installs? If so, then extremely large and fast hard drives wouldn't be necessary unless you're primarily buying digital.

Better file compression requires CPU time. So unless Microsoft/Sony invest in a dedicated hardware decompression block on the APU, then really good compression is highly unlikely outside of game developer made implementations. (I.E. iD software with Megatexturing.)

The other issue of optical disks is... Seek times. Mechanical drives not only have significantly higher transfer rates and capacities... But they can get to the information they require faster as well... Which once you start doing lots of random reads, is very important.

We need a new Next-Gen optical disk format.