i_p_freely said:
SvennoJ said:
Kynes said:
mrstickball said:
Kynes said:
mrstickball said:
Can you link me to where the original Xbox had 128MB of ram? The official technical specs have it listed at 64MB. I know some people upgraded, but the stock version only had 64, AFAIK.
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It had 64MB of ram, but in 128 mbit (16 MB) chips, with 4 chips for a 128 bits channel. 360 has 8 chips, each 64 MB (512 mbit) , for a total of 512 MB in a 256 bits configuration. Each chip has a 32 bits channel.
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Ah, I see. At any rate, though, one should still assume that due to Moore's law, we should see a significant increase from last generation. Moore's law is doubling every 18 months, give or take. 6 years would equal 8 doublings, which should mean a pretty notable increase.
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Foundries haven't been capable lately to keep pace with the Moore's law. I think 2-4 GB is a reasonable number.
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It's slowing down though, there are limits. Otherwise we would have 12 to 16 ghz processors already and 60k rpm hdds. I also doubt the next hardware is going to have 24 processor cores, or 64 cell spus.
Memory and hdd size can keep pace, but it's no use it you can't process it all fast enough. Memory bandwidth is the biggest problem, get the data from/to the right core(s) fast enough.
Graphics cards can keep pace since they take the biggest advantage of parallel processing. Looking at the gtx 590, they're up to 1024 cores now, but still no more then 1.2ghz processor speed. And 365W power consumption! Run that in quad sli and it's like running the microwave on high continuously lol.
Developers already have trouble to split their code into taking advantage of 3 cores or 6 spus. Splitting the code up to use 24 cores will require a new way of making games.
Edit: quad config 'only' takes 730W, just 2 cards. It's already 2 cards together apparently.
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I work for Intel and can tell you that Moore's law is NOT slowing down and there are no limits forseen for the next 5 years. And, in that time technology research will have progressed to find solutions to any limits. Moore's law has a lot more left in it.
Moore's law says that transistors will half in size every 2 years. It has nothing to do with GHz - although the 2 used to be interchangable until AMD started going for functionality (more cores) over speed and kicked Intels ass.
Anyway... on topic. Whatever about Microsoft, I dont think that Sony will have learned anything from the PS3 launch - look at the high specs of the NGP. The PS4 will be a beast with a powerfull processor, lots of RAM but a HDD - SSD is still too costly. It will be expensive too.
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That's great, I don't want it to slow down. But as a programmer I do know it's a hell of a lot more difficult to program efficiently for multiple cores/threads instead of running everything sequentially.
That won't stand in the way of better graphics, real time lod tesselation instead of storing multiple versions for each object will make things easier for programmers. Physics, smoke, particles, water, shadows, lighting will all see the biggest advantages. Memory hungry AI, speech recognition and language processing will probably see less of a jump. Hopefully sound won't be forgotton, 24bit 96khz sound samples with real time echo, reverb, flutter etc calculations based on level geometry and materials will be nice.
Microsoft won't risk rrod again, not another 250 watt machine at launch. Sony I don't know. Hopefully they go all out with SSD, I hate loading times. You're probably right though, a 1tb hdd console will sell better then a 64gb ssd console.
