Actually thats not correct.  Its Kinect, snap OS and probably anything else done outside of the main game thread like recording and editing video Skype calling with multiple people you name it.  I know people saw kinect and just ignored the other parts but lets not blind ourselves to the bigger picture.

Its interesting that no one on GAF trust this guy because if you read the stuff he has reported, he leaves the opinion part out and just give the details or ask the questions.  This article is a prime example.  No opinion parts really, just questions and letting the engineers tell their story.  I find the article a very interesting read since it gives a good understanding of MS design decisions.

Not sure if you are reading the same article.  It appears they know exactly what they built.  What they probably do not know is how important certain features will be for certain games.  Some games probably work best with no Snap, OS, Recording features, running multiple apps or kinect, so giving that power back to developers is a sound stragety.  I am sure that Sony will be doing the same thing.  The PS4 will probably be doing things not game related and Sony will be adjusting resources as time goes on determining which is important and what not based on the game.

Microsoft's hypervisor is capable of offering dynamically allocated resources. There was a discussion of this quite some time ago when it was first revealed that the Xbox One would be split between 3GB and 5GB.

With the Hypervisor OS capable of scaling resources available to one or the other and having hard stop limits, it means that you could allow the Apps VM to scale lower than the 3GB hard limit, and the Games VM to scale larger than the 5GB.

And despite what people think (i.e. believe) you can have an application that scales to available memory. Microsoft SQL Server does this today. SQL Server consumes 100% of available physical memory and then relinquishes it as the systems needs change. Open up the event viewer on a SQL Server server, and the SQL Server has that much less memory to use.

The Apps VM may not use anywhere near the 3GB of memory, and CPU and GPU cores assigned to it when a game is running full screen. I don't think Kinect is a target, just he's pointing out that 10% of the GPU resources are assigned to Kinect when a game may not be utilizing any functionality where the GPU is necessary (i.e. they support voice commands).

Did not read your comment before I posted, but I agree.  I think Microsoft is talking about dynamically scaling the resources of the Apps VM to provide more resources to the Games VM. 

With the Hypervisor OS, Microsoft can allow the VMs to be scaled on the fly based on load and need rather than a fixed amount.  

As I always said, system performance and specs have no direct relation!

So Xbone is even more weaker than the specs suggest lol.

The increase in clock is more for increase the 16 ROPs power than the GPU performance... Xbone lacks in specs and that can't be overcome into optimizations or tricks.

And PS4 didn't use GPU for nothing of the OS... only CPU.

BTW the rumors about OS reservation of system resources was true.

Devs may not even need the 10% of reserved GPU power as they become more familiar with the system, so this sounds like a lengthy explanation of a non-issue. Or it's a means to keep the gap small between multiplat games in the initial years of the Xbox One.

They need... right now every bit of GFLOPS that MS can release for developer is welcome... the system is weak so even a 6% increase in clock make a difference.

The difference today is 1.18TF vs. 1.84TF.

That's big... people says specs doesn't matter but no developer can make 1.18TF run better than 1.84TF.

This article just shows all the issues with MS system... low RAW power, low ROPs, less ACE/Queue, Kinect/OS holding game performance, etc.