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Forums - Gaming Discussion - Optical drives need to be kicked to the curb! Flash is the next-gen future.

NJ5 on 16 December 2008

Flash is currently produced on the 50nm process node. At 30nm a 10mm by 10mm area of flash will likely be up 2.5* as dense. So if you had 1gb on that flash, you would now have 2.5gb. Intels 32nm process looks to be coming on stream by the end of 2009, so it does follow that they could easily start producing flash at the 22nm and fit over 4* as many transistors in the same area of silicon. So that flash you can buy on Newegg for $5 which contains 4gb of storage, will easily hold 4x that quantity by the time the next generation consoles are being produced.


$5 for 16 GB is your estimate, I think that's still too much. Probably 5-10 times more expensive than optical media. You don't need to buy many games to cancel out the savings on the optical drive.

I mentioned HDDs as they will become a required part of the console kit as optical drives simply are not fast enough to deliver the content a more modern console will require in a timely manner.


Why? By the time the next generation comes, 4x or 8x Blu-Ray drives will be affordable, delivering much higher transfer speeds than PS3/360 optical drives. The only reason why a HDD may be needed is for downloadable content.

 



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NJ5 on 16 December 2008

Another idea: if next-gen games really require caching of data to a medium with higher throughput and lower latency, just use those 5 dollars to add a few GB of flash memory to the console itself. Then while the player is watching the intro videos and menu screens there's plenty of time to cache some content into that memory ;)

Look, I'd love it if flash memory was affordable enough to make your predictions a reality. I just don't think it will happen in time for the next generation.

 



My Mario Kart Wii friend code: 2707-1866-0957

Squilliam on 16 December 2008
NJ5 said:

Flash is currently produced on the 50nm process node. At 30nm a 10mm by 10mm area of flash will likely be up 2.5* as dense. So if you had 1gb on that flash, you would now have 2.5gb. Intels 32nm process looks to be coming on stream by the end of 2009, so it does follow that they could easily start producing flash at the 22nm and fit over 4* as many transistors in the same area of silicon. So that flash you can buy on Newegg for $5 which contains 4gb of storage, will easily hold 4x that quantity by the time the next generation consoles are being produced.


$5 for 16 GB is your estimate, I think that's still too much. Probably 5-10 times more expensive than optical media. You don't need to buy many games to cancel out the savings on the optical drive.

I mentioned HDDs as they will become a required part of the console kit as optical drives simply are not fast enough to deliver the content a more modern console will require in a timely manner.


Why? By the time the next generation comes, 4x or 8x Blu-Ray drives will be affordable, delivering much higher transfer speeds than PS3/360 optical drives. The only reason why a HDD may be needed is for downloadable content.

 

$5 is my estimate for retail flash like SD cards. You wouldn't base your estimates on the viability of Blu Ray based on writeable media you can buy online would you? But in reality Blu Ray or DVD costs a publisher about $7 per disk if you include royalties.

Essentially I believe that consoles need to use a more "console-like" architecture in the future to be competitive and deliver the performance people need. By using slower media like Blu Ray it requires a console to essentially have a similar architecture as a standard personal computer because the challenges are the same. You have a slow data delivery so the information must be cached on much larger stores of ram.

This article explains it better if you haven't seen it: http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/ps2vspc.ars

 



Tease.

NJ5 on 16 December 2008

$5 is my estimate for retail flash like SD cards. You wouldn't base your estimates on the viability of Blu Ray based on writeable media you can buy online would you? But in reality Blu Ray or DVD costs a publisher about $7 per disk if you include royalties.


We have to make equal comparisons. What are those royalties you're talking about? You mean console licensing royalties? The disc royalties themselves shouldn't cost anywhere near that.

You're right about retail/wholesale prices, I was just going from your numbers since I haven't seen better data.

Essentially I believe that consoles need to use a more "console-like" architecture in the future to be competitive and deliver the performance people need. By using slower media like Blu Ray it requires a console to essentially have a similar architecture as a standard personal computer because the challenges are the same. You have a slow data delivery so the information must be cached on much larger stores of ram.


The 360 and the Wii are doing fine without using HDD for caching. Only the PS3 has problems with mandatory installs. I don't see a reason to believe these problems will be present with 4x/8x Blu-Ray drives transferring data at 18-36 MB/s.

 



My Mario Kart Wii friend code: 2707-1866-0957

The Anarchyz on 16 December 2008
Squilliam said:
@The Anarchyz

Flash based media doesn't have to be as cheap as optical disks to be effective. Because the Xbox 360 can only store 6.8GB of data per disk they could easily get away with 8gb sized flash drives for media. There are other compelling reasons for going with flash, significant compelling reasons. A lot of games at the start of the next generation will be simple ports of the current generation and 6.8GBs is the standard which Microsoft has disctated to the industry through their success.

Take the Xbox 360, it comes without a HDD. Effective strategy? Yes its currenty able to be sold for $200 because it doesn't have the fixed cost of the HDD constantly pushing the price up. Take that mindset one further and having an SKU without HDD or Optical drive with a minimum of flash for saved games starts to make perfect sense.

As for the price of the media, they could easily charge $5 more next generation for games, $4/1 split between the console manufacturer and retailer to pay for the extra cost of the media if they have to. To be quite frank really, the console manufacturing costs are far too high at the moment to be tenable. So much money is spent on hardware just to make up for the failings of the optical media.

They won't get away next-gen with 8 GB, look at Lost Odyssey, it comes in 4 discs, and Final Fantasy XIII will come to them in probably the same or more amount, the mayority of games this gen could fit in a single DVD9 because last gen a few games took the full disc (Ninty had 1.5 GB, PS2 and Xbox used 2 to 4 GB most of the time), i think that for them to be safe next generation they need to have 16 to 32 GB media, especially if they want to do 1080p...

You said so, it comes without an HDD in the Arcade Edition, but it comes with an optical drive, and do you think that they cannot do the same next-gen? And tell that extra-charge to 3rd party publishers, part of the 360 success is 3rd party games, PS3 is getting them also, and Wii is starting to see them, i don't think that they are willing to alienate them...

Like i said, i'm for flash media because of all the benefits it brings, but i don't see it ready next-gen, the one after that is more possible...



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Feylic on 16 December 2008
Squilliam said:
@The Anarchyz

Flash based media doesn't have to be as cheap as optical disks to be effective. Because the Xbox 360 can only store 6.8GB of data per disk they could easily get away with 8gb sized flash drives for media. There are other compelling reasons for going with flash, significant compelling reasons. A lot of games at the start of the next generation will be simple ports of the current generation and 6.8GBs is the standard which Microsoft has disctated to the industry through their success.

Take the Xbox 360, it comes without a HDD. Effective strategy? Yes its currenty able to be sold for $200 because it doesn't have the fixed cost of the HDD constantly pushing the price up. Take that mindset one further and having an SKU without HDD or Optical drive with a minimum of flash for saved games starts to make perfect sense.

As for the price of the media, they could easily charge $5 more next generation for games, $4/1 split between the console manufacturer and retailer to pay for the extra cost of the media if they have to. To be quite frank really, the console manufacturing costs are far too high at the moment to be tenable. So much money is spent on hardware just to make up for the failings of the optical media.

Do HDD's really drive the price up that much? you realize that 20gigs doesn't actually cost what MS makes you pay..

 



Squilliam on 16 December 2008
The Anarchyz said:
Squilliam said:
@The Anarchyz

Flash based media doesn't have to be as cheap as optical disks to be effective. Because the Xbox 360 can only store 6.8GB of data per disk they could easily get away with 8gb sized flash drives for media. There are other compelling reasons for going with flash, significant compelling reasons. A lot of games at the start of the next generation will be simple ports of the current generation and 6.8GBs is the standard which Microsoft has disctated to the industry through their success.

Take the Xbox 360, it comes without a HDD. Effective strategy? Yes its currenty able to be sold for $200 because it doesn't have the fixed cost of the HDD constantly pushing the price up. Take that mindset one further and having an SKU without HDD or Optical drive with a minimum of flash for saved games starts to make perfect sense.

As for the price of the media, they could easily charge $5 more next generation for games, $4/1 split between the console manufacturer and retailer to pay for the extra cost of the media if they have to. To be quite frank really, the console manufacturing costs are far too high at the moment to be tenable. So much money is spent on hardware just to make up for the failings of the optical media.

They won't get away next-gen with 8 GB, look at Lost Odyssey, it comes in 4 discs, and Final Fantasy XIII will come to them in probably the same or more amount, the mayority of games this gen could fit in a single DVD9 because last gen a few games took the full disc (Ninty had 1.5 GB, PS2 and Xbox used 2 to 4 GB most of the time), i think that for them to be safe next generation they need to have 16 to 32 GB media, especially if they want to do 1080p...

You said so, it comes without an HDD in the Arcade Edition, but it comes with an optical drive, and do you think that they cannot do the same next-gen? And tell that extra-charge to 3rd party publishers, part of the 360 success is 3rd party games, PS3 is getting them also, and Wii is starting to see them, i don't think that they are willing to alienate them...

Like i said, i'm for flash media because of all the benefits it brings, but i don't see it ready next-gen, the one after that is more possible...

Many games at the start of this generation on the Xbox 360 used less than 4GB of data on the disc. Its not that hard to imagine they could start the generation releasing games on 8/16gb media, then move to 12/24, then move to 16/32/48, then move to 20/40/60, then move to 24/48/72 by the end of the generation. Just increase the size of the media once a year. Besides this JRPGs are a niche anyway, they are practically irrelevent now that Japan doesn't care for consoles and Westerners don't care all that much for JRPGs.

 

 



Tease.

Squilliam on 16 December 2008
Feylic said:

Do HDD's really drive the price up that much? you realize that 20gigs doesn't actually cost what MS makes you pay..

 

Go to New-egg, and tell me what the minimum price for the drives are. Theres a mechanical floor in the price which they cannot go below. Just as drives are ~$20 always

 



Tease.

Squilliam on 16 December 2008
NJ5 said:

$5 is my estimate for retail flash like SD cards. You wouldn't base your estimates on the viability of Blu Ray based on writeable media you can buy online would you? But in reality Blu Ray or DVD costs a publisher about $7 per disk if you include royalties.


We have to make equal comparisons. What are those royalties you're talking about? You mean console licensing royalties? The disc royalties themselves shouldn't cost anywhere near that.

You're right about retail/wholesale prices, I was just going from your numbers since I haven't seen better data.

Essentially I believe that consoles need to use a more "console-like" architecture in the future to be competitive and deliver the performance people need. By using slower media like Blu Ray it requires a console to essentially have a similar architecture as a standard personal computer because the challenges are the same. You have a slow data delivery so the information must be cached on much larger stores of ram.


The 360 and the Wii are doing fine without using HDD for caching. Only the PS3 has problems with mandatory installs. I don't see a reason to believe these problems will be present with 4x/8x Blu-Ray drives transferring data at 18-36 MB/s.

 

The issue I have with using a HDD is simplicity and cost. Fast flash based media will simplicity to consoles and Nintendo especially seem very interested in going down that route. Nintendo doesn't care about movie playback, and this generation has shown it isn't a significant issue and it will be even less of an issue next generation. With a 4x or 8x Blu Ray and 4x the memory, could they get away with using an optical drive as easily? With patches etc becoming more important, having a SSD could alleviate the issue entirely.

 



Tease.

Feylic on 16 December 2008

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136195

thats an 80GB for $36, a company such as sony, or microsoft could get those for less. I don't see that as driving up the price, especially when the hardrives were only 20GB, or 60GB.