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Forums - Gaming Discussion - Specs of Microsofts next XBox

Squilliam on 14 June 2009

I was just thinking about the Xbox 360 disc space. Developers cannot use the full space available on the Xbox 360 discs due to how they are formated. So essentially that means that every disc has probably got 1GB which could be used for Xbox 360+ specific code, so they could fit an entirely different game engine specific for an updated console without too much trouble. I wonder if that was intentional? Because it does make sense thinking about it in that context.



Tease.

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alephnull on 14 June 2009
Squilliam said:
alephnull said:
HappySqurriel said:
rafichamp said:
This might actually be true. Microsoft knows that the PS3 slim is coming, so they fix their bad architecture on the 360.

Yeah, no one likes the easy to develop for powerful architecture of the XBox 360 ...

The thing about Microsoft oriented 3rd party developers is that they will love any new thing Microsoft puts out. Last week a die hard, self labeled ".Net" (which is not a language) programmer suggested helpfully that I should implement my chromosomal analysis algorithm in ".Net" instead of C and FORTRAN as he does with every project I do.

I am convinced that if they took the cell, renamed it "Xenon II", all of those grumpy developers would be "super excited to be working on such a cutting edge architecture".

I guess Balmer really did mean it when he screamed 'developers' over and over until he sounded like a choked chicken.

Honestly, I believe this is their most valuble asset.



alephnull on 14 June 2009
Squilliam said:
alephnull said:
Squilliam said:
@ Shams whats inefficient about the current Xbox 360 architecture aside from not having enough ED-ram?


Cache coherency is inefficient.

I've heard of it as something that developers would like to have 'been different' but at the same time does it stand out as a big issue overall? From the surface it looks to me like a fairly well balanced system.

The architecture is extremely well balanced for a cache-coherent system (read: most architectures you are familar with). Three cores is generally considered the sweet spot in the literature -- i.e the point at which performance loss from bus and cache contention starts to outweigh any gain from the theoretical increase in FP-OPS. Not to mention the fact that each core has 2 sets of 128 SIMD registers compared to the cell PPE's 32. Though not as simple to get decent performance out of as so many seem to believe.

The problem is you have 6 potential threads all competing for main memory access via a single DMA controller and blugeoning the same 1MB of L2 cache run 1/2 clock speed. And since the whole point is to have a simple unified address space to make life easier for developers you have to address translations and take it from me, TLB misses are frequently of the main performance bottleneck and yet are probably one of the most subtle.



alephnull on 14 June 2009
NightAntilli said:


CPU:
If this is true, this CPU is gonna be VERY powerful.. People keep complaining the CPU of the X360 is not that strong, but that's simply not true. For games, general purpose computing is a big part of the calculations, while floating point is a small part, and the X360 CPU is based on general purpose, while the PS3 has only one general purpose core, and the other ones are floating point calculators, which means, if it wants to do general purpose, the calculations need to be emulated. And the 3 cores of the X360 can handle 6 threads in total, and if it's double, I guess they could do some wacky stuff with this...

Define "General purpose".



NeoRatt on 14 June 2009

As long as the new 360 is forwards and backwards compatible I don't see why people would have an issue... If you can still play all your games, and the future games on the existing 360's but this one gives you premeium graphics and processing bring it on!!!

I was wondering why in the Natal demo they made a point of saying every 360 existing today will be able to use Natal without an upgrade.



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Untamoi on 14 June 2009
Lord Flashheart said:
Steroid said:
Hisiru said:

That's why we have installations for some games. The Blu-Ray is slow and can't handle some games. People think that the Blu-Ray is one of the things that makes the ps3 an excelent console just because the Blu-Ray has a big space, but the truth is that we can have better performance with 3 DVDs. We will not find installations in some games like Uncharted, but no matter if Uncharted has better graphics than MGS4, without installation MGS4 would have problems.

Without a doubt we have good examples (Uncharted), but we also have bad examples. And if we have bad examples, the best thing that we can do is move forward and create another technology.

When is this vid from? 2006? It's been the same FUD for nearly 3 years now. You know that these arguments, cherrypicked from bluray's infancy don't apply nearly 2-3 years later. 

Like saying there is a fundemental flaw with the 360 that keeps the RROD from going away?
You have to put up with these sort of arguments.

Although you are ignoring the fact that current PC BR drives are already much faster than PS3's BR drive. Fastest BR drives on PC has 8X speed while PS3's drive is 2X so they are 4 times faster even now. No DVD drive is that fast actually in transfer speeds (seek times are faster in DVD though).



NightAntilli on 14 June 2009
alephnull said:
NightAntilli said:


CPU:
If this is true, this CPU is gonna be VERY powerful.. People keep complaining the CPU of the X360 is not that strong, but that's simply not true. For games, general purpose computing is a big part of the calculations, while floating point is a small part, and the X360 CPU is based on general purpose, while the PS3 has only one general purpose core, and the other ones are floating point calculators, which means, if it wants to do general purpose, the calculations need to be emulated. And the 3 cores of the X360 can handle 6 threads in total, and if it's double, I guess they could do some wacky stuff with this...

Define "General purpose".

Any instruction/calculation regarding loading, integer, branch, store etc.



Truth does not fear investigation

Loud_Hot_White_Box on 14 June 2009
Squilliam said:
Vashyo said:
Isn't this kinda like microsoft admiting it needs more powerful console to compete with ps3 technically? 360's release was rushed and they're rushing again if this console is gonna be as powerful/barely more powerful than PS3. Also will 3rd party developers only gonna satisfy making games which run well on the older version too or will they push the XBNatal to it's maximum restricting games from players with the older XB360?

Huh? Not really. Most people don't care about the difference and most people who appear to care are fanboys. Theres no advantage really having a slightly more powerful system, however there is an advantage with having a considerably more powerful system especially for Microsoft as they can leverage the PC/360 angle better and exclude the PS3 for reasons beyond the difficult PC/PS3 conversions if this upgrade rumour is somewhat legitimate at least. Furthermore theres the angle that the camera is already expensive so it means that current generation games can easily be retrofitted and the extra processing is shifted from the camera to the console.

If you think that an upgraded Xbox 360 would do anything less than be obviously and significantly more powerful than the PS3 you would have to be mistaken.

I don't know, PS3 is usually lead programming platform nowadays, and devs have said they even get more out of their 360 version doing it this way -- where as before, following MS recommendations designed to cripple PS3 versions, 360 versions even suffered a little.

And now the PS3 install base is pretty big, games are selling, and sales of everything will take off when price cuts / slim bundles occur.

Most devs won't give up sales to the PS3 install base.  It's an open question whether they'll jump at the chance to work that hard on the NextBox hardware when the rewards (install base) for it just aren't there.



Squilliam on 14 June 2009
alephnull said:

The architecture is extremely well balanced for a cache-coherent system (read: most architectures you are familar with). Three cores is generally considered the sweet spot in the literature -- i.e the point at which performance loss from bus and cache contention starts to outweigh any gain from the theoretical increase in FP-OPS. Not to mention the fact that each core has 2 sets of 128 SIMD registers compared to the cell PPE's 32. Though not as simple to get decent performance out of as so many seem to believe.

The problem is you have 6 potential threads all competing for main memory access via a single DMA controller and blugeoning the same 1MB of L2 cache run 1/2 clock speed. And since the whole point is to have a simple unified address space to make life easier for developers you have to address translations and take it from me, TLB misses are frequently of the main performance bottleneck and yet are probably one of the most subtle.

Doesn't the explicit DMA model of the Cell translate to improved performance here? I can't quite remember how to describe it, but from from what I have seen repeated thats what they do. It seems the L2 cache/DMA controller is one of the main reasons for the whole 'port code from PS3 -> Xbox 360' mantra thats been going on.



Tease.

Squilliam on 14 June 2009
Loud_Hot_White_Box said:
Squilliam said:

Huh? Not really. Most people don't care about the difference and most people who appear to care are fanboys. Theres no advantage really having a slightly more powerful system, however there is an advantage with having a considerably more powerful system especially for Microsoft as they can leverage the PC/360 angle better and exclude the PS3 for reasons beyond the difficult PC/PS3 conversions if this upgrade rumour is somewhat legitimate at least. Furthermore theres the angle that the camera is already expensive so it means that current generation games can easily be retrofitted and the extra processing is shifted from the camera to the console.

If you think that an upgraded Xbox 360 would do anything less than be obviously and significantly more powerful than the PS3 you would have to be mistaken.

I don't know, PS3 is usually lead programming platform nowadays, and devs have said they even get more out of their 360 version doing it this way -- where as before, following MS recommendations designed to cripple PS3 versions, 360 versions even suffered a little.

And now the PS3 install base is pretty big, games are selling, and sales of everything will take off when price cuts / slim bundles occur.

Most devs won't give up sales to the PS3 install base.  It's an open question whether they'll jump at the chance to work that hard on the NextBox hardware when the rewards (install base) for it just aren't there.

Developers seem to have no trouble giving up development on the Wii even though its weaker. Microsoft can get developers to jump to the next generation because it already exists on the PC. 10M consoles isn't much on their own, but 10M consoles and whatever PC sales they can get is pretty good. Just as the early Xbox 360 years were all PC/360, early nextbox years can easily be PC/nextbox. Furthermore they can leverage the promising studios in Eastern Europe who can only develop for the PC at this point by giving them an easy window to develop for consoles. Furthermore current developers for consoles can easily take advantage of extra performance with higher frame-rates, better multiplayer, improved visuals etc.



Tease.