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Microsoft's X-Box Specs Revealed
Some information about Microsoft's rumored X-Box console has been leaked. Features are said to include a DVD drive, a 56K modem, a windows derived OS, a 1GHz CPU, 64 MB memory and 4 GB of HD space. Nintendonext has the scoop. All that, a possible $149 price tag.
Other uses:
$149 kickass webserver.
$149 kickass Samba server.
$149 kickass MP3 jukebox (and mp3 encoder).
$149 kickass FTP server.
$149 kickass IRC server.
$149 kickass proxy server.
(This is assuming the machine's running some form of UNIX, as a headless Windows box is about as useful as a bag of mud.)
You get my point.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
"with 300MHz Celerons still at 75$ "
Where do you buy your CPUs? Perhaps you were talking Canadian or Australian dollars!
With that budget you could do much better:
Boxed Celeron 433 @ $71
http://www.ibuyer.net/sprodcat.html?cid =163
OEM Celeron 466 @ $78
http://www.ibuyer.net/sprodcat.html?cid =839
Even Microsoft can't take that much of a loss on the hardware. Yeah, you can take some loss and make it up with the licensing (Sony's done it for years with the PSX). But not that much. The chips alone are going to cost more than that, never mind the DVD drive and various other peripherals. Yeah, eventually the prices are going to drop, but by the time they drop to the point where the $175 price isn't outright suicidal, the gaming companies will be selling better systems for less money.
Remember the lesson Pippin taught us: computer companies should stick to computers, and let console companies take care of the console business. Sony seems to be the notable exception to this rule, but if I'm not mistaken they made the PSX before they got into the computer business. MS can't count on having Sony's kind of luck, particularly with that target price.
By the way, what're they going to call the OS, "Windows X"? How much more rip-off can you get? Thanks, but no thanks, M$; I want a console that doesn't bluescreen everytime I play.
I have. It takes some doing but when Windows get's seriusly messed up it will crash in safe mode. I guse you wold only see that if you repair broken Windows all the time. BTW : fdisk -> format -> setup fixes eaven those Windows setups that are bad enogh to crash in safe mode. So much for "hardware problems". ( Except one that had a genuine memory error and woldn't even run DOOM reliably. ( A 32 bit memory bug of some sort ).
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
That's the one thing they'll never do. For all his faults, Bill Gates knows that having unhindered development is the road to success. He's argued the point on many occasions, and from what I've heard, they plan to do the same for the X-Box. They'll just release the box, and a development kit and let anyone develop for it. No official submission, no licensing fees. Just find yourself a publisher and/or distribution deal and away you go. That is what's going to kill Sega, Sony and Nintendo, not the technical superiority of the box (in fact, they don't even need to be technically superior).
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Yep. PIII/Athlon are too big, too expensive, and do too much. A games console doesn't need one. What it needs is a good media processing chip. I'm going to go out on a limb here, and suggest they may be using a Nuon. It has all the attributes needed for a good games console, and in particular, should be priced very cheaply.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Never mind the "up to 1GHz" processor's speed, think of the box as a space heater. Think of the power supply.
Put the box under your desk in the wintertime to toast your toes.
Hey, the only thing that makes or breaks a console is the games. Specs don't count for anything (look at 3DO or the Jaguar) it's all in the games.
'Nature's got a way, brothers, of scraping the bowl'
Console games are NOT meant to be run on off the shelf parts, this thing /will/ flop. When you're playing games on your TV you want a dedicated graphics rendering engine and you just plain want speed and perty pictures. Now, with that out of the way let me say that the line /is/ starting to blur, but i don't know....the "X-Box" sounds an awfully lot like what it's name implies....a pipe dream.
;)
But that's just my opinion
Maybe they're experts at everything and that is what leads them to like Linux. I'm sure they think that they are. (like there's anybody at this site that doesn't think of themselves that way)
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I agree. $149 isn't the "real" price. First of all, We know that this product won't be on the market for a long time. Maybe even a year or 2. I think Microsoft is betting on the fact that those specs will be commodity parts by that time, and won't be expensive to use. 2nd, you know that Microsoft will have rebates, and MSN deals to lower the price. I think that that when it's out, it'll be closer to the $600 range. But after the rebates, promotional "coupons", and your 3 year contract to the MSN "gaming service", you'll be able to get it at the slick price of $149.
-Brent"up to 1 Gz" priced "as low as" $149
Those are the key words.
The low end model, $149, model will probably ship with a much slower CPU, 32 megs of RAM, and maybe a slower DVD drive...
Sega sells their boxes at a loss and makes up the difference quite nicely collecting royalties from developers. Microsofts got a hoard of cash, so they can absorb short term losses in order to push this thing out the door, if they wanted to.
But remember... When looking at computer ads, car ads, etc... "starting at" never means the model their displaying. It's the little brother to that model.
I was thinking the same thing. $149 is close to free... and we all know what it means to get a free pc... you have to pay for something.
But otherwise does this mean my game console could be infected by Word macro viruses?
I'd hardly think of a harddrive as an asset to a gaming console. What's it good for? An internet cache?
For a pure gaming machine I'd agree, however, who said this was going to only be a gaming machine? I'd say that Microsoft is more likely to go after the elusive set-top box market. It's where all the future consoles are trying to be at some point down the road.
If it really does come out in 2001 with a 1GHZ cpu, I'd think it'd cost WAY more than $150 with those specs.
Remember, consoles are always loss leader (as meantioned in other posts). The $150 is cheap for the hardware, but so is the price for any gaming console you buy. Plus, you have too look at the time line of this thing. Right now it's rediculous, when it's finally released, it may not be so bad.
NTSC (that's those TV thingies) are more like 378x200 something. If you do the math, it take rediculously less power to drive the same number of polygons around at that resolution.
Until HDTV becomes prominent. I guarentee that this thing comes HDTV ready which means it will be pushing at higher resolutions. And over engineered? I hardly think anyone would argue that that would be a bad thing (for the price).
So maybe MS is thinking about a PC replacement?
Like I said, MS wants to take over the future set-top box market. The X-Box is there way to do that. PC functionality in your living room. It plays games, and DVD's and lets you surf the Web and who knows what else. It's been a lot of companies goal for a long time now, and everyone has failed thus far (3D0, Phillips, etc). At this price, with this power, and with this brand recogniton, MS may just have the power to pull this out.
With that said, I think they're in for a big shocker. The games business is notoriously cutthrought and they'll have to go up against companies that have HUGE market share (Sony) and ones that are even more propriatary and greedy than MS themselves (Nintendo). They really better have thier shit together if they want to win this war (I'd place my money on Sony this time around).
Maximum comment lenght for Anonymous cowards.. OR atleast in the comment lenght to show part of preferences.. let me select a different lenght for AC or normal!?>>! how bout it>
Windows is entirely capable of self-corrupting that badly. I've had 95 delete its copy of GDI.EXE - and there wasn't a virus anywhere near the system, we did check.
Greg
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Please, not Mini-ME...
I've heard that used (admittedly by a rather sad looking individual) as a euphemism for male genitalia. Not a lot better than wince, really...
Greg
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Well... they've been making hardware for a while (MS Mouse, Keyboard, Joystick), of course my Sidewinder 3D Pro joystick stopped working as soon as I connected it to my new Athlon 600 running Windows 98...
... it also no longer works on my old PII 266 Win95 machine now either.
I figure this is just a sign of things to come.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Selling at a loss can be against the law - if there is just an intent to harm a competitor, in much the same way that swinging a hammer can be against the law - if there is an intent to hit someone in the head.
Selling at a loss is a common practice. Ever hear of a "loss leader"? Grocery stores love to advertise a few grossly under-priced items (often with purchase limits), and then rack up the bucks when people fill the cart.
While people talk about companies attacking the competition, doing something with the purpose of harming a competitor is generally not allowed. Since intent can be hard to prove, this generally means a company can't do something that harms a competitor but provides no direct benefit. Predatory pricing is just one example of this. This doesn't mean that a company is obligated to avoid harming competitors (what meaning could "compete" have?), just that it can't go out of its way to cause harm.
If MS intends to put Sega, Nintendo, and Sony out of the game console business by taking large losses for several years, and thereby gain a monopolistic position from which to reap huge profits, they will face legal action.
(IANAL, and I am disgusted by legally enforced monopolies on certain types of speech)
The scary thing is, I've seen games crash on the Dreamcast.
I work in a software store, and we have a demo system running near the register (so we can shoo away the "all day" demo'ers.) Every so often, a game would freeze. We've replaced the system and the games a few times.
Mind you it doesn't happen so much that it's a problem. Perhaps once in two weeks. After being on for a few hours.
But still...
There's one conceivable reason why they'd put a hard drive in one of these things. Can anyone say: bundling WebTV? They wouldn't be leveraging a monopoly in either market, so there wouldn't even be a potential antitrust suit. Woe be unto the consumer who buys one of these things.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Mhz are one of the most meaningless speed measurements these days, *especially* when referring to console processors.
The PS2 has a 300MHz processor, but what is hidden is that fact that it has 2 additional 300MHz vector coprocessors, creating a total of about 12 floating point accumulators and 6 dividers that can be used simultaneously, yielding (yet another meaningless statistic) 6.2Gigaflops. However, since VU0 and VU1 are heavily optimized for vector processing (as opposed to dividing by 0), the majority of the 6.2 billion floating point operations can be utilized in the average case. Add to that the Emotion Engine's fully 128-bit design, and you've got a processor that can outrun any intel processor up to ~1.5Ghz, and a memory bus that can actually supply needed data when it is needed. Granted, a Willamette 1500 would be able to do integer operations much faster than the Emotion Engine, making it a better general-purpose CPU; however, for gaming and signal processing integer operations are minimally important, making the EE a much better processor for multimedia purposes.
What MS has forgotten is that the PC platform is a terrible architecture for gaming. Everything about it is just mere upgrades on 20 year-old technology. Maybe Microsoft has something really sneaky up their sleeves, such as using a 1Ghz SH-4 (Dreamcast processor) and a custom-designed bus to an optimized GeForce 256 processor. That could (theoretically) approach PS2 level performance, but I'm not going to give MS that much credit.
$75 for a 300mhz Celeron? I got my 400mhz Celeron for $55...oh well.
Also, did they necessarily say Intel? I'm sure someone like AMD would love a nice bulk order...maybe even Cyrix's reincarnation (what company is that again?)
I've noticed a LOT of posts regarding when they'll be able to do this...
The answer: Within a year.
Almost every (if not every) console is sold at a loss. The hardware isn't where the money is, it's the licensing. Microsoft has the money to deploy these at a fair loss, and still make it back from licensing fees, and boom, they still make a profit off of the whole deal...and possibly control of another market.
OK, sorry, but: WRONG, BZZZT, you're going home with our special matching Slashdot tie and blazer badge set, that's yours, no-one can take that away from you, you've been a very special contestant, Good Night!
The Dreamcast runs either with a set of Sega libraries, or a cut down version of Windows CE. Sega Rally used an early version of Windows CE, but it has been much improved since then.
While it is true that the Playstation doesn't have much need for a full OS, it's not that much of a statement. The Playstation has no MMU. It has 2MB of main RAM. Its only networking capability is through a dodgy serial link.
Modern consoles are a whole lot more complicated. While it is great fun playing with your MMU and writing TCP/IP stacks, we game programmers have better things to do, like writing games. I'm not an OS programmer, nor do I want to be one, but many people are and I defer to them.
Another thing you're missing is that while the Playstation OS fits in 32K, the libraries you use to access the hardware are not included in that amount. You sacrifice your 0x1f8000 bytes according to your needs. The actual overhead of Windows CE is not as large as some have made it out to be, and compared to using the Sega libraries, you gain a lot of functionality.
Of course, I don't expect everyone to flock to it, because many game developers are still too busy trying to prove how studly they are at poking hardware. It's such a pity, because everyone spends a couple of years falling into the same traps.
Step 1: Plug in your shiny new dev kit
Step 2: Read the docs saying, "Don't do X to the hardware! It will be slow!"
Step 3: Watch the mailing list as punters from 15 different game companies flood the mailing lists with, "How can I do X to the hardware, in asm, by poking it directly?"
Sigh...
bug free games?
got tony hawk? create a new game and save it. kill power and load saved game. when selecting skater equipment, look at your wheels. do you see wheels? if you do, hit up once. you should now see no wheels. select this equipment, b00m crash.
I own 2 psx games and I dont make a habit of looking for bugs, but I would imagine there are a lot more than this one.
Just a reminder, Microsoft runs each Business Unit already as a separate business, trust or anti-trust. The HBU (hardware biz unit) has none of the issues that WOBU (windows office biz unit) has, or that the OS BUs have.
The hardware guys are accustomed to making products that are expensive to revise, can't be patched in the field, and need to run under fairly rigorous use without crashing.
When a product can be released patched, from a business perspective, why shouldn't it be released and patched?
(MS Hardware is not MS Software =anagram> Oh wow! Drat! Mainframe's stress)[
Timna would be a MUCH better choice.
Timna is optimized for low cost, but Transmeta is optimized for low power, not low cost. For example, the morphing software alone requires 16 MB to operate, so that adds a cost of 16 MB extra.
Samsung recently announced a "disposable PC", sub-$200, sounds fairly similar to this, and was based on Timna.
What the article actually says:
-could cost as low as $149
-Up to 1 GHz CPU
Which of course says absolutely nothing at all.
To be honest, at this point in time, I can't imagine MS selling a computer at any price without such strings attached.
----------
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Why?...think about this: currently, many, if not most, computer and video games developers create games for one platform with the intention of later porting it to other platforms. Naturally, the game developer wants their game available on the greatest number of different platforms to increase market audience reached over-all by their game. A good example of this "intended" development especially comes with the sports games. A beautiful example is the current Tomb Raider series: after Tomb Raider I, all the Tomb Raiders were planned with both the PC and console in mind.
Now how does this matter with the X-Box? Well, as previously mentioned, most developers develop first for one platform, release on that platform, wait for a period of saturation on that platform while they port to another, then release on their secondary platform. This porting costs money and time. Now what if, they only had to write the game once to reach both the console and PC markets? Would they choose to do that and save the money?...of course!
So here's where the X-Box's potential as a real market changer lies: if MS's "Windows-based OS" supports DirectX as an API to create games for the X-Box, a near port-less possibility to creating games for multiple platforms simulatenously now exists that game developers are going to leap at to use...
Now I'm not saying this is by any stretch a good thing...actually, I think it's a dangerous thing...but I can see why the X-Box might succeed...
I know this wasn't the main point of your thread, but there is a lot of misleading in that statement. Yes, the PS2 uses a 300 MHz chip to do massive graphics, but it is a 128 bit chip, not a 32 or even a 64. It also has an 150 MHz "graphics synthesizer". M$ would need a fast 32 bit CPU to keep up, particularly running Windows CE.
For some more information about the PS2 to use for comparison, I suggest IGN's PS2 FAQ. For additional info about the PS2 including other information, try ps2.ign.com.
B. Elgin
B. Elgin
"Read at your own risk; feel free to ignore."
Few people will buy just an X-Box, they will buy several games as well (duh). Add up all the revenue over the life of a games console, subtract the bill of materials over the same period, and MS can make a profit overall. Or take a loss and derail the PSX2 bandwagon. Go stick some figures into Excel ^H^H^H^H^H StarOffice. As I've said before, that's the problem (we) Linux and Open Source games advocates have to address, how to subsidise the hardware.
1) 56K Modem? This has GOT to be a made up stat as any game hardware company (besides SEGA) would be retarded not to include broadband (Cable, DSL, etc.) ability in their console, especially when the average console life span is around 4 years or so (easily taking us into mainstream broadband access timeframe). Forget your "MSN subscription for life" arguments - any new console MUST offer broadband capabilities.
2) X-Box WON'T wipe Sony out... what a joke. That's like saying "Yamaha's making a new motorbike that goes 20mph faster than any other bike - all the other bike companies will go out of business!". Microsoft dominates the PC s/w market because it got in early and Apple stumbled big time. The game industry is much more mature and companies like Sony, Nintendo and Sega are FAR more entrenched in terms of market share. MS will eat a big portion of that pie perhaps, but not enough to put Sony out of the game business.
3) MS would again be retarded to attempt to offer multiple models of the X-Box at different price points (i.e. base model for $149, deluxe model for $250, etc.). This is misinformed speculation as releasing multiple models fractures your install base, meaning developers can't count on a common platform spec (the same problem that doomed the SEGA 32X and that currently plaques PC land).
www.AdrianCrook.com
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I am just guessing but I think steak doesnt think the X-Box is viable...
A nice, well written, constructive criticism would probably be better, but hey what the hell...
--- Can i borrow your Clue-Stick(tm)? I need to go beat a few people with it...
..because MS's Games operation think it sucks and actually fought *NOT* to have WinCE on it. Also, because "WinCE" is fast becoming a dirty word
among Dreamcast developers.
Hmm. It might actually have a decent operating system, and be from MS. Interesting in itself.
(Posting anon for a reason).
$149 hmmm. Taking a look at that last article about the 1.5Ghz Intel chips priced around a small yugo! Well, Microsoft must be shooting to release these X-Boxes when the Intel price drops to 45$. Using the current trends, with 300MHz Celerons still at 75$ The X-Box should be out sometime in 2004. I'm not waiting that long.
Joseph Elwell.
Here's a copy of a post I made on this same story that appeared on the Shugashack:
;) [and in light of that price, the X-Box launching at $150 is made that much less likely]
(disclaimer: I am very biased here, being a PSX owner and long-time MS hater)
OK, now that we know(?) something concrete about the X-Box,let's compare it to its obvious competitor, the PS2:
- CPU: the X-Box may get "up to 1GHz" cpu, but its quite likely that the PS2's 300MHz chip will beat it out. We already know that the X-Box will be x86-based, which means we have an idea of how that "up to 1GHz" can perform. As various developers who already have development systems have pointed out, the strength of the "Emotion Engine" (blah, lame name) is its vector units. For comparison, 2 of the Athlon's FP units are also vector units,
responsible for executing MMX and 3DNow instructions. The Emotion Engine has 10(!) *dedicated* vector units. Also, x86 cpus are 32bit, the EE is 128bit.
- RAM: At first, it looks like the X-Box wins here, with 64MB over the PS2's 32MB. But it doesn't say what type is in the X-Box. We know that the PS2's 32MB is Rambus (whether that's good or not is open to debate)... More on the RAM in the OS section...
- OS: "Windows Derived OS"? That's reason enough to stay as far away from this thing as possible. And as at least one other poster has noted, how much of that 64MB is this OS going to take up? Judging from what Epic has said about porting Unreal to the PS2, writing PS2 software is like
using Glide: you're basically "coding to the metal". Programming for Windows and DirectX on the other hand, involves many layers of abstraction
and results in many cycles being wasted in intermediary software.
- modem: same as PS2
- other I/O: no info on the X-Box, but the PS2 will have IEEE1394, USB, and PCMCIA, and MS had better match that
- DVD: same as PS2
- hard drive: OK, this is the big deal. Some ppl may look at this and say, "hey! the PS2 doesn't have an HDD at all! this r00lz!" Wrong. The PS2 will get by with 8MB memory cards, very similar to what the PSX has now. Sure it's not 4GB, but it costs a hell of a lot less too. But more important than the fact that it shouldn't need an HD is what having one enables. If you follow the link and read the blurb, it says "it also has a 4GB hard drive, which will allow you to download patches" OH SHIT. What is arguably THE best characteristic
that consoles have over PC's? Stability. Console games never get patched, because they're shipped on read-only media. This naturally forces developers to make their games bug-free, and it works. With the opportunity given to developers to release crap now and patch it later, like PC devs do, they'll use it. Watch out.
- upgradability: I've got the sinking feeling that the X-Box will be upgradeable. Fanatic PC gamers/console haters don't realize this, but upgradeability is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it allows the platform to evolve, on the other hand it *requires* the platform to evolve. Compare the PC to the PSX. Can a PC from 5+ years ago run Quake 3? No. But is a PSX game of today as far advanced past those of 5 years ago as Quake 3 is? Not really. So the technology level of a console's games stays pretty much constant for its lifespan. The upside here is that you've made your one-time hardware expenditure, and that's it! When I buy a PS2 for $200 (which IS the price it'll launch at, every console in recent memory has launched at that price, and Sony's not dumb enough to break that streak), that $200 will likely be the only money I spend on PS2 hardware for as long as I own the thing (other than memory cards, a 2nd controller, etc). However, if I buy even a $500 PC now, to play current games in a year or two I'll need to shovel more hundreds of dollars into it.
I'm guessing that the X-Box will fall somewhere between these two extremes.
- games: The other obvious advantage the PS2 has is games. One, there are already hundreds of PSX games that will play on it. Two, there are already many developers working on games for it. Three, several developers have contracts with Sony, most
notably SquareSoft, so we know they'll be putting their games out on the PS2. As for the X-Box, who knows?
However, I will not deny the possibility that the X-Box could succeed. Microsoft has produced at least three good products (EDIT.COM, the original Natural KB, the Sidewinder pad), plus a few others that are decent but not stellar (Publisher, various mice). So I'll concede the possibility that the X-Box could mark another good product. We'll only know for sure when the thing actually comes out. Until then, however, I will remain VERY skeptical.
==
Now for some stuff I've thought of since then:
- video: Holy crap, the PS2's advertised triangle and fill rates are insane (although I forget what they are, 75MTriangles/s comes to mind...)
And all that with only 4MB of video ram! 4MB, that according to psx2000.org, is linked to the gfx chip by a 2560-bit bus! Now, even if that's a typo, and is supposed to be 256 bits, it's still twice the width of any current PC video bus (unless you count the G400's dual 128 bit buses).
- CPU: there were a lot of people on the 'shack who concluded that since the X-Box will have a 1GHz cpu, and the PS2 will only have a 300MHz cpu, that the X-Box will be significantly faster. Now, for some perspective on this, compare the GeForce to the Voodoo3. The former has a clock speed of 120MHz, the latter, up to 183MHz. Which is faster? That's right, the GeForce. Architectural superiority will put the PS2 on top.
- price: the fact that this article projected a $149 launch price is indicative of one of two things, either:
1. this report is bogus, entirely rumor, totally worthless. or...
2. Microsoft is going to be selling these things at a loss (or very *slim* margin) in order to put the hurt on Sony.
The reasoning behind this is, as I said above, that $200 is basically THE customary launch price. The SNES, PSX, and Dreamcast all hit the market sporting $199.99. Although EB is pre-ordering PS2's for $239, so it may be that inflation is catching up with us
MoNsTeR
Consider for a second if you will, the fact that Microsoft blames crashes on faulty drivers. Now consider the fact that since consoles are (or atleast are supposed to be) standardized hardware, meaning that all drivers should be release-worthy, in that they only have to be tested in one configuration.
This kills their excuse, but also the reasoning. They're right when they say the majority of faults is in drivers, and while a driver shouldn't necessarily be able to kill everything, hey it happens. Ever have windows crash in safe mode? I haven't. That's what this will run in, a permanent safe mode, because it's all standard overly-tested drivers.
You may not like the products, but MS is far from a stupid company, and they know what they're going up against, and what they have to do to win.
All of this said, I'm sure it will be a nice console, and I'll probably have one, alongside my Dolphin, PS2, and DC (and yet I never play games...I just enjoy wasting the money).
Plus...for people into console dev, such as myself, this will probably be a fun toy to play with.
The only way I can see a 1 Ghz machine coming out next year at that price point is if it requires you to sign-up with a specific Internet provider.
If that is valued currently at $400 for 3 years, then they real cost of the box is $550, which I can believe. Hopefully it will be broadband access at no more than $22/month by that point.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
Second, in most modern rendering chipsets the fill rate (the rate at which pixels can be put into polygons) is grossly higher than it needs to be: it is the polygon rate (the time to compute the position of each polygon) that is limited. Therefor, increasing or decreasing the resolution will have almost no effect on the frame rate, as the system will be limited by how many polygons it can cram onscreen, not how many pixels.
Lastly, remember that the X-Box will be running DirectX on Windows CE (Control Everything). The intent is to make it very easy to port from the console to the desktop (as long as the desktop has broken glass for an OS, not rotten fruit, flightless waterfowl, or satanic influences ;^) )
Lastly, for something like this to sell, the BOM (Bill of Materials, the cost of the parts to make it) would have to be about $75 for it to sell at $150 (the rest is eaten up with manufacturing cost, NRE (non-recurring engineering costs), shipping, stocking, returns (my box just gives me this funky blue screen, I want a new one) etc.) This is even if the whole thing sells at a loss. MS wants to dominate the game market: they sell this as a loss-leader, they get all the hot games made for DirectX, they get all the game programmers indoctrinated into The MicroSoft Way Of Doing Things and they kill all competition. They almost managed this without a game console: look at how many games are DirectX rather than OpenGL. However, today, game companies are starting to realise that if they want to make Mac ports (or Linux/BSD ports, or console ports) they had best program for OpenGL. Case in point: Aliens Vs. Predator is being ported to OpenGL so that they can make a Mac version. Hopefully, the folks at Activision are learning a lesson from this and will do all future games in OpenGL.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Did you ever hear about the PSX needing upgrades and service packs? No, because the idea is to release the platform spotless from the start. The 4 GB hard drive is worth nothing; it's not a feature, it's a way to circumvent future bugs M$ know they're gonna get. Who wants to connect to the Internet and download service packs for your platform? That's gonna hurt the X-Box's reputation immensely.
Incidentally, did anyone notice how M$ and Nintendo always explain their performance by comparing it to the PS2? 'We'll be faster than the PS2'. Hmm. It's just funny how the PS2 is already a standard, a full month before its Japanese release.
Finally, if they need a 1 GHz processor to work this thing, then they're doing something wrong. The PS2 achieves 25M pps with only a dedicated 266 processor. A 1 GHz processor sounds like infinitely more than what's needed to power a cutting-edge gaming platform at this time.
This is gonna bomb. M$ is not ready for this.
I'd hardly think of a harddrive as an asset to a gaming console. What's it good for? An internet cache? I've got dsl, and I load database driven sites. New games? Let 'em stay on the server. When I connect to the server, I'm playing version 1.2.7 automatically without having to patch it.
Playstion games look better now than five years ago when the PS first came out. Why? Because the programmers got better. Why? Because they weren't wasting time trying to integrate COM 2.0, or Direct X 12a, or whatever MS trys to sove down developers throuts. PS programmers just focus on the task at hand.
So a winders based platform means Joey down the street can develop his own games. You think Joey won't need to replace DLL's? That's one of the reasons why winders crashes. And yup, harddrives will help that problem manifest.
Next, let's talk about the price. If(the nintendo site didn't state any sources for their info, mind you) it really does come out in 2001 with a 1GHZ cpu, I'd think it'd cost WAY more than $150 with those specs.
If there was a 1ghz cpu to be had for under $400, that'd kill the PC industry all together. Think about it. Way more power than you need, in a $150 box? Where's the space to squeeze in a $40(or whatever...) winders licence? They'd be killing themselves!
Lastly, comparing a console to computer hardware is the old apples/oranges argument. PC gamers buy athlon 800's and GeForces to be able to run 3d games with 5000-10000 on-screen polygons at 1280x1024x32bit color. NTSC (that's those TV thingies) are more like 378x200 something. If you do the math, it take rediculously less power to drive the same number of polygons around at that resolution. The propossed x-boxen would have idle CPU cycles, which means it was over engineered, which means it costs too much to build regaurdless of the price. : )
So maybe MS is thinking about a PC replacement? That kind of power would run winders NT pretty well, but it seems a little light for winders2k. That much hardware could drive a real monitor just fine. It'd also run Linux pretty well, and I'd guess it will about 4 months if it ever comes out, which it won't.
The whole thing is just so rediculous...
-=nft1999=-
"We must be the change we wish to see in the world." -Gandhi
This is not a flame or some stupid AC, but a valid warning. Anyone who follows Nintendo news will relieze that Nintendo Next is the "tabloids" of videogame reporting. They've mislead SOOOO many people with their bogus stories. I HIGHLY doubt anything they said in the article is true, or if it is, they sure as hell just heard it from rumors or unconfirmed reports. I'd take this article with a HUGE grain of salt. Story after story they "broke" has proven to be just based off of rumors or have been very misleading. I can't believe Slashdot would even post anything from somewhere as unreliable as NN.
So to sum it up, I wouldn't trust anything you read in the article, especially since none of the major gaming sites have had anything new on the X-Box at all.