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Gamespy Reveals Xbox Next Specs
Gamespy's reporters have been on the ground at the GDC, and managed to wrangle specifications for Microsoft's upcoming next-gen console. From the article: "Xenon's CPU has three 3.0 GHz PowerPC cores. Each core is capable of two instructions per cycle and has an L1 cache with 32 KB for data and 32 KB for instructions. The three cores share 1 MB of L2 cache. Alpha 2 developer kits currently have two cores instead of three."
CPUs are INSANELY cheap to manufacture, almost all of their price comes from the need to recoup on R&D and fab construction costs. It would be very easy for a manufacturer to sell them at a steeply discounted price in order for the publicity that being used in the Xbox2 will bring. HD-DVD drives were probably much more expensive in an actual dollars-per-unit way.
1) RAM is expensive. Game developers and console designers, like most other embedded programmers, have an incentive and opportunity to write efficient and well-optimized code to meet specific hardware requirements.
2) Consoles run very little by way of background processes, and when they do, they're almost always modules relevant to the application (i.e. XBox Live-enabled services). This trims the base requirements down and still leaves a lot of space for the actual application.
Desktops, on the other hand, run an OS that has a whole bunch of background services running, plus a bunch of preloaded platforms to improve responsiveness when the user wants to start something new. In addition, we expect them to be able to run more than one primary application at a time. They eat RAM for breakfast.
Even though your stock Windows XP machine may crawl when running a program with 512MB of RAM, a console (or other embedded/dedicated platform) probably wouldn't need a fraction of that to get excellent performance.
64MB was not conservative when it came out. 64MB was the most any PC video card had back then, but the xbox ran at lower resolution. Also, console RAM isn't the same grade as PC3200. This generation it'll be faster, GDDR3, the same as what's in the latest video cards. Like others said, the good stuff is more expensive.
False. Many games have had patches released for not only multiplayer issues, but also single player issues. For example, Crimson Skies has a problem where if you changed something in the multiplayer settings, it made you unable to play the single player game, so the patch for Crimson Skies fixed that and some other minor issues, but there was no "multiplayer balance" issue to be fixed in Crimson Skies.
Other games have also had issues with their single player games patched on XBL. Halo 2, for instance, had its 480p mode fixed that affected both single and multiplayer where the HUD was cut off on the far left side of the screen.