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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."
The next geration of consoles, no matter the brand, will be freaking amazing.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
..for a modchip before buying. NOT necessarily for stealing games but for all the third party software. The current xbox shines with a modchip. Emulators galore, xbox media center, etc.
Live enabled != Live play. I won't be giving anything about the next xbox since I don't know anything, but even in the current generation a game being Live enabled means that you can receive invites to play games on Live even if the game is single player only. Play Sands of Time and your friend can see you are "Live enabled" and invite you play Halo 2. Its pretty freakin sweet.
GameCube's disks were a mistake? Last I heard they made load times faster and helped prevent piracy...
If all I can do with it is see the perfectly-rendered sweat rolling down the forehead of the Exclusively-EA-Branded Linebacker in front of me, with all the control in the world being nothing but a pair of awkwardly placed sticks, what the hell do I care? I will be buying a PS3 solely because the PS2 controller is the only one with actually intuitive control schemes, because of the symmetrical placement of the sticks. But mostly I can look forward to more sports games, more driving games, more awkward TPS (that's third person shooter) games, or on the PS3, lots of badly-written and acted "RPGs" with stories on rails.
Oh yeah, fighting games and platformers too. Right now I amuse myself with platformers the most, but I keep going back to play Alpha Centauri.
Give me Civilization 5 with a wireless mouse+keyboard interface on one of these, or a Total War title, and we'll talk. As it is, I doubt the next gen consoles will even have VGA outputs (and no, third party scan converters don't count).
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot
The question is - how much will it cost, and like the original XBox, will it be subsidised by Microsoft again? If so, then either Microsoft is either willing to take risks, or desperate to take over the console market. Three 3.0Ghz PPC cores can't be that cheap...
I remember something else that sounded great, too: the first XBox. Microsoft released ridiculous specs that gradually became less and less ridiculous as time went on, right up to the point the system was actually released, when it barely had better specs than either of the two main competitors.
This sig is part of your complete breakfast.
Three 3.0 Ghz PPC cores. Wow. And I'm sure it'll be at a standard console launch price point, about $300. That's a whole lot of power. Of course, people said the same thing when the Xbox first launched. 733 megahertz for $300 seemed like a great deal then. But, that was back when becoming obselete used to be a concern when buying computers. Remember when Moore's Law was being upheld? I bought a Pentium IV 2.4C about 2 years ago for $180 dollars. Today, $180 dollars buys you a PIV 3.0. An incremental leap forward at best. If the Xenon really has 3 PowerPC 3.0 GHz processors, that thing is gonna be one hell of a bargain at $300 dollars. Five years from now, a Xenon is still going to be relatively impressive, unlike today's Xbox, unless we manage to invent some radically new technology that lets us get back on track with Moore's Law.
Actually, GameCube supports 6:1 hardware texture compression. You are correct on that. And the audio is usually compressed as well.
What you fail to realize, is that texture compression is much like a PNG. It compresses it to 1/6 the size you would find a texture on a PS2, with no loss of quality. You feed that into the GPU on the GameCube, and the GameCube can decode it for you. On the PS2, it takes up valuable clock cycles to decompress the texture. So a lot of developers don't do it.
As for the audio... well, most audio is tracked, same as the PS2. The stuff that isn't, is of course sampled. Much like playing an MP3 or OGG on your computer, it's a good idea to compress the audio. Storing and playing back raw wave files seems a little needlessly excessive to me, if the processor can decode compressed audio in real time.
I'm sorry, I just don't get what you were getting at. It's a good thing that game console hardware is powerful enough to handle compression these days. Even the GBA supports compression of sprites.
But if you mean that the GameCube has bad looking/sounding multiplatform games, I would really like to know which ones. But even if they are slightly lower in visual quality, I can still load the game a good 10 seconds quicker on a GameCube than a PS2 for the most part. That's truly more important to me.
Moores Law is still valid, how else do you think they fit 3 PowerPC cores on a single die?
Using the P4 to say that Moores Law is no longer valid is a bad analogy, as the P4 architecture was strongly based on getting as high a clock speed as possible. The roadmaps of CPU manufacturers point pretty strongly to multicore as being the future of processing, for two reasons:
We can keep cramming more and more transistors into the same space (Moores Law), so we might as well use that space.
Critical paths can only be so short (i.e. you can only have so many pipeline stages until you get diminishing (and negative) returns)), before you have to come up with other ways to improve speed.