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Next-Gen Console Wars Will Soon Begin In Earnest
When the Wii U was released at the end of last year, Nintendo got a head-start on the long-awaited new generation of video game consoles. Now, Sony has announced a press conference for February 20th that is expected to unveil the PlayStation 4, codenamed 'Orbis.' This will precede the announcement of the Xbox 360's successor, codenamed 'Durango,' but that too will likely be announced by E3 in June. Specs for development kits of both systems have leaked widely. The two systems both use 8-core AMD chips clocked around 1.6 GHz. Durango has 8GB of DDR3 RAM, while Orbis has 4GB of GDDR5 RAM, though Sony is trying to push that up to 8GB for the console's final spec. Reports also suggest Sony is tinkering with its controller design, going so far as to add a "Share" button to let people exchange screenshots and recordings. Developers indicate the systems are very close in power, though Sony's system currently has an edge. With the upcoming announcement of the PS4, the big-three console makers will kick off a new round of direct competition. They'll maneuver to one-up each other with the most powerful hardware and the slickest software. However, they'll also hope the release of three major consoles in rapid succession will help to anchor a part of the games industry that no longer enjoys the dominance it once did, thanks to threats from mobile.
Somewhere, a Nintendo exec is opening a bottle of Jack Daniels to pour a toast to the one year they had a current gen console.
But seriously, any word on the optical drives for the new consoles? I imagine Sony will stick to a blu-ray drive (I just hope they lose the bluetooth remote and include an IR sensor this time). But will MS swallow their pride and go bluray (widely viewed as a Sony technology), or develop some proprietary optical drive, or use some sort of SSD-type technology--or take the REALLY bold, and risky, step of going download only? I think they would be better off swallowing their pride and going blu-ray myself. But, then again, I say that as someone who has a lot of blu-ray movies and who would really like one console to watch all my stuff instead of several.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Starting the launch with Mario Sequel 58, Zelda Remake number 14, Halo 5, and who can forget Final Fantasy XIV - II: Offline Edition?
X86-64? cpus? will they be able to run linux or a full windows desktop?
Now a nice to have will be some kind of cable card / tru2way / allvid system as well.
The Android concolelets, like the Ouya, could be about to upend the whole thing. It's just one more consequence of the "good enough" being embraced by both gamers and the industry. Nintendo was in this space before, and they'll definitely have to compete with Ouya, Gamestick and the sea of nameless Chinese manufacturers of Android mini PCs. The heavy games, those that needs tons of storage, CPU and GPU power will still be around, of course, not everyone who bought an Xbox was playing those. Problem (for MS and Sony) is, there's a new kid in town who wants to eat up some of that (the heavy gamer) marketshare: Valve.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
No but at the same time, A given chip with a higher clock speed WILL out perform the same chipset at a lower clockspeed.
Depends on the kinds of operations you're throwing at it. If it's simple integer math, then yes, every single time. If it's more complicated floating point math, then it'll depend on how efficiently it's implemented in the instruction set (which is why a 2.8GHz i3 will smoke a 5GHz P4 on almost every benchmark). If it's very large array math (such as most graphics computations and AI), then it'll depend on how parallel your code is and how many threads you can execute simultaneously. You can take a modern Intel chipset, and clock an i7 at the same speed as an i3: for some types of operations they'll score exactly the same on benchmarks, and for others the i7 will score about 4x better (twice the cores, and hyperthreading enabled = 4x the threads).
There's a reason that NVidia and AMD are competing on stream processors more than they are clock speed: modern graphics processing is embarrassingly parallel, and performance scales linearly with number of processors, while you see diminishing returns with clock speed.
As for gaming, and why they will have gone with a lower clock speed... very little in modern games is actually dependent on having a high clock speed. Almost everything that games do is dependent on graphics, which is a completely different problem, which leaves things like AI and object tracking, both of which benefit more from parallelization than they do an increased clock speed. They also need to worry about EnergyStar certification, and a consumer base that is increasingly aware of the power consumption of their electronic devices. Money is not infinite for their consumers, and they get better economy throwing a manycore low speed processor at it than they would throwing a high speed processor with a low core count.
My concern is primarily compatibility. We've got a good sized collection of games -- far more dollars invested there than in the consoles -- and if the new hotness won't play them, it's not coming to my shelves.
Not sure how to deal with the lies: XBox 360 claimed they would implement compatibility via downloads; then they didn't produce the downloads for the best games (the Mechassault series for one example.)
Then there is "the cheapening": The PS3 (original) came with PS2 hardware, and that really worked pretty well. Then they took that out. Which doesn't work for me, but I do have the original version. Sadly, only replaceable via EBay now because the newer PS3's stripped that out.
So PS4, XBoxXXX... going to wait and see if they obsolete my game library, and if they do, pffft. If they don't, will wait at least a little and see if the compatibility is decent.
Really not very happy with these companies.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I think that the new steam (Linux) box by Valve will grab a significant market share. Why? because it will be much more customizable, AND run current PC games.
..........FULL STOP.
Why would that determine the winner? Nobody outside of Slashdot gave a shit last time around.
Yeah, because clock speeds across cpus and chipsets are a real meaning full comparison. Who cares about stuff memory bandwith and speeds.
AMD are producing the Pentium-4s of this generation, which need about a 25% higher clock speed to be comparable with a similar Intel CPU for single-threaded use. So 1.6GHz is probably going to be soundly dumped on by Intel's low-end i3s unless they can really take advantage of all eight cores (which are presumably four of the Bulldozer-styte cores and not eight full cores).
More FUD. AMD's chips are full cores that just share an FPU/SMID unit, you do not need a FPU unit to have a core. Most CPU's made do not have FPUs to begin with, so nobody doubts those are not CPU's.
And Intels chips only dump on AMD's in canned bentmarks, not real world tasks.
---- GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Oh FFS. That reeks of cluelessness and desperation.
Sony, sure enough.
Why would that matter, nobody outside of Slashdot gave a shit....if they did we'd have seen a LOT more people on the YDL forum. Most of the people whining abou tthe removal of OtherOS probably NEVER actually ran Linux on a PS3, (or had a Linux kit for the PS2 for that matter)
And yes, I had that PS2 Linux kid AND I ran YDL on my PS3.
a feature that was advertised on their own packaging,
The packaging doesn't mention OtherOS at all. I still have my PS3 box...I looked.
As someone with some game development experience, let me throw in some observations. (*based on the specs mentioned here).
The 3.2 Ghz Power PC CPUs in the Xbox 360 and PS3 were in-order execution units. As I remember, code on the 360 typically executed about 0.2 IPC -(Instructions per cycle), sometimes worse. The very best hand optimized assembler doing tasks like video decoding could execute about 0.9 IPC once properly cached and unrolled.
AMD and Intel have decades of R&D now into out-of-order x86 execution (the x86/x64 opcodes being translated to internal micro ops), which is a major factor in their performance. Even the Power PC G5 chip devoted a good chunk of its silicon to Out-or-order execution. The 360 and PS3 CPUs - designed almost 10 years ago - traded Out of Order execution for die size and clock speed.
The specs say that the 1.6 Ghz CPUs can issue up to 2 instructions per cycle. If real world performance works out to an IPC of 1.2 to 1.6, which seems very doable, then you will see a 3x to 4x increase in the real-world rate of instructions being performed . ( 0.2 IPC @ 3.2Ghz == 0.4 IPC @ 1.6Ghz ). This doesn't take into account any efficiency gains due to the instruction set, cache, etc.
And at the same time, I would imagine it's a whole lot easier to deal with other things on the chipsets at 1,.6Ghz than at 3.2 Ghz (mature tech and all that)
Just told my bro, who owns a 360, to get ready to shell out some dough for a new Xbox. He gave me a dirty look and said he's finished with Microsoft consoles because of, quote: "They Nickel and Dime me to death".
As for me, I'm very content with the Ouya and my Linux desktop. Gaming doesn't have to mean $600 for a console, plus subscription, plus $70 games. That's outrageous, for me at least.
I don't exactly know and am honestly too drunk and lazy to google it, but if memory serves me right, the time between console announcement and actual appearance on the market seemed to be pretty long, so i think we look at 2014/2015.
Plus i think it is entirely possible that the announcements (NOT the actual market releases) are made a bit earlier this time to get people to diss the Wii U and wait for the "big thing"
I didn't have 5. I had 3. I stopped at 3, getting tired of the whole deal. There have been people who have had plenty of the old style consoles replaced. This isn't an isolated incident. Just google the track record of the pre-slim quality and you will see that 5 is about average if you gamed more than 15 minutes at a time.
The quality problem with the 360's hardware is precisely one reason why I won't be getting Microsoft's next console (720, whatever). And since Sony took Linux install from my console, I won't buy Sony's box either. The problem I attempted to illustrate in the original post was the huge outcry about the 360's lack of quality (along with 4 or 5 also-ran posts where someone's launch 360 still runs, even though they've been playing on the sun 24/7), and the reams of rants about Sony and their lack of security. Couple that with the removal of a feature on a Sony product and you had lots of mad people (myself included.) I wonder how many who posted will follow through? It'll be interesting to see... but difficult to correlate. :(
I'd rather play Nethack anyway.
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
More FUD. AMD's chips are full cores that just share an FPU/SMID unit, you do not need a FPU unit to have a core. Most CPU's made do not have FPUs to begin with, so nobody doubts those are not CPU's.
Nobody claimed they weren't CPUs, but nice strawman. The better question is whether one Bulldozer module is one core with SMT or two cores with SMP. Here's at least one claim to the difference between SMT and SMP:
Multithreading CPUs have hardware support to efficiently execute multiple threads. These are distinguished from multiprocessing systems (such as multi-core systems) in that the threads have to share the resources of a single core: the computing units, the CPU caches and the translation lookaside buffer (TLB).
A Bulldozer module shares computing units, CPU caches and the TLB. It doesn't share integer units and having an FPU is not necessary to be a CPU, but it is still relevant. Imagine if we're trying to determine if two twins are Siamese twins or not. If they had no legs, we'd still recognize them as twins. But if they do have legs and share a leg, then they are Siamese twins. Likewise a core doesn't have to have a FPU, but if it has one and shares it with other threads it's not a separate core.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Except that you're forgetting one key component of the 360 CPU: SMT.
Fine-grained SMT (the only SMT worth pursuing) allows for a second thread to populate unused execution units, allowing for an in-order CPU core to potentially exceed 1.0 IPC when running highly-threaded code (or maintain near 1.0 in I/O-blocked instances)..
The 360 cores are dual-decode, dual-issue (just like the Pentium, Intel Atom), as anything less would make zero sense to implement SMT for, and anything more would be overkill for an in-order design. It features triple 128-bit vector units, but will usually only be able to execute 2 vector instructions per-cycle. Here are the specs if you want to peruse them.
The AMD Bobcat core is not a very powerful out-of-order unit. Like the 360 CPU, it features dual-decode and dual-issue (a trait shared by the Jaguar refresh). You can see how little boost Bobcat receives from out-of-order by putting it up against the Intel Atom.
The Atom gets trounced in single-threaded operations, and also in some c tests where Brazos can keep itself fed. But in some tests the I/O becomes the bottleneck, and in those cases Atom catches-up (or exceeds Brazos).
Thus, for certain operations SMT offers similar per-clock performance to out-of-order execution. This means that an optimized multi-threaded load on the 3.2 GHz 360 CPU may run 50-75% faster than on a 1.6 GHz Jaguar core.
Thus if you assume PERFECT scaling for those 3 cores on the 360 and 8 cores of Jaguar, you really see only a 2x overall speedup (especially since Jaguar is getting an upgrade to dual 128-bit vector units).
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Why not stick 16 or 32 GB in it, if you use 8GB dimms it is cheap. Will be even cheaper by the time the thing is released.
When you're making a $300 consumer device, the extra $25 makes a big difference. And when you're competing in the $300 consumer space, a $25 increase in price will knock you out of the market.