Next Xbox Rumored to get Two GPUs, Hexacore CPU

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[citation][nom]rmpumper[/nom]X720 - always-on Internet connectionPS4 - no used game supportMy guess is that a lot of people will migrate to PC's in coming years.[/citation]

People keep forgetting that not everyone's computer-savvy. The casual gamer (or even diehard console gamers) want it to "just work" without having to update drivers or do some of the other things that we computer geeks are used to.

Oh well...99% of the noise is created by 1% of the people.
 
This is great in the sense that it offers more flexability to allow developers to do awesome things. Granted i have to agree with something David Jaffe said a few weeks ago which was that we have not seen anything really significant to get excited about with the next generation. There has been little change in game interaction and input, just more power with a different controller attached to it.



 
Cool. Sounds like the hardware will be only slightly out of date within a few months of release. Vast improvement over the current gen.
 
The always on internet connection BETTER be false. A ton of kids have an xBox in their rooms without internet. Maybe their parents even block the internet for them if grounded or whatever. Or maybe you have a cabin up north with no internet, or an RV/Motorhome.... there are SO many scenerios that would involve not having internet connection at the XBox. I think this detail must be false. I know MS is screwing up very bad right now with Win8, but let's hope they are not taking that failure to the XBox as well.
 
not a chance dual gpu based on a 7k radeon so this unit is going to pull at least 500w power. hope they wont bring such a iffy power-supply agen. well at least the console will pull 1080p graphics and greatly improve on game ports for pc.
 
The next Xbox is going to have to be seriously beefy to compete with what's on a PC today.

The Xbox 360 was incredible at the time it was released, and was only over-shadowed by the PC in later years, but it's quite "long in the tooth" now. I'm not a console user; I'm a PC gamer, and if you want my money, develop your game for the PC, not some dedicated gaming device. That being said, I was pretty blown away by the Xbox 360 at that time so I'm very curious and somewhat excited, even though I'll never buy one, to see if the next gen can live up to the standard set by that release, and do it in the price range consoles have today (or close).

😉
 
[citation][nom]p05esto[/nom]The always on internet connection BETTER be false. A ton of kids have an xBox in their rooms without internet. Maybe their parents even block the internet for them if grounded or whatever. Or maybe you have a cabin up north with no internet, or an RV/Motorhome.... there are SO many scenerios that would involve not having internet connection at the XBox. I think this detail must be false. I know MS is screwing up very bad right now with Win8, but let's hope they are not taking that failure to the XBox as well.[/citation]

i believe this true.. MS is very stubborn you know? i started to not like it since ribbon ui, and then win8, and now this.
 
i love all the rants about people and the always on Internet connection.
its going to happen eventually in some form or another, either thru activation codes or soemthing else. Game Publishers want to end the used game market, it makes sense for MSFT and SONY to do what they want.

100s of millions of people have smartphone with internet always on, its it really stretch
 
@Bloob

but your willing to pay $60 odd for a disc that probably cost no more than $2 to make.... cost of a class 6 16GB micro SD card is around $10
 
What's the source of these rumors? You can't believe anything nowadays, we still don't even know what chip is powering the Wii U, and that's coming out this year, which means within 8 months. So who's to know what's in the next xbox or ps4, which are at least a year + away.
 
[citation][nom]alvine[/nom]sweet make it 3d[/citation]

The PS3 already has 3D capabilities if you have a 3D TV connected to it. Some of the games have awesome 3D.

[citation][nom]hellfire24[/nom]a six core cpu,two gpus,man then how it's still a console?it's almost a pc.[/citation]

Good hardware does not a PC make. This would be a console because that is the platform it is on, regardless of how powerful or weak the hardware is. Going back almost 15 years, the crap PCs running Windows 95 or 98 were PCs and still are regardless of them having weaker hardware than the PS3 and Xbox 360.

[citation][nom]jonnyboyC[/nom]Why two gpus? really doesn't make sense to me, it's not like they're going to be a high end gpu. The only reason i could think it would be like this would be so they could clock down the cores so it would be more power efficient but then it becomes more expensive because they have to by two dies instead of one for each console[/citation]

If it is more expensive, but the power efficiency is improved enough for it to cover the fairly minor increase in up fron tcost, then it's okay. Even if it still costs a little more over time, it's still okay if it's significantly more power efficient because that is then a selling point to market off of.
 
[citation][nom]DaddyW123[/nom]LOTS of people are still buying BD Movies and even DVD movies from the bargain bins. If any company wants to be the all inclusive media center of your home (games, movies, music, web...) they can't do away with the disc format.And while I agree, I wish that games would move to SD Cards, they are still more expensive than a disc, and harder to copyright preventing pirating.We'll get there some day, it is not that day.As for the always-on internet connection - yeah, that's crap. If I buy the game, I should be able to play it whenever, where ever I want.In my opinion, a little piracy is actually good for business. I don't do a lot of gaming, so occasionally I have downloaded a game rather than purchasing it. The idea here being, if I didn't download it, I simply wouldn't have played it at all.After having played the game and liked it, I have purchased the sequel to said game, which gave the developer money from me they normally wouldn't have gotten if I hadn't pirated the first one.Same goes for music. I now am being good and purchase all my music from Amazon MP3 (even still buy a CD from time to time) - but back in the day, I used to pirate a couple songs from an album, and if I liked them, I would go out and buy the CD. Had I never pirated those first couple songs, I would not have known I liked it and purchased the CD.Now pirating something that you KNOW you want, just because you are too cheap to pay for it - well that's wrong. But I use pirating like a testing bed, then I pay for what I like later, and delete what I didn't like.[/citation]

You make an excellent point, but there is no reason to pirate just to listen to songs or watch TV in order to find out if it's worth paying for because we have Youtube now and can watch/listen to all the media we want there so long as we have an internet connection. If you're contemplating buying an album, instead of pirating a song like you or I used to and buying the album if we liked it or deleting it if we didn't, we can just go to Youtube.

It's even legal to do this, so there's really no excuse for pirating songs and TV anymore (although it isn't always legal for the uploader to post the song/video, it is legal to watch it until Youtube removes it). Games are a different story still, but even then, you can look up stuff on Youtube and maybe get a feel for it... The piracy to get to know what it is before paying for it or skipping it argument is losing ground because of this.

As for the Blu-Ray versus Flash card argument, I completely agree. When 16GB and 32GB Flash cards are about at least as cheap as a Blu-Ray disk then they can replace them for game/movie storage. Until that happens, there's no way it will be done.
 
[citation][nom]jonnyboyC[/nom]Why two gpus? really doesn't make sense to me, it's not like they're going to be a high end gpu. The only reason i could think it would be like this would be so they could clock down the cores so it would be more power efficient but then it becomes more expensive because they have to by two dies instead of one for each console[/citation]
Assuming that the APU rumors are true then it makes sense on 2 fronts to have duel gpus:
1) The onboard APU video is junk, so it would need a real card paired with it to really make it go

2) Marketing: When on paper you can say that you have duel GPUs while the competition has only one (even if the duel rig is less powerful than the single) then it will be a major draw to the simi-computer literate masses who buy consoles.


At the end of the day I was super excited about the consoles last time around and was highly disappointed. Now when a $400 laptop/computer can game just as well as a console, and I see little point anymore. You need to buy a computer anyways, so why not simply spend an extra $100 to make it your game system as well? The only future for consoles are for kids and group/party games.
 
[citation][nom]EzioAs[/nom]This is good news right? If they integrate 2 GPU into the Xbox, all game developers will optimize their games and SLI or crossfire will scale better for the PC once it's being ported or am I wrong?[/citation]

yay, require us all to have 2gpus because that will catch on in the pc landscape.
this would honestly be the biggest mistake ever if they went 2 gpu.

make it 1, a decent one,
shorten the life span to about 6 years (total life, not exclusive life) and push out new itterations that are fully backwards compatible.

make the system basicly a computer dedicated to gameing, that can do other things
and not
a pc that can play games and only these games, and if you get the next gen none of these will work.
 
[citation][nom]SDNotSoExpensive[/nom]@Bloobbut your willing to pay $60 odd for a disc that probably cost no more than $2 to make.... cost of a class 6 16GB micro SD card is around $10[/citation]

Did you seriously make a new account just so you could post a comment and have a name relevant to your argument?

Also, compare that $10 to the much cheaper Blu-Ray disk. If SD cards games aren't sold for the SD card to make a profit like they do when you buy an SD card from Newegg or where ever, then they might not cost more than Blu-Ray games do and i'll gladly welcome them. However, if the customers need to pay another $5-10 per game for it to be on an SD card, then it's not worth it

It costs next to nothing for the Blu-Ray disks to be used and even $5 might not seem like much at first, but if you buy even say 6 games, you spent another $30 on them because of this. If it's the full $10, then you spent another $60 because of the SD media. That's enough for a seventh game if you buy on Blu-Ray instead of SD.

You're not spending $60 on a Blu Ray, you're spending $60 for a game that happens to be on a Blu-Ray disk. If it were on an SD card then it might cost more like $70-80. Also, Blu-Ray disks are a lot faster than SD cards that don't cost upwards of our to five times the cost of a regular class 6 SD card.

[citation][nom]elcentral[/nom]not a chance dual gpu based on a 7k radeon so this unit is going to pull at least 500w power. hope they wont bring such a iffy power-supply agen. well at least the console will pull 1080p graphics and greatly improve on game ports for pc.[/citation]

You might be right if by dual 7K Radeons, they use dual 7970s to pull that much power. It's fairly unlikely that there will be double the 7970's graphics performance in these consoles, at best it will probably be equal to a 7970 (and that's quite a stretch).

[citation][nom]john_4[/nom]Yup, thats why I see no reason to build a new rig, my 3 year old Q9650 is still going strong and should last at least another 2-3 years.[/citation]

That depends on your graphics setup. The Core 2 Quads would all bottleneck a 7950 or 7970 in a lot of games and probably the 7870 too. If you have a much weaker graphics setup like a 6870 or 6950 or even a 6970, then you won't notice a bottleneck with your setup (basically, for 1080p gaming, you shouldn't notice any bottleneck).

 
[citation][nom]alidan[/nom]yay, require us all to have 2gpus because that will catch on in the pc landscape. this would honestly be the biggest mistake ever if they went 2 gpu.make it 1, a decent one, shorten the life span to about 6 years (total life, not exclusive life) and push out new itterations that are fully backwards compatible.make the system basicly a computer dedicated to gameing, that can do other thingsand nota pc that can play games and only these games, and if you get the next gen none of these will work.[/citation]

[citation][nom]alidan[/nom]yay, require us all to have 2gpus because that will catch on in the pc landscape. this would honestly be the biggest mistake ever if they went 2 gpu.make it 1, a decent one, shorten the life span to about 6 years (total life, not exclusive life) and push out new itterations that are fully backwards compatible.make the system basicly a computer dedicated to gameing, that can do other thingsand nota pc that can play games and only these games, and if you get the next gen none of these will work.[/citation]

Micro-stutter is pretty much eliminated completely by activating V-Sync if you have more than 60FPS, so if two GPUs are a better option for some reason, there is little reason to not do it just because of the problems we currently associate with multi GPU setups since those problems are a thing of the past if you have the right setup. If MS wants two GPUs, then that means it may have better multi GPU support on the PC and if MS does it properly, then there won't be micro-stutter, variable FPS, and the like (properly meaning simply keep FPS above 60 and activating V-Sync; very simple things to accomplish).

PCs can play older games. Some very old games don't run properly with Vista, 7, and newer, but just use XP mode or an XP virtual machine and there's no problem. Games so old that they don't run in the new OSs will run in XP and if they are that old, then a virtual machine's performance is probably enough for them anyway (unless you have an already slow computer).
 
Also, a bluray disc currently has a capacity of 25-128GB depending on whether it is single layer, dual layer or BDXL.

At 1x, they can read 4.5 MB/s... at 12x [the max I can find right now] that would be 54 MB/s. To even be in that transfer speed neighborhood-- you are talking more like $28-$30 retail. If you actually need more the 16GB for a game, then $36-40 for a 32Gb card... and if you were going to need a dual layer for a game, now you have a $75 retail [64GB] SD card.

If their cost, in volume, is half of that and they currently spend $2 per bluRay disc, then you are adding $14-15 to most games, $18-20 to some games and like $35 to maybe a handful of games... and that assumes that they won't need to markup these costs at all [they presumably need to invest in new hardware to go from stamping discs to writing SDs in bulk...]
 
r ex[citation][nom]CaedenV[/nom]Assuming that the APU rumors are true then it makes sense on 2 fronts to have duel gpus:1) The onboard APU video is junk, so it would need a real card paired with it to really make it go2) Marketing: When on paper you can say that you have duel GPUs while the competition has only one (even if the duel rig is less powerful than the single) then it will be a major draw to the simi-computer literate masses who buy consoles.At the end of the day I was super excited about the consoles last time around and was highly disappointed. Now when a $400 laptop/computer can game just as well as a console, and I see little point anymore. You need to buy a computer anyways, so why not simply spend an extra $100 to make it your game system as well? The only future for consoles are for kids and group/party games.[/citation]

Laptops and such only game as well as consoles do now because consoles are 5, 6, 7, etc yeas old. New consoles should slaughter all but the most expensive laptops. Definitely not just a kiddie toy. Besides that, I've enjoyed most games I've played on a console more with multi-player than with single/campaign mode. Campaign is fun for a while, but once it's beaten once or more, it gets old a lot faster than playing with or against other people.

If the Xbox has something like Trinity, then the APU isn't junk unless it's somehow a low end model despite having 4 or 6 cores CPU cores. If it has two GPUs, maybe that means it's a hybrid Crossfire type of situation (or is it Asynchronous Crossfire now? AMD keeps changing it), but maybe it means that there are two APUs (two dual cores or two tri cores, each with a decent GPU). Even two A8s together could have a lot more graphical performance than the current consoles.

Of course, with current systems this isn't possible (not to mention the lack of enough Hyper Transport buses on the current APUs to do this), but maybe something like this is setup for the next Xbox. Remember, everything on these sites about the next Xbox is pure speculation, we have no idea what it will be like. Claiming that we do know much of anything about it could come back to bite us because this is the tech world; we tend to not know exactly what comes next despite often thinking that we do. For example, I never expected Nvidia to pretty much abandon their compute performance advantage with Kepler, but they did it anyway.

If the Xbox had two Trinity A10 APUs each with an integrated equivalent of a 7750, then it would actually be some serious graphical performance (approximately equal to a 6950, 6970, or 7850 in performance). The CPU side is a little unpredictable at the moment because although AMD has shown some serious CPU performance weakness lately, Piledriver does have huge potential. I think it could nip at Nehalem in IPC if AMD does it properly, but whether or not AMD does it properly this time is anybody's guess at the moment and I'm doubtful.

Also, here's to hoping that Trinity has more than two memory channels. I'd like to see four (one channel per memory slot with four slots, I would not expect nor even desire 8 DIMM slot Trinity motherboards) or at least three, but I'm also not too expectant of this either. We all know that the APUs could really use the bandwidth here. It would also help to see a much better controller. AMD's controller gets like 25% less bandwidth than Intel's Sandy Bridge controller when they are at the same bandwidth according to an earlier Tom's article (probably a factor in Sandy not being as memory frequency hungry as AMD's processors).
 
Console prices are subsidized by game purchases; and the long selling lives of the hardware helps [ie if the cost for hardware on day 1 is $800 and day 3000 is $300, then they are initially selling at a $400 loss and can lower the price over time while still reducing that loss.
 
I have some family that live in the middle of no where and out there there's no broadband internet. They use their cell phones for Facebook and whatever else they need online. Their oldest son is an avid xbox gamer and I can assure you that he is not the only person in America with a case like this. Always-on internet DRM crap like this and Sony's no-hard-media policy are going to wreck console gaming. It looks like everyone's going to be getting a Wii-U this next go-round unless they take the optical drive out of that next.
 
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