Rumored Next-Generation Xbox Specs Float About

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[citation][nom]catbus1[/nom]Yeah consoles are going to jump from 512mb ram to 8 gigs in a single generation.....GOD DAMN IT INTERNET, QUIT BEING RETARDED.That includes you Tom's......[/citation]
[citation][nom]vanwazltoff[/nom]8gb of ram seems a bit unbelievable, a console can run on much less since it doesnt have an entire desktop OS, doesnt have antivirus, wont multitask etc. 6gb is the sweet spot for desktop gaming so 4gb should be ideal for a console[/citation]

You're forgetting something. It's not supposed to be able to run today's games, this will probably last until 2020 maybe a year or two more. 8gb was unthinkable in 2005, now it's a reasonable standard. Look at the specs in 2020 then say that it's 'enough for a console', I'd much rather consoles have beefier specs. This looks like it'll be about a 7770.

In a few years, we'll see a big leap in GPU performance. Now lets say that will be released, the low end (7750/7770 equivalents) will be about 1/4 the power of that which is what they are roughly now (7750 is roughly 1/4 of 7970 ish), that will mean low end GPU's are about 2x 7970's possibly by 2016. Now the 7750 is about 4x as powerful in terms of GFLOPS than current consoles, in a few years (if what nvidia says is true) they will be 6-7x as powerful and they'll still have 4 or more years to go.
 
[citation][nom]A Bad Day[/nom]And maybe Intel would start to move the hexa-core processors into the standard i7s (instead of keeping them at the very high-end i7 range), and move the octo-core processors into the very high-end i7 range.Plus, AMD should be happy. Finally their Piledriver and the future Steamroller has some chance given their strengths in heavily threaded tasks.[/citation]

they are 8 cores at 1.6 g ONLY

the i7 4 cores running at 3.6 Ghz with HT is still faster .... thing of them as 8 cores at 1.8 ...
 
Basically 2x 4 core i5's at 1.6ghz. The Xbox 360 cpu specs look a lot better. Sad.
 
Sna your forgetting something, oblivion looked like no other game on earth when it released for 360. Regardless of 1.6 or laptop gfx card on the next console bill will provide a jaw dropping oblivion moment for $400 bucks.
 
[citation][nom]soldier2013[/nom]And my GTX 690 still trumps this tech thats not even out yet lol. I hate the thought of what I will have upgraded to once it does come out next year lol.[/citation]and your 690 costs twice as much if not more than the rumored price of the next gen xbox lol but you are right your card will be better than whats in the new console, it better be for that price lol
 
These are still rumors. I could make up any figure I wanted. I actually think these rumors are dropped intentionally to mislead the competition and consumer base. Don't forget, the Wii U was going to be a powerhouse that wooed hardcore gamers back before E3.

This rumor does not add up. Not only are we talking about system specs that would add up higher than $400. but you're also talking an integrated Kinect unit which would also drive the price up. Taking a huge loss on console hardware is NOT the "usual" way like people have been led to believe from this generation. I don't think MS or Sony are looking to take any more losses at this point with Microsoft suffering from poor Win8 adoption and Sony weakening financially (Sold your NY building to "restructure", sure whatever Sony). As a business, they are not looking for 360/PS3 sales, they are looking for Wii sales. The last gen has shown that catering to casuals is more profitable than catering to hardcore gamers.

My prediction stays what it is until there's confirmed rumors of info from MS. The next XBox has a built in Kinect as well as Smartglass and MS market support. They could easily bite into Nintendo's pie by advancing Smartglass to support those same features, except their version would not be included in the console price meaning any Windows or perhaps even Android tablet would become a "Gamepad". Without the gamepad cutting into the base price, the console can afford more power than the Wii U, but only enough to push it to 1080p gaming. If a Wii U can do HD gaming with $250 worth of console, XBox can do 1080p effortlessly with $350 worth of console.
 
[citation][nom]A Bad Day[/nom]What about the hard drive?[/citation]I am sure they will have a hard drive. It will probably be something similar to the current system where you get a low end system with 4GB for less money or a much larger one for another $100. I would love it if they made it easy for the user to buy their own hard drive (or SSD) and use that.
 
A huge improvement any of these console producers could make is with regard to a cooling solution.

I own 2 Xbox 360s, owned a PS3, and owned a Wii. With the exception of the Wii (and doesn't even compare to the quality of an Xbox 360 with Kinect), every one of these consoles has annoying fan noise ESPECIALLY when they were first introduced to the consumer market. I got rid of the PS3 altogether because the fan noise was so excessive. Some people find this aspect of the PS3 acceptable. I do not. The Xbox 360 teeters on the edge of my tolerance for noise; especially when I'm just watching Netflix through it.

None of my other entertainment center components give off fan noise or any kind of hum. I don't want one that does.

If the next gen Xbox sounds like a jet plane, I'll just build an HTPC with the latest processor from Intel and Nvidia's latest and greatest video card and be done with the whole console thing.

 
[citation][nom]blubbey[/nom]You're forgetting something. It's not supposed to be able to run today's games, this will probably last until 2020 maybe a year or two more. 8gb was unthinkable in 2005, now it's a reasonable standard. Look at the specs in 2020 then say that it's 'enough for a console', I'd much rather consoles have beefier specs. This looks like it'll be about a 7770.In a few years, we'll see a big leap in GPU performance. Now lets say that will be released, the low end (7750/7770 equivalents) will be about 1/4 the power of that which is what they are roughly now (7750 is roughly 1/4 of 7970 ish), that will mean low end GPU's are about 2x 7970's possibly by 2016. Now the 7750 is about 4x as powerful in terms of GFLOPS than current consoles, in a few years (if what nvidia says is true) they will be 6-7x as powerful and they'll still have 4 or more years to go.[/citation]
A funny quote regarding RAM requirements of the future:
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/09/08/640k-enough/
 
[citation][nom]eklipz330[/nom]you forget clock speed doesnt matter? its not 2001 anymore.[/citation]
It does matter since total throughput = overall_IPC x clock.

If you have 8 threads processing an average of 3 IPC at 1.6GHz, you have 38 400 MIPS. If you have 4 cores with HT averaging 4 IPC per core (including HT) at 3.8GHz, you get 60 800 MIPS and more than twice as fast at single-threaded/low-TLP throughput.

"Clock does not matter" is only true if you are comparing two architectures that have comparable features and behavior under similar circumstances. When you have two drastically different implementations and equally different use-cases, clock can make a huge difference... particularly when you compare an architecture with lower ILP and much lower clock (the architecture description seems to hint at an AMD-based CPU for the X720) vs another that has much higher ILP with more than twice the clock rate but half as many cores. (Like the i7.)

Same goes with Xeon Phi: while the Phi may be capable of 200X the performance of conventional desktop CPUs under massively threaded code by leveraging 200+ threads, it would perform miserably for most desktop applications since Phi throws away many single-thread optimizations to squeeze that many cores+threads on the die.
 
Would like the next XBOX to have good graphical capabilites.
Being able to use DirectCompute shaders would be very helpful.

And about the multithreading, so what if not all cores are used? Just do the number of threads that gives the best performance. It's not a disaster if you don't actually use all cores.
 
[citation][nom]blubbey[/nom]You're forgetting something. It's not supposed to be able to run today's games, this will probably last until 2020 maybe a year or two more. 8gb was unthinkable in 2005, now it's a reasonable standard. Look at the specs in 2020 then say that it's 'enough for a console', I'd much rather consoles have beefier specs. This looks like it'll be about a 7770.In a few years, we'll see a big leap in GPU performance. Now lets say that will be released, the low end (7750/7770 equivalents) will be about 1/4 the power of that which is what they are roughly now (7750 is roughly 1/4 of 7970 ish), that will mean low end GPU's are about 2x 7970's possibly by 2016. Now the 7750 is about 4x as powerful in terms of GFLOPS than current consoles, in a few years (if what nvidia says is true) they will be 6-7x as powerful and they'll still have 4 or more years to go.[/citation]
you are forgetting that they actually have to make these affordable, after cpu, gpu, blueray, wifi, power delivery, controller, and hard drive space they are going to cut back somewhere, ram is the first and easiest to go after the hard drive
 
The CPU sounds like a majorly under clocked bulldozer or piledriver. A 965BE or Athlon II x4 640 would be better(for under 100 bucks versus 160). The GPU sounds a bit like that HD7850 Tom's got in the mail with 1/4 of the shaders turned off. They tested it and it performed fairly well(BF3 playable @1080p on ultra). I've seen 1GB 7850s for 150 and 2GB 7850s for 170. A 2B 7850 with 1/4 of the shaders turned off could go for 150. 965BE for 90. blu-ray 60. 8GB ram 30-40. Custom mobo, case, psu. "Free" pure gaming/entertainment OS? 1 controller, cables, not sure about hdd or ssd. Better cooler for cpu to OC.
 
"The GPU sounds a bit like that HD7850 Tom's got in the mail with 1/4 of the shaders turned off. They tested it and it performed fairly well(BF3 playable @1080p on ultra)."

So it's good with the current generation, what about 5 years from now? Or 7? Or 10? That's where the real problem is. It's going to do the same thing this generation did, except with more cores, lower performance, more ram, and same degradation in gaming advancement.

Admittedly, maybe better PC performance for multi-core chips, which is a good thing, and use of DX11. Maybe we'll get developers to get over themselves and this BS "We can't code female models in because of ram problems" that would be nice.
 
If this is AMD CPU, it can be a piledriver, so 4 real core with two integer cores (so 4*2="8 cores"...) If this is bobcat core, then there will be 8 real really small cores. Any real information of CPU provider? If this is PowerPC CPU, has anyone a fintest idea what this will be?
The GPU is line in expectations of AMD 7770 or 7670 variant. Nice to see what this can do when it is released.
Have check out the power usage of these. The 1.6GHz CPU says that they try to use as little power (and heat) as they can, so this sound guite realistic for gamin console, where the heat is really bad enemy!
 
Wow the stupidity hurts my head.

First and foremost, this is not a home computer. There is not four to five layers of abstraction between the software code and the hardware resources that run that code. This is why Console's can perform work more efficiently then their general computing brothers. So right off the bat any comparison to a $750+ home computer is null and void.

Now consoles have a restricted footprint, their small and low power by PC standards. Immediately this puts a thermal ceiling on the total heat generation of the unit. The 360's RRD was caused by the overheating CPU melting and stressing solder contacts, many consoles have faced similar issues in the past. That alone is why you see a 1.6Ghz clock rate, APU's are known to under-clock / under-volt marvelously. It's an under-clocked eight core PD APU with a customized iGPU connected to hyper fast memory. That brings me to a point some people need to realize, the #1 biggest limiter for a GPU isn't its clock speed but it's memory bandwidth. That is why this has such large memory bandwidth, that memory serves as main system memory and as graphics storage memory. They also included a 32MB region of hyperfast memory to do special effects and to act as a buffer (my guess).

Now for the CPU, another misunderstanding. This is indeed "8 core", there are eight different register stacks with eight different L1 caches. I'm willing to bet it's a customized PD core so it's branch prediction and instruction scheduler is shared, also seems like their using shared L2. PC users gasp in horror but remember this is a console, it's code will be designed specifically for this CPU and compiled with a special compiler that optimizes specifically for this CPU. There won't be the current resource contention issues that the PD faces. Console games are also far easier to multi-thread then games compiled on general PC hardware. There is no heavy OS in the background, the software engineer has 100% control over the hardware and can predict exactly how long instructions will take to execute and how many resources are available at any point in time. And while some things must be done in serial, there are other things that could be done at the same time with the unused hardware (voice / audio / control / various UI and special effects). Which goes to my final statement, each core can independently be completely shut down if it's not needed. When you have a tight thermal ceiling the less hardware you have running the better. That was the reason they went with 8x1.6 vs 4x.2.4 (3 or higher would be too hot).

The specs actually look really generous "for a console". Definitely worth more then $400 but console manufacturers tend to take a loss on selling the platform and make money through software licensing fee's. The last several generations of consoles cost much more then they initially sold for and only later revisions got the cost to breakeven / margin profit.
 
[citation][nom]hannibal[/nom]If this is AMD CPU, it can be a piledriver, so 4 real core with two integer cores (so 4*2="8 cores"...)[/citation]
The article says two modules with 2MB L2 and four cores and "one fully independent thread" each, which makes it sound like AMD modules with twice as many integer cores per module.

There is no mention of separate memory for the system and GPU. With 68GB/s memory bandwidth, the bus has to be 256bits wide at just over 2GT/s. This seems to indicate that the x720 might use a souped-up custom APU with quad-channel memory.
 
[citation][nom]eklipz330[/nom]you forget clock speed doesnt matter? its not 2001 anymore.[/citation]show me an architecture from AMD that has twice the IPC to make up the low clock speed vs the current x86 CPUs. It is @ 1.6Ghz, I wonder what architecture can have such IPC to rival the current quad core CPUs @ 3GHz++

Clock speed still matter it is part of the performance measurement.
 



Not on consoles they don't. Your buying into the "single threaded performance or nothing else" koolaid. This is a console not a home PC, the software will actually be compiled for the CPU.
 
[citation][nom]palladin9479[/nom]Not on consoles they don't. Your buying into the "single threaded performance or nothing else" koolaid. This is a console not a home PC, the software will actually be compiled for the CPU.[/citation]
Most PC software is compiled with multi-threading and multi-threaded libraries enabled with the software framework, APIs and system doing some threading of their own in the background but this is still meaningless unless the software is written specifically to take advantage of thread-level parallelism. For tons of interactive code, making stuff parallel or neatly pipelined to leverage parallelism is much easier said than done if at all possible or practical to parallelize.

If you have a sparse array or tree shared between threads and multiple threads need read+write access to it, you need to slap mutexes in it and you may quickly end up spending more time waiting on mutexes than doing any useful work. When that happens, you end up better off going single-threaded for that section so you can avoid mutexes altogether. Writing for multi-threaded takes away many toys programmers take for granted or requires significant rethinking using often much less obvious methods and algorithm structures.

If writing for multi-threading was so easy to do efficiently, everybody would be doing it. But not every algorithm can be translated into efficient multi-threaded code.
 
[citation][nom]vanwazltoff[/nom]you are forgetting that they actually have to make these affordable, after cpu, gpu, blueray, wifi, power delivery, controller, and hard drive space they are going to cut back somewhere, ram is the first and easiest to go after the hard drive[/citation]

Assuming that all consoles are sold for profit. It took the 360 until 2008 to make a profit, Sony until 2010 to make a profit on the PS3. Given these specs and how affordable they are nowadays plus mass production - we're not talking off the shelf prices for M$ or Sony, hundreds of thousands if not millions in bulk orders will drop the price per part down considerably, economies of scale basics. Even if they aren't making money from the console, they will make it from games or other hardware accessories (remember the Xbox's dvd remote/adapter/addon thing? Release price of the 120gb HDD's for the 360 for how much?) you could probably put a 7850, maybe 7870 equivalent in consoles and it will probably be profitable by 2016, maybe 2015.
 
[citation][nom]palladin9479[/nom]Not on consoles they don't. Your buying into the "single threaded performance or nothing else" koolaid. This is a console not a home PC, the software will actually be compiled for the CPU.[/citation]the situation is diff here, the combine power of 8 cores @ only 1.6GHz running a fully optimized software are still not enough to make up Twice the clock speed diff. u are the one who actually think that 8 core could out match a Sandy bridge. @ 1.6Ghz, that 8 core is a pretty weak CPU by todays standard.

I still could not see how would an 8 core bulldozer 1.6GHz have performance anywhere near the sandy bridge @ 3.5GHz
 
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