News Xbox Series X SSDs Will be Powered by Phison Controller, Report Claims

[Admin]

A recent DigiTimes report gives us a hint of what's to come with the Xbox Series X

Xbox Series X SSDs Will be Powered by Phison Controller, Report Claims : Read more

 

[bit_user]

I feel like MS is going to use some fairly cheap NAND, and that will probably be the main bottleneck. I'm skeptical the SSD will even have its own DRAM. MS simply can't afford to put the equivalent of a $210 SSD in there, and that's the starting price of a 1 TB PCIe 4.0 SSD.

 

[gg83]

I guess it depends where the nand is sourced right? Some big multi year nand supply contract might allow for some cheap stuff, I think.

 

[gg83]

Oh, and will PCI-e gen4 require more or less ram to reach high sustained speeds?

 

[hannibal]

There Are new factories in China that produce very cheap ram... so who knows.

 

[bit_user]

There Are new factories in China that produce very cheap ram... so who knows.

RAM? No, I don't see that happening. The new XBox will use GDDR6, which is certainly not going to be made in those factories.

 

[bit_user]

I guess it depends where the nand is sourced right? Some big multi year nand supply contract might allow for some cheap stuff, I think.

Obviously, MS is going to get better pricing through high-volume orders and cutting out some intermediaries, but that only gets you so far...

I still don't see how they can afford to deliver storage performance on par with the current round of PCIe 4.0 NVMe drives.

Oh, and will PCI-e gen4 require more or less ram to reach high sustained speeds?

Generally speaking, DRAM-less SSDs are slower. And, usually, you need more/larger buffers to accommodate higher speeds, whether we're talking about networking, storage, or probably a range of other things.

Here's an in-depth review of a DRAM-less NVMe SSD that supports Host Memory Buffering.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12819/the-toshiba-rc100-ssd-review​

So, it's not pretty. However, I didn't read the whole review to see whether they found a way to control for the NAND speed. The second page analyzes the effect of disabling the host memory buffer, but I don't know if they found any way to compare it with a comparable drive that does include onboard DRAM.

 

[daglesj]

As long as it pushes and pulls around 1000/1500MBps it will do fine.

A step in the right direction.

 

[Zhyr]

Consoles have historically been sold at a loss(at least initially) which they recoup by game sales.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/080515/economics-gaming-consoles.asp

Something else to consider is that the maximum read/write speeds advertised are generally not achievable in real world situations. In saying that, we can hope there may be a change in the way games access storage to take advantage of the higher queue depths of SSDs.

 

[hannibal]

RAM? No, I don't see that happening. The new XBox will use GDDR6, which is certainly not going to be made in those factories.

Ssd ram memory and system memory Are different things...

 

[bit_user]

Consoles have historically been sold at a loss(at least initially) which they recoup by game sales.

Yeah, and I'm (mentally) accounting for that.

The thing is that they can't build a $1000 console, and sell it for $500. The gap has to be smaller than that.

Also, whatever the gap is, it's got to be something they can turn around in a refresh after about 1-1.5 years. So, not only the absolute amount matters, but also the price trajectory of the various component parts.

 

[bit_user]

Ssd ram memory and system memory Are different things...

I know, but putting any DRAM on the SSD costs more than putting none. Not only do you have the cost of the DRAM, but also the board space & routing.

I'm betting MS is too cheap to use a SSD with DRAM, and will just have the SSD use a Host Memory Buffer.

 

[hannibal]

Maybe... the ram is more usefull when writing and reading is the most important thing in consoles...