So I just saw this, the most tangible rumor I’ve yet run across:
I never heard of Xbox World, but it’s always a bit weird for a magazine to go out of business right when its target technology is about to get a huge spike in press…
Anyway, any credibility to this? I don’t think anything here is that controversial or outside of plausibility, except for the glasses part, which is news to me even at the rumor level. Would’ve thought Microsoft glasses were another couple years out.
Calling the next Xbox just “xbox” would be stupid. Consumers expect a new number or name and without it will think it’s just a slightly tweaked 1st-gen box. Apple has always gotten this right and I’ve always hated how Microsoft came up with dumb names that defy chronically and simplicity. Similar vent towards NVidia, ,ATI and mobo manufacturers for their naming scheme.
Didn’t Apple just call one of its iPads just “iPad”?
Like how the iPad 3 was officially the “New iPad” and never referenced by the more popular (and logical) moniker? Or even how the current iPad 4 is the “iPad with Retina Display” right?
There’s an iPad 4 already? And I thought the iPad 3 had a Retina Display.
I don’t care what it’s is called. I just want an easy way to differentiate search results for games and info (on a variety of sites) about the dumb thing. They could call it the XBOX: XBL KinectConnect 555 for all I care.
It appears to basically be a roundup of rumors that have been kicking around NeoGaf for months. The PlayStation magazine from the same company that is also being closed just published a similar rumor round up for the PS4. In both cases it feels like a transparent attempt to move some magazines when you don’t have to worry about your credibility down the line.
Remember when it was rumored it would only have 2GB of RAM and Epic basically threw a hissyfit about that not being enough for the textures and stuff they have in mind for Unreal Engine 4. Hell, there are phones shipping right now with 2GB.
8GB on the other hand. That’s gonna open up a lot of stuff. I also see a huge chunk dedicated to the OS. Now you’re going to have that stuff they can’t do because the OS is limited to 32MB. Plug your social network accounts/twitter in an get real-time updates even in a game is just the starting point.
Please note that the actual article (via the way of CGW) - not the shoddy retreat mentioned in the OP - is talking about the hardware that was supposedly built into the early dev-kits. If the dev-kit had 8 GB of RAM, the final console sure hell as wouldn’t.
Moore’s law has continued to benefit ram. Unlike CPUs where the extra transistors just aren’t as useful in more cores, memory density just goes up and up and prices go down and down. 16GB in a regular desktop cheapo ram is like 50 bucks in a deal now. 8GB seems perfectly reasonable.
That 8GB of RAM sounds suspicious. If its really that much then it would have to be slow/cheap DDR3 stuff not fast GDDR5. So are they going split memory like a PC or one pool like the 360 had?
The Xbox has GDDR3 on a 128-bit bus, and half a gig of it. Memory bandwidth is about 22GB/sec. (Today’s mid-range PC GPUs have 128-bit GDDR5 at higher clocks giving them 3-4 times that much)
The 360 offsets a lot of that relatively low bandwidth by having a chunk of embedded DRAM really close to the GPU with really high bandwidth. It’s only 10MB, but it helps.
I think it unlikely we’ll see 8GB in the new Xbox, because to make that affordable you’d be stuck RAM speed or bus width or some other tradeoff that would really limite memory bandwidth, really. Also, dev kits often more RAM than production units, for, you know, development. :)
My guess? 4GB of RAM, probably GDDR5 or something like it, 128-bit bus, not clocked super high. Somewhere in the 80GB/sec range. (GeForce GTX 650 cards with 2GB of GDDR5 at 5GHz effective retail for like $140 for the whole damn card.) As with the 360, they’ll have a nice chunk of embedded DRAM or stacked RAM or something, hopefully more than 10MB this time.
I respectfully disagree here. Keeping the next one to simply XBox helps their brand. They want to promote the word XBox to reenforce their brand, not the number “360” or “720”.
The dev kits at this point are rumored to have between 12 and 16 GBs of RAM. Rumors also suggest as much as 3 GBs of the 8 in the console will be reserved for OS. It is supposedly DDR3, but with some amount of embedded DRAM on the GPU to alleviate the bandwidth limits. At least 64 MBs.
Hell, I don’t even respectfully disagree. Who in the world would seriously think a company would step down performance just because of a lack of numeric title designation greater than last gen’s console? That makes zero sense.
I heard in France they are focus testing “XeBox” branding. It’s simple, recognizable, but has that Wii psuedo-multicultural flair. This Saturday we’re partying with Xe!
Or maybe regional branding with Le Box
That would be a very interesting play. A really BIG chunk of eDRAM (enough for frame buffer and caching other stuff), and then main system RAM that isn’t much faster than what you find in the 360, if at all, but freakin’ tons of it. 16 times more.
You could do a lot with an eDRAM buffer 64MB or bigger, if you were clever about how you swapped things in and out and how you ordered the drawing of your scene, I’ll wager.
Where are you seeing these rumors, though?
You know what else was branded Xe? Blackwater. The soldier-for-hire company with the “kill all civilians, rape female employees, and send our men out to die without proper protective gear” image.
If Microsoft uses that brand, they’ll be changing it before you can say “Metro”.
There’s a reason consoles have so little ram.
Console ram usually isn’t cheapo ddr3 ram. The Playstation 2 had RDRam, which had the same performance as 1000mhz DDR3 ram found in 2009 desktops and laptops. RDRam was ridiculously fast but also expensive, a 2GB RDRam kit for PC would set you back $1000 at the time. Hence why the PS2 had only about 32mb as I remember it.