Be Excellent To Each Other

Youre getting cobfused between xblig (xna , .net) and xbla (typically native)

That's what Sony did with the first iteration of the PS3, then dropped it when they realised they could sell you the same games again on PSNdecided it was too expensive.

Is that what they did? Or was it ALL of the PS2 hardware crammed in?

PS2 hardware must have only been the size of a beermat, by then, surely?

I'm expecting ARM as it goes, what with windows phone 7 being displaced by the windows 8 RT port. It makes less sense to go back to x86, to me.

@dave: so I am. Whoops.

If they go with ARM, will it work with LEGacy games?

I hope it's not too expensive.

The very very first PS3 hardware did have complete PS2 hardware inside, yes.

No. But then, it won't if they go x86 either. Emulating a tri-core PowerPC chip will be HARD.

Not without an emulator layer or a recompile and rerelease.

Oh, wait. You twat.

I think it was even smaller than that. Let's all sit down and remember what the PS3 was intended to be when they launched it. It was very well built and cost a fucking fortune and Sony were claiming they were losing money on every one — it had been conceived in a moment of quite breathtaking hubris, as a top-end multimedia machine with the game playing feature almost thrown in as an afterthought. Didn't they originally want to charge £800 for it?

The rumours are that it'll be an IBM PowerPC 16 core processor. Is that x86?

Whose rumours? I'd find that extremely unlikely.

Why? Explain to the idiot please!

That was the spec leaked about the "Durango" project, which by all accounts is the next Xbox.

Is there any legal issues with MS cramming a Blueray player into the 720? Because that was one of the big reasons people chose a PS3 instead.

They have to buy a licence off Sony, which they apparently have. Which is... Strange.

Apparently the WiiU will use similar technology but not actual BluRay, so they'll have high capacity disks, but it won't function as a BluRay player.

Its what one magazine has rumoured, a google shows. I don't believe it. maybe someone said it's like a 16 core PowerPC.

Out of interest, why is it so unlikely? And if it happens to be true, are these things capable?

It's not a licence from Sony, it's a licence from the consortium that control Blu-Ray. Sony is a part of that consortium, but only a part.

The licence includes a per-device fee that has to be paid, which is why...

This is happening.

On a similar note, fresh installs of Windows 8 (even the ones with Media Center enabled) won't play DVDs, for the same reason (so Microsoft doesn't have to kick back to the DVD Forum). Upgrades inherit a licence for DVD playback from the previous version of Windows, however. Simples!

With the notable exclusion of the last set of consoles, PowerPC is pretty much a chip that's embedded devices only, since Apple dropped it in the middle of the last decade. And it's a ballache for devs who have to support x86/x64 on PCs to have to support a totally different architecture on consoles.

Aha! And, interesting stuff!

Yep, Nintendo have no interest in making anything other than a gaming machine, for better or worse.

Microsoft are still attempting to push digital, but I think they'd be cutting off their nose to spite their face if they didn't include a Blu-ray player. One reason they didn't last time is because there was no guarantee it was going to win over HD-DVD at the time.

Oh right - so PowerPC is a different thing to x86/64 altogether. Gotcha.

So another question - why do you guys reckon they'll go x86 over x64? Isn't x64 the future?

I remember Sony sinking millions into the cell architecture, and justified it by saying that they weren't just going to be used in playstations, but all sorts of consumer electronics and computers and things.

I guess that never happened. The Vita uses an arm microprocessor.

as an ovwrsimplification,
moat modern chips do both.and thw 64 bitness only teally needed with more than four gb of memory.

Thanks for the clarification, Dave.

What Dave said. Pretty much every chip out there today supports x86 and x64. The question is what mode the OS will run in. If you're not addressing more than 4GB of RAM+VRAM, then there's actually a small performance gain in running in 32-bit mode. I'd be surprised if the next XBOX had more than 2GB RAM and 1GBVRAM.

It all makes so much sense now.

(Seriously though, I get it! Cheers gang.)

You would understand it less if I let the autocorrection do anything.

What, even ARM ones?

Citation needed. Don't forget that x86-64 had a handful of extra registers. In my experience, that makes it run faster than x86/32, regardless of memory.

So would I.

I'm simplifying for the plebs (WTB), smartarse!

Wii plays DVDs, doesn't it?

He is a smartarse!

One more question, though! With regards to RAM. 2GB doesn't seem like a lot, but I've seen a lot of people saying that they'd be surprised if it has much more than that. In my experience of building PCs, RAM is cheap. Do consoles use some sort of special expensive RAM?

No. Same deal with the Wii. DVD in all but name, basically.

Nope.

The amount of ram in a console goes further than that in a pc for obvious reasons,so less os needed for equivalency.
Although more is always welcome.

Isn't that generally what happens with all new consoles? (the losing money bit).

The 360 was losing money also IIRC. The only thing that keeps them afloat for the first couple of years are the licensing fees on the games.

No - but the setup is designed not to need as much as a PC. Your PC is doing umpteen gazillion things at the same time, your console isn't. The games engines and the like are all optimised to be less resource hungry when running on a console than they are on a PC where you've not got similar resource limitations. So while RAM is cheap, every pound you can knock off the bill of materials means it's easier to offer a powerful console at an attractive price point.

2gb is heaps. When I built the sponsored PC "NFenix" I fitted 2gb of ram to it. Put on Windows 7 professional X86 and it was absolutely fine. I ended up with Quad SLI (2xGTX 295 co op) in there and the only thing holding it back was the CPU I was running.

With a console you don't have a plethora of crap running in the background. There's no fancy desktop, no Aero, no AV, no Steam. ETC ETC.

Ram prices have plummeted, but people have been getting carried away. There is such a thing as too much ram. It all needs addressing, and you can actually slow a system down.

The 4gb GTX 680 actually benchmarks slower than the 2gb version in all but Surround. Once you add three screens and the memory comes into use it claws back FPS.

But what about the new Xbox Dashboard? Presumably that'll be ramped up even further this time around and we'll see a proper "OS". Will that possibly result in more RAM being required? The current dashboard doesn't half creak on the 360.

Probably. But I still think that 2gb is more than enough. I mean let's face it, the new Xbox dashboard has to be optmised better than Windows

IIRC Windows 7 32 bit with Aero enabled shows about 890mb used when you boot into Windows. Mind you, again, I'm running MSN, Skype, Steam, MS SE, Acronis monitor and so on.

Most of the dashboard isn't in ram when a game is running.

An aside on the 32/64bit mode thing, there's a funky hybrid mode for userspace apps going into Linux that uses 32bit addressing but also all the 64bit registers and instructions. Best of both worlds.

is JC back?

And the billions of dollars that Microsoft had put aside for its gaming division.

Is he backwards compatible?

Yes, there is



Hrm. Perhaps. It has an overhead. It's basically overblown PAE, isn't it?

What? No. Extra registers are nothing to do with memory access. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64#Arc ... l_features

Okay, get out now. You've drank all of the tea, the biscuit barrel has only crumbs in it, and you're talking about stuff I don't understand.

Ah, the website has some numbers. Just barely slower than pure 32bit for memory (much faster than a 64bit program) and much faster than pure 32bit for 64bit ops (slightly slower than 64bit). Good compromise I reckon.

And a slideshow.

And yeah, WTB's right.