Leaked Xenon spec looks genuine, say experts Comments by Games Industry.biz

One thing I've been wondering about regarding backwards compatability, is that Microsoft could do something really smart: Release an emulator disc.

See, this document states that even if the hard-drive is not included in the retail box, you can definitely buy one as an add-on component. Going by that, Microsoft could develop an emulator that you buy (For a modest fee) and then install onto the hard-drive, effectively allowing you to run Xbox games. After all, backwards compatability would require a working hard-drive, and then you could just copy over your save games with a memory card.

That's the solution I suggest, anyway.

Christ, I'd love to see the cooling on this thing.

Whilst the 3.5ghz are on a single die, that things going to put out some serious heat. The current dual 2.5s in the Power Macs are liquid-cooled just to keep the temperature down. Add a nice fast video card to be cooled, plus PSU, plus the main board....

Small footprint on this one ? I get the feeling....no.

That's... that's friggin powerful!

Aye, and like Nem I'd like to see the cooling on that thing!

I prophesy they'll try and make it look like a posh DVD player - large, flat, silver, sparkly lights...

No, that's a UFO, isn't it.

I thought he PS2 netwok card was 100mbit already. Mine seems to transfer at 100mbit from Xbox to PC, and about half that the other way.

Was just thinking. I imagine some sort of entire case is a heatsink situation.

Nem is right, those 3 cores are going to really pump out the Watts.

Yea...hmmm...sounds great.....But seriously Ram will be the major issue here. The processor and graphics will be next to useless with only 256Mb of ram and what is the point of a cpu with 3 g5 cores? Especially if they are all sharing a 1mb on board cache. To manage that they would have to be synchronised via a memory bus and that makes having 3 cores a bit stupid as they will still access the cache in serial to avoid problems with instruction fetching and don't get me started on just how the hell a game will synchronise what runs on which core!

Let me spell it out to any non programmers. Currently games run as a loop. This loop does more or less the following things one after the other:-

1. get user input
2. process user input
3. update enemy AI based on 2. or preset routines (patrol routes etc)
4. sound processing
5. graphical tasks such as deciding visibility sets, scene graph stuff etc, again based on player position, sso based on results of 2.
6. rendering scene

and then loop and repeat the process again. In a multithreaded (three cores no less!) environment, the loop could be.

1. get user input
2. process user input
3. spawn a thread to do this after 2 completes -> update enemy AI based on 2. or preset routines (patrol routes etc)
4. spawn a thread to do this after 2 completes-> sound processing
5. spawn a thread to do this after 2 + 3 complete -> graphical tasks such as deciding visibility sets, scene graph stuff etc, again based on player position, but also on AI results for enemy movement.
6. rendering scene can be done while sound processes but that's what sound chips do currently anyway!

Are Microsoft a bunch of bloody morons or what!

That there's a whole lotta computing power... but I must add to the critics - the G5 isn't terribly geared towards graphics, now is it? Wouldn't it make more sense to just have two or three GPUs instead of three CPUs and do like that Alienware thing and render one half of the screen each?

Or maybe MS is just doing it like this to make ABSOLUTELY sure that their console will be the "most powerful" again. :)

It'll make for a console with one hell of a longevity, too. Maybe five years after release there'll actually be a game that'll push it.

Is it really going to be called the Xenon?

/does not understand technobable

Ok SCEI, beat that! :D

I don't think that MS will suffer worse than Sony because of this parallelism, especially taking into account that they have a lot more experience with software development.

Yeah, I don't think anyone is arguing that PS3 (or N5 for that matter) is going to be easier to develop for than Xbox 2. Although, I think it's fair to say that all three systems are going to be characterised by extremely well-implemented libraries and heavy use of middleware style tools. Sony is already migrating that way with PSP, Microsoft is pushing its development platform in that direction under the XNA banner, and Nintendo has always vaguely followed that model anyway.

Problem is, Microsoft are going to be asking people to solve these technical problems - and more important, to start creating assets for next-gen - well over a year before they'd have to start thinking about doing so for PS3. There's the crux really. It's not a question of how hard development will be - at the end of the day, if there's money to be made on a platform, people will develop on it - it's a question of when it's going to be worth investing those resources.... Economics, not technology.

Erm, my XBox is 100mb - Full Duplex as well I believe.

Can whoever said "Why don't they include Gigabit?" explain why on earth you'd need such speed outside of a heavy loaded server?

Ahab is my favorite Eurogamer of all time.

um to all you doubters about the ram, as you should know by now, it's likely to be of the highest quality having 256 ram Pc 3200 will still be miles faster than 1gb of pc 133. And a console doesn't need a huge amount of ram because it is just running the game and not an operating system behind it allow it to work in a way in which it uses all of it's ram on the game which I assure you doesn't ever happen on a PC. An example I can give you is try playing Halo at the level of quality on the pc with the same specs as the xbox or a game similar in level to riddick. Basically you can't.

I think Mr Sony is right to wait MS out, let Xenon be first off the starting line...

Wait 12 months then launch PS3, mass market will have the common misconception that PS3 will naturally be more advanced as it launched later...

Having both an Xbox and PS2 and being an early adopter I thought I would be more excited thinking of getting my hands on a Xenon and PS3...

However horsepower even today does not a good game make, given the franchise milking and swathe of low quality titles out there now for the current platforms I hold little hope that these new boxes will bring with them a utopia of quality software titles that are not rushed out to make the accountants happy... *cough*Driv3r*cough*

Theese specs point to a very similar architecture to the PS2. Looks like M$ is learning. ;)

edit: I am an anti-M$ fan, but this looks very good!

Smells like hype to me...


#D-D-Don't believe the hype!

No, that's a UFO, isn't it.

8U7 C@N 17 FLY @ 5PAC35H1P???????

So what is all the CPU power for? After all, the Xbox delivers pretty convincing results with a rather humble processor.

I thought the GPU was much more important. And doesn't a 500Mhz GPU seem underpowered compared to the CPU power? To a non-techhead like me it seems like they will increase the CPU tenfold, while the specs of the GPU will just be doubled.

From an artistic point of view, GPU technology is reaching a plateau, all that's left is to squeeze a few thousand more polys and add some handy shaders. What developers really want at the moment is more processing power to run AI and physics. They also want the extra memory to hold the data for numerous NPCs and the giant environments to house them.

Well, it'd be extremely nice if developers finally started to catch up in terms of AI, but that's a pretty optimistic view, no?

Besides, I can't quite see the "plateau". Just look at the shots of the new Unreal engine, for instance (edit: alright, you wrote artistic plateau). I can't imagine Microsoft "sacrificing" further advancement in graphics, if only technically, for AI/physics etc. though.

And I remember the specs of the Xbox GPU were quite impressive (compared to PC cards) when it was launched, while a 500 MHz GPU looks, to an amateur like me, not really impressive compared to the new generation of GPUs for PCs now, let alone when the Xbox 2 will be launched.

Wait 12 months then launch PS3, mass market will have the common misconception that PS3 will naturally be more advanced as it launched later...


Well it wasn't a misconception in this console cycle but it didn't really help MS or Nintendo did it?

BTW Nintendo is somwhere right quiting the HW performance race. Because where will this lead to? For an example: Kojima said that almost nothing will change. A big macho like guy still blows up everything until he's life gauge reaches zero. ;)
$ony and M$ is investing tons of money into a new high tech console, but will games change, too?
I mean a little more realistic and smooth shadow effect isn't worth all this investment, is it?

How much will this cost? I'm sure those 3 GPUs won't be cheap. Anyway, specs are not very useful for comparison because each console uses a different architecture. Xbox and Xbox2 can't even be compared easily.

I think Nintendo's philosphy isnt launch as early as possible its launch as near to PS3 and whipped up with all the hype. If MS launch this beast too early I think punters will be left cold and await Nintendos and Sony's doings, after all the next gen battle doenst offically start until Sony enters from a publics point of view.

Ahab, MS is not the only one making nice software tools though, since Sony and IBM are a powerful combination and IBM has a lot of experience in making software development tools for high-end systems.

For example they seem to be making content creation tools for Cell:

Sony and IBM take on digital content creation with Cell workstation

Edit: link clickable :-)

That's a great article :-)

Ahab:

> and refined in a highly competitive environment

Wrong! This environment is not competitive.

Intel rules the personal computer sector and IBM rules the mainframe sector. Both of them are just making money without developing in new directions (making a little faster clones of x86 based and rs6000 based architectures) . Even Mac and Sun has a so small install base compared to their's.
Theese days backward compatibility (caused by software) and "why risking, when you can make money with little development to" approach holds back HW evolution.
A new x86 with 200 MHz more is no evolution at all. ;)

So I hope Cell will change things.

edit:
Well, this is interesting, but when looking at games (and gameplay)...
...I don't care about HW. ;)

aabyssx, RE competitive - I think Ahab was refering to the high performance CPU not the desktop CPU

And the Cell being a massive leap forward in performance? Not a chance.

Sounds cool. Although I dread to think how big it'll be and/or how much it's going to cost at launch.

Nice to see 'em addressing other areas of the system that lack compared to current PC technology rather than just focussing on the graphics - that's a bastard lot of processing power under the hood. Should make for some tasty improvements in AI, etc.

ssuellid: Rumors talk about terraflops in case of Cell. If only the half (fourth) of it is true...

Well, already a rumor, so let it grow a little: ;)
Don't forget that IBM is going to use Cell in servers, too. And $ony and IBM (and Toshiba) is an unusual ~alliance~. Something must be behind...