Microsoft leaks details on XBOX 2

[John]

Microsoft more or less owns Apple so know they aren't

No they don't, they had a very small amount of NON-voting shares which
they've sold anyway.

BTW, those aren't Apple processors. They are IBM ones. I repeat they
are made by IBM for whoever wants them. Apple is probably the primary
vendor at the moment but others do in fact use them. I suspect they
were a good choice since MS needs them as cheap (wuth low power
consumption and heat output) as possible. They don't need to perform
that well as long as they're cheap... Intel and AMD processor may beat
the crap out of the IBM ones being used in terms of performance but
they cost to much, use too much power and output too much heat

No-one apart from Apple and IBM uses them so far.
AMD has licensed some of the fabrication process but thats about it
iirc.
Intel and AMD don't beat the crap out of the G5 and you have to ignore
the tests which have the competing OS's "in the way"
Go read

 

[xTenn]

person


You two tits are amazing. Being able to rip music to a hdd and have in-game
playback (required for racing games IMO) is what convinced some of us to
purchase Xbox in the first place. Is there *anything* MS could do that you
guys wouldn't happily pay *more* for?

Dr.z3n

Doc, you calling me a tit is more of a compliment than a lot of other people
calling me a fine person.

I bought the XBox to *play* games. I hope this vision of purpose continues
to thrive. This should be in the Mission Statement of the folks at the XBox
division. Otherwise I will find another place to get my fix.

I do enjoy an occasional custom soundtrack, and will use it if it is
available. I would also use a cupholder in a ferrari, but that would not be
my reason for buying it.

BL summed it up - give us the cutting edge GAMING features. Not the Tivo of
the week, of which there are becoming a plethora.

Only one more question, Doc - would you say we were nice tits?

 

[ammonton]

(e-mail address removed) wrote:
Isn't that a compiler issue?

No, an architectural one. Allegedly some parts (eg. the hardware
abstraction layer) are very dependent on endianness. My guess is that
the actual processor eventually used in the Xbox2 will support
little-endian.

-a

 

[Noodle Groover]

Nah I would still prefer a large H/D and the ability to record from other AV
sources i.e. TV, vid camera. This was mooted about some time ago and I was
really excitet about this. I thought MS intention was to dominate the home
entertainment market. Anyway thats my 2 cents!

NG

 

[Skijumptoes]

Quick question, Eric - outside of custom music (Which is not supported by
the majority of games, BTW. Not to mention that soundtracks agruably
should be part of the game inherent design and is part of what you pay for
when you purchase a newer game), how does a HDD make the gaming experience
better? This is assuming that the flash memory can download updates, levels
and of course game saves.

For starters a HDD would be way bigger than any flash memory
installed, and also a HDD can be used to spool huge areas like on
morrowind or halo.

 

[Tony Hill]

No-one apart from Apple and IBM uses them so far.

In the case of the PPC 970, yeah it's only Apple and IBM. However IBM
has quite a number of customers for their other PPC processors,
including Nintendo for the Gamecube. Most of these chips don't show
up on people's desktops though, but they are used a lot in routers,
in-car computers, PVRs, etc. Heck, those rovers driving around on
Mars use PowerPC processors (I don't know if they're made by IBM or
Motorola though).

In short, IBM has plenty of companies that might chose to use their
PPC 970 processor at some point in time, and likely some have already
done so. However chances are that you won't hear much about most of
them.

AMD has licensed some of the fabrication process but thats about it
iirc.
Intel and AMD don't beat the crap out of the G5 and you have to ignore
the tests which have the competing OS's "in the way"
Go read

The PPC 970 (aka G5) is a nice little processor. It performs very
comperable to the P4 and the Athlon64/Opteron chips. At 130nm
production they were all in the same basic ballpark for power
consumption as well, and while you couldn't buy PPC 970 chips on their
own, I would imagine that the price was pretty similar.

 

[kevin getting]

No-one apart from Apple and IBM uses them so far.
AMD has licensed some of the fabrication process but thats about it
iirc.
Intel and AMD don't beat the crap out of the G5 and you have to ignore
the tests which have the competing OS's "in the way"
Go read

Their is a very good reason why no other vendor has shipped a PPC 970
based system outside of Apple and IBM - IBM hasn't sold PPC 970's to any
other vendor other than Apple in 2003. I can't remember if it was due to
an exclusive contract or not. However, that contract has expired and
several Linux hardware vendors have announced PPC 970 products for release
later in the year.

 

[xTenn]

For starters a HDD would be way bigger than any flash memory
installed,

Not sure how that applies to the topic...

and also a HDD can be used to spool huge areas like on
morrowind or halo.

I would rather have memory in the machine and do INTELLIGENT caching for the
read, instead of heinous load times. You know, like Halo does on the fly
but with enough actual memory to pull it off even smoother. Spooling from
disk is sloppy code work, and ends up being slower that an efficeint
in-memory solution that actualy manages the data at hand. Caching is
wonderful, but spooling merely lets bad code run faster.

 

[Eric R.]

Quick question, Eric - outside of custom music (Which is not supported by
the majority of games, BTW. Not to mention that soundtracks agruably
should be part of the game inherent design and is part of what you pay for
when you purchase a newer game), how does a HDD make the gaming experience
better?

Aside from being VERY useful on a modded xbox, the real advantage of
such a large HDD is for game saves. I have about 20 game saves in
KOTOR that I want to keep. That's about 500 MB worth of saves for that
game alone. I also have a lot of big saves for Morrowind and many
other games. Thanks to the size of the xbox HDD, keeping them
indefinitely isn't a problem.

Now, there is no way all these saves would fit on a mere Gig of flash
memory. And I hate to think how much $$ it would cost to try and put
them all on memory cards (not to mention that memory cards are
notoriously unreliable for storage). Taking away that HDD would force
me to delete a lot of my saves. Having that big HDD means never having
to worry "Do I have enough space for this save? Is it worth buying all
these memory cards for these saves?", etc.

What's more, games for the xbox2 would likely require even MORE space
than they already do on the xbox1. A gig or two of flash memory isn't
going to even come close to a good HDD.

This is assuming that the flash memory can download updates, levels
and of course game saves.

Only if the flash memory is as big as a large HDD (i.e., not ****ing
likely).

-Eric

 

[xTenn]

Nah I would still prefer a large H/D and the ability to record from other AV
sources i.e. TV, vid camera. This was mooted about some time ago and I was
really excitet about this. I thought MS intention was to dominate the home
entertainment market. Anyway thats my 2 cents!

NG

Don't get me wrong - such a device is way cool, but IMHO it needs to be
outside of the central gaming unit itself.

Just 1 question - what if you have it set record the latest episode of 24 et
al and decide you want to play? Do you wait for the gaming or kill the
recording, even though you will be missing information for next weeks show?
Or do you give up and watch the show, which means you are not playing and do
not need the recording after all. Either way you will have to make a
choice.


The answer "I do not like 24" is not acceptable.

 

[Dr.z3n]

Doc, you calling me a tit is more of a compliment than a lot of other people
calling me a fine person.

I'm glad you two had the sand to take it the right way.

I do enjoy an occasional custom soundtrack, and will use it if it is
available. I would also use a cupholder in a ferrari, but that would not be
my reason for buying it.

BL summed it up - give us the cutting edge GAMING features. Not the Tivo of
the week, of which there are becoming a plethora.

In all likelihood, this is academic. I'm guessing the next version will
have a HDD, even if it's only an 8GB (or whatever it cheapest). It's not
only for soundtracks, either. Just because most developers aren't using the
HDD doesn't mean we have to cater to them. Most developers don't support
Live, either.

Only one more question, Doc - would you say we were nice tits?

That would violate my 'don't ask-don't tell' policy. Now run along you
perky lads.

Dr.z3n

 

[Walt]

Ah, that is the difference in our perspective.

Here in the USA, the switch to HDTV is mandated by law,
and everyone here will be forced into HDTV in 2006.

Even our kids.

 

[Noodle Groover]

stuff solid state I WANT MY H/Drive

and


Granted, to properly use Flash memory you need to erase before a write, but
these type of manipulationas pale in comparison to the mechanical movements
of reading a simple file. I could throw out the MTBF for a typical compact
flash card (1,000,000 hours) in this comparison, but more importantly is
the number of erase cycles for typical flash (1,000,000 ), which does show
that flash has a set use.

There are limitations - I still would not in any way suggest using flash
memory as a swap drive for windows (I pity the hard drives that do this
every day - they can hit many, many writes in a short time for this
half-a**ed but necessary use ), but we are talking about the mechanics of
storage only.

So, in short, I agree about the limited number of writes in certain
conditions, but for game consoles I can't see a problem.

A side note - I have accidently had a 512m memory card go through the wash
TWICE - I still use it today. I don't think I would try that with an
average 2.5 hard drive.

( Don't get me wrong - I am still completely impressed with the quality of
the average 2.5 hard drive - it can stand many Gs of force (IIRC 200 active,
800 inactive typical) and the price keeps coming down. And to add to this
are new Active Protection drives that autopark the heads when freefall is
detected, and it is all wonderfully cool, ESPECIALLY considering where it
all started.... But I can't see the lack of one of these in a console to be
detrimental if sufficeint storage space (with a higher MTBF) is to be had
otherwise. )

P.S. - I ignored your followup location - the microsoft server does not
support alt.video.games.xbox. Hopefully you may still see this...

 

[Magill]

On 1 Feb 2004 08:49:18 -0800, (e-mail address removed) (R420) wrote:

[snip]

Compatibility with the original Xbox, which is based on Intel and
Nvidia chips, isn't guaranteed. Microsoft is concerned it would cost
too much money in hardware or in licensing fees to enable the Xbox
Next to play old Xbox games. This is risky in part because Sony's
strategy has been to maintain compatibility with its old consoles.

But not in hardware, this seems to have been largely
overlooked. The new PS3 hardware has *no* backwards compatibility
whatsoever, they're merely going to release a PS2 emulator with the
PS3! For me, it's a moot point, I don't buy a new console to play old
games! Same for PS2, the PS2 has *some* of the original PS1 hardware,
but mostly the PS1 compatibility is emulated, it's not supported in
hardware.
I'll wager we'll be seeing XBox & PS2 emulators on both
machines before too long, assuming their specs in the real world end
up being anything like the specs they advertise (unlike Sony's
bullshit they spouted about the ps2). I see Sony are back on their AI
trip.. claiming the cell is fast enough for "True AI".. lol, yeah..
right! 'Emotion Engine (mark 2)' perhaps

 

[Mike]

On 1 Feb 2004 08:49:18 -0800, (e-mail address removed) (R420) wrote:

[snip]

Compatibility with the original Xbox, which is based on Intel and
Nvidia chips, isn't guaranteed. Microsoft is concerned it would cost
too much money in hardware or in licensing fees to enable the Xbox
Next to play old Xbox games. This is risky in part because Sony's
strategy has been to maintain compatibility with its old consoles.

But not in hardware, this seems to have been largely
overlooked. The new PS3 hardware has *no* backwards compatibility
whatsoever, they're merely going to release a PS2 emulator with the
PS3! For me, it's a moot point, I don't buy a new console to play old
games! Same for PS2, the PS2 has *some* of the original PS1 hardware,
but mostly the PS1 compatibility is emulated, it's not supported in
hardware.
I'll wager we'll be seeing XBox & PS2 emulators on both
machines before too long, assuming their specs in the real world end
up being anything like the specs they advertise (unlike Sony's
bullshit they spouted about the ps2). I see Sony are back on their AI
trip.. claiming the cell is fast enough for "True AI".. lol, yeah..
right! 'Emotion Engine (mark 2)' perhaps

True AI? Now THAT would be intersting to see. (;

Mike

 

[Keith R. Williams]

Ah, that is the difference in our perspective.

Here in the USA, the switch to HDTV is mandated by law,
and everyone here will be forced into HDTV in 2006.

I don't think it's going to happen. The market is dragging it's
feet. Few want it (consumers nor broadcasters) and I don't see
it happening in two years. Lines in the sand have ways of being
blown about.

Even our kids.

Since they're not paying the bills, the financial equation is
rather easy for them. When they pay the bills they suddenly get
cheap. ;-)

 

[Phil]

Microsoft acquired Connectix for their Virtual PC software. At one
point this company did make Virtual Game Station which allowed you to
play PS1 games on the Mac. It went to court, there was long proceedings
and eventually Sony bought the right to develop/distribute it and
surprise surprise that was the last we heard of it.

You sure you aren't thinking of Bleem as Sony bought out that entire company.

 

[Phil]

Didn't they buy out the company that made the PS1 emulator for PC and
Mac? Not Bleem... the other one...

- Jordan

Hmmm thought it was Bleem :/ Ah well easily confused I suppose.

 

[Walt]

I believe you are quite right (as always).

The "trigger" for the mandated switch over, is that 80% of
households with a TV, have at least one HDTV, by 2006. That
is all or nothing. The current law doesn't allow for a fall-
back to check again for 80% in subsequent years (2007,2008,etc).

The industry convinced themselves, congress, and the FCC that
reaching that goal would be easy. This was based on their own
projections that there would be sub-$1,000 16:9 HDTV sets for
Christmas 2002, and sub-$500 16:9 HDTV sets for Christmas 2003.
You are right, the market is dragging its feet and hasn't
delivered on those price-target promises yet.

However, I am also quite sure that congress and the FCC will
suddenly declare that, for example, 25% is close enough to 80%
and pull the trigger in 2006 anyway. I am sure that their best
"creative accounting" budget people will be brought in, and
demonstrate with pie charts and bar graphs that 25% is actually
more than 80%.

 

[Keith R. Williams]

I believe you are quite right (as always).
Err...

The "trigger" for the mandated switch over, is that 80% of
households with a TV, have at least one HDTV, by 2006. That
is all or nothing. The current law doesn't allow for a fall-
back to check again for 80% in subsequent years (2007,2008,etc).

....and *not* going to happen.

The industry convinced themselves, congress, and the FCC that
reaching that goal would be easy. This was based on their own
projections that there would be sub-$1,000 16:9 HDTV sets for
Christmas 2002, and sub-$500 16:9 HDTV sets for Christmas 2003.
You are right, the market is dragging its feet and hasn't
delivered on those price-target promises yet.
....and...

However, I am also quite sure that congress and the FCC will
suddenly declare that, for example, 25% is close enough to 80%
and pull the trigger in 2006 anyway. I am sure that their best
"creative accounting" budget people will be brought in, and
demonstrate with pie charts and bar graphs that 25% is actually
more than 80%.

This is where I think you're wrong. The broadcasters don't
*want* HDTV, except in a few select markets. The consumers don't
*want* HDTV, because it costs real money (my cable bill went up
30% this last year without it). Congress isn't going to shut
down broadcasters as long as their constituents are watching TV.

Sen. Framis isn't going to tell his constituents that they *must*
fork over $1000 for a new TeeVee either. I can just hear my
congressman "it's just horrible", in his NJ accent.

Nope, not going to happen. The marketing is all wrong.