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Rumored Chinese Forum Xbox720 specs: 8CoreCPU,8GB,HD8800GPU,W8,640GBHDD

iceatcs

iceatcs

Junior Member
gaming_noob said:
In this thread? Where? All I see are people commenting on how good the MS tools have been and how they believe it will transition to next gen. That does not translate to PS3/Vita tools = bad.
Click to expand...

Everywhere and everyday. It is common to heard people said Sony always has poor documentation.
 
B

bigtroyjon

Member
iceatcs said:
Are you for real? There are numbers of posts about how bad Sony provide to devs. Fact of this truth or not is doesn't matter.
Crazy assume by from Brad. No one know that yet.
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lol, so it doesn't matter if it's true that Sony has a history of providing substandard support?

I think you forget to deflect the negative Sony posts by talking about your obsession with MS PR.
 
P

pharmboy044

Member
bigtroyjon said:
lol, so it doesn't matter if it's true that Sony has a history of providing substandard support?

I think you forget to deflect the negative Sony posts by talking about your obsession with MS PR.
Click to expand...

History can change and reading developer feedback regarding Vita tools, it looks like it is changing.
 
JonathanPower

JonathanPower

Member
Brad Grenz said:
If the PS3 had launched with dev tools just as good as the 360's, it still would have been a bigger pain to program because the underlying hardware was more complicated. If MS is shipping the Durango with more complicated underlying hardware than Orbis, the quality of the dev tools won't necessarily make up for that fact, especially when Sony has reached near parity (reportedly) with the tools for their last two platforms.

Trying to keep 8 cores fed alone, versus 4 on Orbis alone would pose certain challenges, but if they're also adding multiple, additional (programmable?) exotic hardware blocks to the system that is an additional challenge. If all that' automated, I might question the utility or desirability of what they add, and if they're highly flexible the burden will be on the programmers, which makes me wonder if they wouldn't simply prefer a 50% more powerful GPU.
Click to expand...

I think that using 4 more powerful cores is a better solution as it would be much easier to program for, without to mention that it would be more cost-effective to produce. Ms is not stupid and if 4 cores are a better solution, they are never going to use 8 cores, regardless of what the rumor says.
 
JonathanPower

JonathanPower

Member
Reiko said:
It's not like this is new for Sony... Before they went insane with exotic hardware... The original Playstation was easy to code for.
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Yeah, if the Ps4 will use an x86 provessor and an AMD GPU, then it would be easy for Sony to provide good tools for such a standard hardware.
 
C

Can Crusher

Banned
I'm sure Sony will have proper documentation this time around, specially considering the less exotic hardware, and improvements to their own dev tools as seen in Vita and as result of their initiative with the PS3 when they got their 1st party studios working on them.

That said, in MS's case, I'm not worried about an exotic architecture. MS has been working on the HW for a long while, and at the same time they have been working on on dev tools for it. You can read talks about auto threading compilers coming from MS for example, and you understand this isn't Kutaragi and the Cell, where the hardware is just going to be put out there naked.

JonathanPower said:
I think that using 4 more powerful cores is a better solution as it would be much easier to program for, without to mention that it would be more cost-effective to produce. Ms is not stupid and if 4 cores are a better solution, they are never going to use 8 cores, regardless of what the rumor says.
Click to expand...

Yeah but maybe MS doesn't agree with you. Does that make them stupid?
 
K

KageMaru

Member
Brad Grenz said:
I'm not trying to make multithreaded development sound hard. I'm suggesting that having to develop for a many core processor AND program additional, heterogeneous cores of varying types (which we are being told may be necessary to get good performance on the system), could be more complicated and less straight forward than Orbis development, no matter how good Microsoft's tools and documentation are.
Click to expand...

I doubt they'll have much problem with the 8 cores. All that time with the 6 and 8 threads in the 360 and ps3 respectively have given them some good practice on handling multiple threads.

As for the additional custom hardware, that will depend on how easy the tools are to understand and good documentation hopefully with examples how to best use this hardware. If devs think the extra performance is worth the time, they'll use it early on.

Regardless how devs shoot for parity, they still use the unique hardware features in each system. No different than devs using the SPU and PCF support in the PS3 or tessellator unit and MEMEXPORT in the 360.

I think both will have good tools. In the end they'll go with the dev environment that gives them the quickest results.
 
S

spwolf

Member
iceatcs said:
?

I'm not the one who ask for this. You and mrklaw were asking. Just because you were discomfort with my comment.
Don't worry and be happy, ignore me if you want to.
Click to expand...

as much as we know, ps2 and early ps3, these days Sony provides a lot of free tools and SDKs for PS3 development

nevertheless, 720 will be easier to develop for sure, as it seems to be based on Win8... but that doesnt mean that PS4 will be like PS2 as PS3 is already much better.
 
S

specialguy

Banned
S

specialguy

Banned
it seems to be out there, the rumor is one of the "custom blocks" is a blitter. (Another being audio DSP).

I dont even really know what a blitter is. Seems to be something from the past, but I guess it's now in next gen form.
 
E

ekim

Member
specialguy said:
it seems to be out there, the rumor is one of the "custom blocks" is a blitter. (Another being audio DSP).

I dont even really know what a blitter is. Seems to be something from the past, but I guess it's now in next gen form.
Click to expand...

What seems to be out there?
 
eso76

eso76

Member
specialguy said:
it seems to be out there, the rumor is one of the "custom blocks" is a blitter. (Another being audio DSP).

I dont even really know what a blitter is. Seems to be something from the past, but I guess it's now in next gen form.
Click to expand...

Blitter ??
The Commodore Amiga had a blitter !
Some devs did amazing things with it.

From wiki:

In a computer system, a blitter is a circuit, sometimes as a coprocessor or a logic block on a microprocessor, that is dedicated to the rapid movement and modification of data within that computer's memory. A blitter is capable of copying large quantities of data from one memory area to another relatively quickly, and in parallel with the CPU, whilst freeing up the CPU's more complex ISA for more general operations.
Click to expand...
 
N

NemesisPrime

Banned
specialguy said:
it seems to be out there, the rumor is one of the "custom blocks" is a blitter. (Another being audio DSP).

I dont even really know what a blitter is. Seems to be something from the past, but I guess it's now in next gen form.
Click to expand...

Interesting...

Basically this would mean memory moving and sound processing without stress on the other systems. Points to a very specialised games/media system. I like that idea. A console should be foremost a specialised system, not a general purpose one.
 
THE:MILKMAN

THE:MILKMAN

Member
Certainly sounds like Durango is packed with tech.

8 core CPU (Jaguar?)
8000 based AMD GPU ~1.2TF
8GB DDR3 RAM
eSRAM
Audio DSP?
Blitter?
Arm core for security?

Anything else?
 
D

deadlast

Member
I really hope the MS lets me put my own HDD in their next system. I know they like having a closed system and up sale those HDD, but I would like to have more freedom in that area

Do we have any speculation on HDD being like the 360 or ps3 for the next system?
 
S

systemfehler

Member
mrklaw said:
128MB. They can do post process AA most likely, but with all the different passes you'll want to store multiple buffers in fast memory.
Click to expand...

Depends what they set as standard and if the want to use tiling again. 128MB will take a big part of the chip and the cost will rise quite a bit.
 
Ardenyal

Ardenyal

Member
THE:MILKMAN said:
Well raw flops don't tell the whole story anyway. aegies has been hearing that the GPU is "comparable with a 680" with all the assists/customisations.
Click to expand...

And it's probably going to need special attention which third parties can't be arsed to give (as was the case with Cell and SPEs)
 
gaming_noob

gaming_noob

Member
THE:MILKMAN said:
Well raw flops don't tell the whole story anyway. aegies has been hearing that the GPU is "comparable with a 680" with all the assists/customisations.
Click to expand...

Which is more powerful: GTX680 or HD 7970?
I was in a brief PM convo with someone on GAF who seems to have had confirmation that PS4 will have an HD7970 equivalent.
 
E

ekim

Member
THE:MILKMAN said:
Well raw flops don't tell the whole story anyway. aegies has been hearing that the GPU is "comparable with a 680" with all the assists/customisations.
Click to expand...

Well the mentioned 1.2 TFlops where the raw power specs in the alpha kit iirc. The same rumor suggested an actual 8x increase from the 360 flops. That would be 8x0.25 Tflop = 2 TFlops. Now add all the custom stuff and you'll get a monster machine imho.
 
T

TheOddOne

Member
This might be interesting:
jbhHJWfKvKW4MS.jpg
Click to expand...

Project started Feb 2012.
 
C

charsace

Member
REMEMBER CITADEL said:
More cores doesn't necessarily mean more complicated architecture for programmers to deal with. The number of cores was never the Cell's problem, it was the underlying heterogeneous architecture with a lacking memory subsystem that made keeping all the cores running without hitches a challenge. More hardware threads are welcome, and if Durango really puts such emphasis on seamless multitasking as the rumors suggest, a single application won't even have access to all those resources at once.

As for additional specialized hardware, it depends on what it is and how it's implemented. Xbox 360 also has some custom features not usually found in the PC world (eDRAM being the most obvious example; it also sports hardware tesselation, which was not common in desktop GPUs at the time), so that doesn't necessarily pose an obstacle either.




Indeed. Slower RAM has not been a problem for Xbox 360 because of the clever architecture. In fact, it ended up being a better and more flexible solution.
Click to expand...

I think it was the documentation and support that hurt the PS3 more so than the hardware being exotic. You have programmers that have been working since before API's, who coded in assembly at times, working with the PS3. When things were a real crap shoot. If Sony provided good support for development on the PS3 you would have had way less problems.
 
X

x-Lundz-x

Member
deadlast said:
I really hope the MS lets me put my own HDD in their next system. I know they like having a closed system and up sale those HDD, but I would like to have more freedom in that area

Do we have any speculation on HDD being like the 360 or ps3 for the next system?
Click to expand...

I just hope it comes with an SSD drive, or if not at least be compatible with one.
 
T

TxdoHawk

Member
deadlast said:
I really hope the MS lets me put my own HDD in their next system. I know they like having a closed system and up sale those HDD, but I would like to have more freedom in that area

Do we have any speculation on HDD being like the 360 or ps3 for the next system?
Click to expand...

No need to speculate: There is no way MS is going to do this. Furthermore, I'd bet heavily that Sony won't let you do this on the PS4 either. There is zero benefit to the manufacturers, letting the user do this is another security weakpoint, and the fat profit margins on accessories will be desperately needed, since both these consoles will almost assuredly be sold at a loss initially.
 
H

higherARC05

Banned
x-Lundz-x said:
I just hope it comes with an SSD drive, or if not at least be compatible with one.
Click to expand...

There will be a ssd.

Wait till you guys see how Microsoft is handling memory for your content.

You all have no idea.

Edit:

Well not a ssd but a storage device that offers speed like a ssd. ;)
 
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