Post by Martin St. Louis on Aug 29, 2008 16:55:52 GMT -5
Everything you need to know about the next Xbox
'Xbox 720' could be the hottest gift for Christmas 2011
Will Microsoft launch its next-gen Xbox in 2011? There have been a couple of articles recently that have speculated on just that. We look at whether the 'Xbox 720' will feature a return to Intel chips, the inclusion of a Blu-ray drive, and more storage than you can ever fill.
A PlayStation 4 and potential 'Xbox 720' could arrive as early as 2011, estimates Crytek president and CEO Cevat Yerli. Industry analyst Colin Sebastian agrees, suggesting that "the general consensus amongst industry professionals is that a new generation of home consoles will arrive on the market in 2011 or 2012."
Terabyte storage for the Xbox 720?
We've already speculated about what Microsoft might be planning for its third Xbox – 16 or 32 processing cores (including onboard graphics), 8GB of DDR memory, broadband connectivity and a hard disk that delivers terabytes rather than gigabytes of storage space.
More storage is a given – Microsoft has recently launched the 60GB Xbox 360 Pro, while Sony has rolled out a 160GB PlayStation 3. Both consoles are trying to sell themselves as digital hubs and any future Xbox is going to need a huge amount of space to store downloadable movies and TV shows, demos and Live Arcade games. A 60GB hard drive is nowhere near big enough.
"One of the problems with the 360," Rockstar Games founder Sam Houser told 1UP, "is the fact that they don't have a significantly larger storage medium than the previous systems. It's a slightly bigger DVD disc... If we're filling up the disc right now, where are we going? It's not like our games are going to get any smaller."
The solution isn't just to add a Blu-ray drive to the next Xbox. The developers of Bioshock recently told videogamer.com that: "in terms of specific things, [Blu-ray] hasn't made much difference. The original game fits on a 360 disk so it wasn't like we were in need of room." The ability to run games from a massive hard drive renders the optical drive virtually redundant.
Xbox 720 to feature Intel processor?
Assuming that Microsoft isn't going to dumb-down the next Xbox in favour of a Wii-style family console, the next-generation of processors could give the Xbox 720 the muscle of a turn of the millennium supercomputer. A return to Intel technology might also be on the cards.
Because by 2012, Intel plans to have launched the 22nm die shrink of the Sandy Bridge architecture – that's the next architecture after Core i7 (aka Nehalem). According to TechRadar's resident chip-geek Jeremy Laird, this should see CPUs with at least 16 cores, each with two threads for 32 logical processors. We might even see chips with as many as 24 or 32 cores.
Graphics-wise, the current trend on the PC side is towards outsourcing more of the physics and AI work to the GPU. So a contender for Xbox 720 inclusion might be Intel's Larrabee processor.
With its multi-core x86 approach to graphics rendering, Larrabee is blurring the lines between traditional CPUs and GPUs. "It's not inconceivable that you might have a next gen Xbox with a relatively simple CPU," says Laird, "just a couple of biggish out-of-order cores, and then some Larrabee-like monster handling graphics, physics, AI and so on."
Why Sony's Cell might have got it right
Larrabee isn't just a graphics processor. It's a clever side bet by Intel on a possible future processing paradigm – highly parallel, massive floating point performance. Revolutionary? Not quite.
"The Cell processor was quite prescient," suggests Laird, "as it's philosophically similar to Larrabee. The problem is that the only workload on a console that is currently parallelised is graphics and that's the one thing the Cell doesn't do. Real-time physics and complex AI will become more important on consoles, as will more programmable graphics (ray-tracing is one example). So highly parallel and programmable Larrabee or Cell chips look like the way forward."
Considering that the next generation of processors could pack in several billion transistors, the next generation of consoles should be capable of some truly stunning high-definition games. Any new machine in 2012 will take full advantage of broadband for multiplayer and massively multiplayer gaming, social networking and media sharing.
But what if there is no next-gen console?
Acclaim boss Dave Perry recently suggested that Sony has "pretty much no chance of making money on the PS3" and will have to extend the console's lifespan. While Alex St. John, the CEO of games company WildTangent, predicts that: "we're looking at the last generation of consoles. There's not going to be an Xbox 720 or a PS4, I'll make that bet, not going to happen."
Sure, Microsoft can build a better, faster, more powerful Xbox. As Microsoft's Robbie Bach told 1UP: "people ask me how many people I have working on the next generation. On the one hand, it's everybody. On the other, it's nobody. People are continuously working on new technology."
The next question isn't necessarily 'what will the next Xbox look like?' but 'will there even be one?'
'Xbox 720' could be the hottest gift for Christmas 2011
Will Microsoft launch its next-gen Xbox in 2011? There have been a couple of articles recently that have speculated on just that. We look at whether the 'Xbox 720' will feature a return to Intel chips, the inclusion of a Blu-ray drive, and more storage than you can ever fill.
A PlayStation 4 and potential 'Xbox 720' could arrive as early as 2011, estimates Crytek president and CEO Cevat Yerli. Industry analyst Colin Sebastian agrees, suggesting that "the general consensus amongst industry professionals is that a new generation of home consoles will arrive on the market in 2011 or 2012."
Terabyte storage for the Xbox 720?
We've already speculated about what Microsoft might be planning for its third Xbox – 16 or 32 processing cores (including onboard graphics), 8GB of DDR memory, broadband connectivity and a hard disk that delivers terabytes rather than gigabytes of storage space.
More storage is a given – Microsoft has recently launched the 60GB Xbox 360 Pro, while Sony has rolled out a 160GB PlayStation 3. Both consoles are trying to sell themselves as digital hubs and any future Xbox is going to need a huge amount of space to store downloadable movies and TV shows, demos and Live Arcade games. A 60GB hard drive is nowhere near big enough.
"One of the problems with the 360," Rockstar Games founder Sam Houser told 1UP, "is the fact that they don't have a significantly larger storage medium than the previous systems. It's a slightly bigger DVD disc... If we're filling up the disc right now, where are we going? It's not like our games are going to get any smaller."
The solution isn't just to add a Blu-ray drive to the next Xbox. The developers of Bioshock recently told videogamer.com that: "in terms of specific things, [Blu-ray] hasn't made much difference. The original game fits on a 360 disk so it wasn't like we were in need of room." The ability to run games from a massive hard drive renders the optical drive virtually redundant.
Xbox 720 to feature Intel processor?
Assuming that Microsoft isn't going to dumb-down the next Xbox in favour of a Wii-style family console, the next-generation of processors could give the Xbox 720 the muscle of a turn of the millennium supercomputer. A return to Intel technology might also be on the cards.
Because by 2012, Intel plans to have launched the 22nm die shrink of the Sandy Bridge architecture – that's the next architecture after Core i7 (aka Nehalem). According to TechRadar's resident chip-geek Jeremy Laird, this should see CPUs with at least 16 cores, each with two threads for 32 logical processors. We might even see chips with as many as 24 or 32 cores.
Graphics-wise, the current trend on the PC side is towards outsourcing more of the physics and AI work to the GPU. So a contender for Xbox 720 inclusion might be Intel's Larrabee processor.
With its multi-core x86 approach to graphics rendering, Larrabee is blurring the lines between traditional CPUs and GPUs. "It's not inconceivable that you might have a next gen Xbox with a relatively simple CPU," says Laird, "just a couple of biggish out-of-order cores, and then some Larrabee-like monster handling graphics, physics, AI and so on."
Why Sony's Cell might have got it right
Larrabee isn't just a graphics processor. It's a clever side bet by Intel on a possible future processing paradigm – highly parallel, massive floating point performance. Revolutionary? Not quite.
"The Cell processor was quite prescient," suggests Laird, "as it's philosophically similar to Larrabee. The problem is that the only workload on a console that is currently parallelised is graphics and that's the one thing the Cell doesn't do. Real-time physics and complex AI will become more important on consoles, as will more programmable graphics (ray-tracing is one example). So highly parallel and programmable Larrabee or Cell chips look like the way forward."
Considering that the next generation of processors could pack in several billion transistors, the next generation of consoles should be capable of some truly stunning high-definition games. Any new machine in 2012 will take full advantage of broadband for multiplayer and massively multiplayer gaming, social networking and media sharing.
But what if there is no next-gen console?
Acclaim boss Dave Perry recently suggested that Sony has "pretty much no chance of making money on the PS3" and will have to extend the console's lifespan. While Alex St. John, the CEO of games company WildTangent, predicts that: "we're looking at the last generation of consoles. There's not going to be an Xbox 720 or a PS4, I'll make that bet, not going to happen."
Sure, Microsoft can build a better, faster, more powerful Xbox. As Microsoft's Robbie Bach told 1UP: "people ask me how many people I have working on the next generation. On the one hand, it's everybody. On the other, it's nobody. People are continuously working on new technology."
The next question isn't necessarily 'what will the next Xbox look like?' but 'will there even be one?'
www.techradar.com/news/gaming/consoles/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-next-xbox-461169?artc_pg=1