Next Xbox "to have 16 core processor"

[Vigormortis]

Congrats people! Die-hard console fans will finally have a piece of hardware vastly better than any PC gamer!

Granted, it'll cost you (likely) more than $8000 USD, but hey. At least you can say it's faster and more powerful than any PC gamers rig, right?

Or maybe...just maybe...this is yet another bit of bullshit rumor that deserves to be ignored. Seriously people, the console crowd has been trolled harder in the past month or so than the Half-Life fans have been for the past four years. We really need to stop giving credence to this stuff.

I'm doubting even the dev-builds of the new consoles have that many cores. It's just excessive to the point of being ludicrous.

 

[Robert Ewing]

Wow, that's a lot of grunt, It doesn't really seem financially viable though, hmmmm.

 

[Vigormortis]

Wanted to add, I'm waiting for the next rumor to spring forth that says the new consoles will have four mother-boards, thirty-six controller ports, and will have integrated holo-decks. Just you wait.

 

[Alpha Maeko]

The highways on a motherboard only have so much bandwidth... so... 16 cores won't necessarily equate to four times the performance if the HDD/SSD and the RAM and the GPU can't keep pace. Then there's the actual games and how well they're optimized to take advantage of it.

This speculation is ridiculous. I doubt the next xbox will be any more then twice the raw power of the current xbox, CPU wise.

 

[Waaghpowa]

Am I the only one who was reminded of this?

I'm glad I don't watch this show...

 

[MercurySteam]

16 cores? Someone try running the Heaven DX11 Benchmark on max see if it breaks.

And what makes you think a 16-core CPU can break a GPU benchmark?

I was talking about the console itself unable to do it, not the benchmark. You see what I'm getting at?

Okay then let me rephrase;

And what makes you think a GPU benchmark can break a 16-core CPU?

Good job I just invested in an upgrade for my computer, I now have 20GB of Ram, and 34 core processor, and a small nuclear reactor to power it.

I see what you did there. Also, 20GB of system memory isn't that much considering Z68 mobos support up to 32GB and X79 mobos support up to 64GB.

 

[black_knight1337]

God these rumours are hilarious. 16 core cpu? just no. I can see them having 6 maybe 8 but thats pushing it. The gpu is a bit more reasonable, the 7000 series is possible. This all depends on when they actually want to release this stuff. For the cpu maybe in another 5 years or so, the gpu would most likely be suitable if its released with 1-2 years. idk what Ram is being suggested, but something like 8gb is reasonably within a year or two.

8Gb would be excellent but it may increase the price too much.

I doubt it. high quality ram kits that are 8gb are about $50 nowadays. So the price increase (if bought now) would be around $30. It's more likely going to be released next year or the year after so the increase would at the most be $20. I think thats incredibly reasonable considering the benefits they will receive from it.

 

[TorqueConverter]

16 core CPUs exist.. anywhere in the world?

Yes and no.

I highly doubt that they would be using 16 physical cores but rather a CPU with 8 physical and 8 virtual giving a total of 16 logical cores.

This is all hardware designed for a server which leaves it very skeptical.

Oh it is skeptical to say the least. I don't pretend to understand the purpose behind passing around a devkit to the developers, but I imagine it has something to do with the promotion of the nextbox to the developers. "Look at our future platform's potential. Don't forget about us." ect.

What hardware will the nextbox have? Who knows? What were the specs on the devekit passed around prior to the release of the Xbox 360? It's probably best to look at the past if we want to have any semblance of insight into the near future. I wasn't much of a PC gamer in 2004-2005 so were the specs of a high end gaming PC at that time? Were fast dual cores and 512 dedicated cards the standard of high end hardware at the time?

I fully expect the nextbox to be comparable to a contemporary high end gaming PC of today in terms of it's CPU and GPU partitions. What I don't understand is what importance a 16 or 8 core CPU over a CPU of similar power with fewer cores for nextbox. Will kinect 2 benefit from, or require, more cores and multi-threading? There's got to be a reason behind this push for more cores/threading in this devkit.

 

[White-Death]

That just sounds ridiculous, I mean, a Quad core is expensive, and eight core is REALLY expensive.A 16 core would be the price of a decent gaming PC!Yeah, I think they are going to stick with a 6-core or quad core.

 

[shintakie10]

I bet the power supply is the horn of a unicorn and the input device is injected directly into your brain.

I also heard a rumor that the new Xbox will be able to make you a sandwich, any type of sandwich at that, simply by tellin it to make you a sammich. Don't have the supplies for a sammich at home? No worries, its got built in 12G and orders it for you.

I may be makin that stuff up, but its about as plausible as Microsoft tryin to push out anythin remotely like these rumors.

 

[TorqueConverter]

Just watch, there will be rumours about it have 6 gigs of ram or something next.

it needs to have atleast that now days... 4gigs is starting to be on the very low end...

For PCs yeah, gaming consoles are still under 1 if I'm correct if not they aren't up past 2 or 3 yet. 6 for a gaming console right now would be overkill.

You are correct, current console memory is below 1 gig.

PC memory is utilized differently than the memory present on the game consoles. The Xbox 360's memory is shared as opposed to dedicated as you would see in a PC graphics card. The Xbox is a game console so in a nutshell it's shared memory, for all practical purposes, is dedicated towards gaming. Still, it's always nice to have more memory and especially when the life of these things exceeds 6 years on the same hardware specs locked in at birth of system. I would expect more than a couple of gigs of the stuff in the nextbox.

 

[Hunter65416]

It could be a doomsday machine of unlimited power and I still wont buy it if the DRM rumours are true..Probably arent true but im slightly worried that MS havent addressed it

 

[Phisi]

16 cores or 16 pseudo-cores, thread things? Windows thinks I have 8 cores when I really have 4 just each core is split into another 2 magical whojamawhatsits. Also remember that Sony and Microsoft loose money for every console they sell for quite a while. This loss is made up from games sold for their system.

 

[Griffolion]

-snip-

There was DDR and GDDR in the 360. The PS3 used XDR for it's system memory for the ridiculously low latency and GDDR for video.

-snip-

As I said, they'll attempt to balance affordability with performance. At the end of the day, MS and Sony want to create a gaming platform for the next 5 - 8 years that will be stable, capable and well serving.

-snip-

In a sense, they did, since Blu-Ray won the generation war over HD-DVD. And now, HD film sales are almost exclusively on Blu-Ray outside DD. Blu-Ray hasn't totally caught because of a combination of:

1 - Hefty price gap between itself and DVD
2 - Going on from 1, the price gap would be justified if in-built up-scalers in BD players wouldn't make DVD look near blu-ray quality.

Still, despite it being a bit of a Pyrrhic victory, it's still victory for Sony non-the-less.

Congrats people! Die-hard console fans will finally have a piece of hardware vastly better than any PC gamer!

You're joking, right..?

 

[blackrave]

What console developers did wrong was took more expensive faster RAM, instead of little slower, but cheaper RAM. They could keep same price, but have more MB for RAM.

It's not faster, it's higher bandwidth. Good for when you're doing bulk parallel processing... not so good when you're not.

My bad, I was convinced that XBox360 had 1Ghz DDR3 RAM
After some wiki-digging (wikging?) and self education I must admit that 700Mhz isn't that impressive

 

[EvilMaggot]

and no game still supports it... not even the PC's with 4 cores or higher. most games today dont know how to fully use all cores.. so it would be waste.. and just for them to use "we got more cores meh meh meh"

 

[Euskalduna]

Something tells me this is not going to be cheap, but atleast if it stops from self destructing every 3 nanoseconds then it just might be worth it.
On a side note, I was raised in Durango.

 

[SeeIn2D]

It'll still run like shit because Microsoft will outsource everything to suicidal Chinese workers and the consoles will still break down at the hint of a small breeze.

I don't know why but that made me laugh lol.

OT: I don't think it'd be so surprising for the new Xbox and Playstation to have really powerful processors just because with new technology arising so quickly and everything, they won't want to have obsolete systems when like 7020p comes out as a resolution or whatever. I don't think we'll see games using that amount of power initially but as technology gets better in TVs and such, I think they will want to give developers the power to develop games towards those new resolutions and such.

 

[mad825]

What hardware will the nextbox have? Who knows? What were the specs on the devekit passed around prior to the release of the Xbox 360? It's probably best to look at the past if we want to have any semblance of insight into the near future. I wasn't much of a PC gamer in 2004-2005 so were the specs of a high end gaming PC at that time? Were fast dual cores and 512 dedicated cards the standard of high end hardware at the time?

I fully expect the nextbox to be comparable to a contemporary high end gaming PC of today in terms of it's CPU and GPU partitions. What I don't understand is what importance a 16 or 8 core CPU over a CPU of similar power with fewer cores for nextbox. Will kinect 2 benefit from, or require, more cores and multi-threading? There's got to be a reason behind this push for more cores/threading in this devkit.

I don't think that there's going to be much improvement, the problem with High-end PCs today are that they produce alot of wasted power; heat, efficiency has been very poor. This has been too much of an issue with the latest gen (emphasis on the 360). GPUs are the devils sidekick in this matter alone.

Also, this is the future of transistor CPUs, the only real way in which CPUs can be drastically improved in terms of performance and efficiency is by increasing the number of cores. We are moving ever so near Moore's law.

That all said, Microsoft used a tri-core (3 physical/logical), a bloody tri-core in the 360.

 

[Waaghpowa]

That all said, Microsoft used a tri-core, a bloody tri-core in the 360.

Actually, I think it was a quad with a core locked down to reduce cost.