E3 guesses 2016
13 Jun 2016Just a few predictions and ideas for E3.
Hardware
First I’m going to say that Microsoft won’t announce an upgraded Xbox One this year. Assuming Sony are outselling by 2:1 that means there’s 60 million consoles out there that will be less powerful than the Neo, and since Sony aren’t allow developers to only target the Neo there’s no rush. I think 4 years is the closest between releases you want to go, 3 seems a little short to me.
While some people are claiming that Sony and Microsoft could change their specs depending on what the other announces this doesn’t make sense. Redesigning your APU isn’t a quick thing to do, silicon designs take months to go from final design to production ready, so changing your mind is going to cost you a lot of money and push any launch date back.
Both Microsoft and Sony are building their consoles from the same parts, so it’s easy for them to guess what the other is doing. If Microsoft would have been happy releasing their console with only 4GB of RAM, as Sony were, the Xbox One would have been GDDR5 based and would have been almost identical to the PS4. As they wanted 8GB, and GDDR5 wasn’t available in a sensible density during the design phase, their only choice was to go with DDR3, which lead to them needing a cache to compensate for the reduced bandwidth and since they couldn’t feed a bigger GPU it made sense to make it smaller.
In other words, assuming Microsoft move to GDDR5 for their next device (which I think is the only option) it’s just a case of working out what they want to price it and going backwards from there. The total price limits the price of the APU, which limits the die size, which limits the amount of space for the GPU. Tweaking the CPU makes things harder for developers as you need to divide the work up into ever smaller portions and then keep track of everything. GPUs are inherently parallel, but it’s mostly hidden from the developer, so you can scale this out as much as you want.
The PS4 Neo has a GPU that’s twice as big, and with TSMC going down from 28nm to 14nm, that allows more on the same size die. The amount of space for connecting everything together in the APU increases as well, so this prevents the GPU from being made four times as big, even though you can fit four times as many transistors in the same space. In the end, even though it’s got twice the GPU power the final size of the PS4 Neo’s die will probably be abou the same as the launch PS4, and probably around the same price.
Of course there comes a point where you run out of memory bandwidth to keep the GPU fed and at that point you have to redesign the whole memory system (and probably go for a wider bus), which would be a major change to make. I'm starting to wonder if it might make more sense to go for a split memory system, but I’ll write that up as a seperate post.
4K output
From the leak yesterday it seems Microsoft are adding 4K output support to the Xbox One slim and it’ll be interesting to see if Sony do the same. If they kept the PS4 slim with the same 1080p output it would give the Xbox version an advantage, assuming they price it sensibly, but I can’t see Sony leaving it out if Microsoft haven’t.
Other stuff
It seems that Microsoft are changing their branding a bit as well, I first saw this mentioned on twitter last week, and now the changes are everywhere.
All of Microsoft’s recent ads/videos that used to end with the ‘Xbox One’ and ‘Jump ahead’ bright green screen have been changed to just say ‘Xbox’, the tag line dropped, and now have ‘Xbox One’ and ‘Windows 10’ at the bottom instead. Almost like they’re going to make the Xbox brand cover all Microsoft related gaming, PC and console.
I'm wondering if they’re going to unveil an Xbox mode for PCs (that meet certain minimum specs) that uses boot to VHD to give a more Xbox like experiance. Whether it would run Xbox games is another matter, but they could easily mount your main disk and let you run UWP apps/games fullscreen with an OS optimised for gaming/tv use.
They could license this version at a lower price, then sell an upgrade to a full version of Windows 10 through the store. This would make a good competitor for Steam boxes, but it looks like they’re dead anyway so it’s probably not important.
What would be nice is if this rumored Xbox streaming box streams from the PC as well. The device that looks like it on the FCC site has Bluetooth support, which makes me think it’ll support keyboard and mouse as well.