
The Xbox One: Hardware Analysis & Comparison to PlayStation 4 - AutocorrectThis
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6972/xbox-one-hardware-compared-to-playstation-4
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UnoriginalGuy
My take away:

\- PS4 and XBox One are going to be similar hardware wise, with the PS4 having
an edge in raw power and the XBox One having an edge in "cleverness" (e.g.
memory caching) and power consumption (lower).

\- Microsoft is re-using Hyper-V in a very awesome way(!).

\- HDMI passthrough is Microsoft's "ace in the hole."

\- Developers are going to have a great time this generation thanks to how
similar the hardware is (identical in many cases).

I really want to know how Microsoft is able to run two hypervisors and offer
GPU acceleration to both concurrently. Is this part of AMD's new CPU+GPU on
one die magic, or is this something we'll see on the PC?

~~~
wmf
Using cleverness to get better performance than your competitor is an edge;
using cleverness to get the same performance in the common case but worse
performance in the worst case is poor design.

I suspect that HDMI passthrough will be a frustratingly unfulfilled promise,
as it is with Google TV.

Recent GPUs are virtualizeable (using multiple command queues); this is mostly
targeted for VDI or cloud gaming but unused in PCs.
<http://www.nvidia.com/object/enterprise-virtualization.html>

~~~
joenathan
I don't think it makes sense to compare the Xbox One to Google TV, Google TV
is very much a side project for Google which is obvious because they aren't
putting much effort behind it. While many people already use their Xbox for
streaming Netflix and Hulu, the HDMI passthrough is an extension of that.

~~~
georgemcbay
I think it makes sense in that the base technology is exactly the same. There
is really only so much you can do with HDMI + IR blaster (or for the lucky few
with very new TVs and/or set-top boxes) HDMI with CEC.

There are tons of edge cases you run into when you don't have full control of
the tuning stack. As one example (I can think of dozens easily):

Family has a single-tuner old school Scientific Atlanta DVR (still very
popular with cable operators despite being horribly obsolete). They set it up
to record a show, it is currently recording said show, person interacting with
the Xbox One does something to change the channel to one different than the
one being recorded on... oops! There is no way for the Xbox One to know this
is a potentially destructive operation for the DVR. At worst the DVR changes
the channel and loses half your show, at best the DVR is smart enough to
prompt you about this and stop the channel change, but how does the Xbox One
know this occurred? There are some high-end DVRs with APIs that exist in an
attempt to deal with situations like this but they are very few, very far
between and there are no standards for them.

Corner cases like this present themselves all the time with these HDMI-
in/HDMI-out devices like Google TV and they are inherent problems with the
current state of set-top box technology. No matter how many resources
Microsoft throws at this, the end result will still be kind of lame a lot of
the time and a far cry from the seamless experience you see in the on-stage
demos.

~~~
meta
I agree with you but for discussions sake...

What if this wasn't classified as a corner case? As you said - most MSOs are
running either an old Moto or old SA as their standard box. Because headends
are either Moto or SA there are actually very few unique STBs in the field.
And of those, they are all versions of the same OS that either Moto or SA have
been using for a long time.

If MS just threw a bunch of resources at common SA and Moto boxes to enumerate
and add special code to handle these cases... could it work? Would it be a
better experience? Is it worth it?

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erickhill
Took me a while to discover the meat of the article was hidden inside a drop-
down navigation system. I honestly nearly bailed thinking, "This is all there
is?"

What an awful idea. Thank goodness I saw it at the last minute.

~~~
guiambros
That's the experienced offered by most hardware review sites - AnandTech, DP
Review, Toms Hardware, Extreme Overclocking, etc. Certainly to pump up
pageviews, and thus generate more revenue.

Having said that, it is still bad design/usability. They could easily fix by
keeping the model of separate pages for each topic, but moving the content
from the drop down to an index at the bottom of each page, and also use
prev/next buttons.

~~~
ibrahima
Well, I feel like most of these hardware sites have pretty meaty pages so it's
not terrible that they split up their articles, as otherwise they'd be very
long pages. Especially Anandtech, some of their reviews are 15-20 pages long -
I wouldn't want to read that in one go. Though sometimes I just stick their
articles in Pocket and read it that way on my phone, so maybe I'm just
rationalizing a practice that I've just grown accustomed to over the years.

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kristofferR
> "The hard partitioning of resources would be nice to know more about. The
> easiest thing would be to dedicate a Jaguar compute module to each OS, but
> that might end up being overkill for the Windows kernel and insufficient for
> some gaming workloads. I suspect ~1GB of system memory ends up being carved
> off for Windows."

Microsoft actually confirmed that 3GB will be reserved for the OS while only
5GB is available for games. Check out the video at 9:44

[http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2013/05/21/in...](http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2013/05/21/interview-
with-xbox-ones-chief-product-officer-marc-whitten.aspx)

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AdrianRossouw
> Combine the fact that TV is important, with the fact that the Xbox 360 has
> evolved into a Netflix box for many,

i thought the ps3 was more widely used for streaming?

it's pretty fscking ridiculous that you need to have gold membership AND
netflix membership to stream with the xbox.

~~~
MacsHeadroom
>i thought the ps3 was more widely used for streaming?

Not by a LONG shot.

And you don't need gold membership to use the Netflix app on xbox. Also, the
Netflix app for xbox is much better than the PS3 app.

~~~
pandaman
According to Netflix PS3 is the most popular streaming device (not just out of
PS3 and 360 but all TV-connected devices).

<http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2412856,00.asp>

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rbanffy
It looks like the Sony machine will be more expensive (or its profit margins
will be a lot lower). The PS4 seems to have a lot more hardware under the hood
than the One.

Having said that, as I pointed out elsewhere, it's now how many things your
device does, but how well it does the thing that'll define its function. If
it's an entertainment system, it's how well it entertains people. If it's a
videogame, it's how fun the games it plays are.

~~~
sp332
Exactly, the developer experience is very important, and hardware is only an
issue if you're really pushing the limits. Differences in SDK made a huge
difference in popularity between the PS3 and the 360. Since the 360 handled
background music, matchmaking, and voice chat natively, devs had a huge head
start over competitors on the PS3. Helping out the devs had a direct effect on
the players' experience, which led to the 360's dominance in multiplayer
games.

~~~
tracker1
Yeah.. but it does look like MS is backpedaling in support of indie devs for
the XBox One.

~~~
rbanffy
OTOH, it seems developing for the One will be easy. At least, as easy as
developing for Windows.

Although I personally have little love for Visual Studio, most Windows
developers would never leave it.

Were it programmable in Lisp, I suppose developers would use it to read e-mail
and chat on IRC ;-)

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hadem
It it really necessary that the article be split between multiple pages. At
first I wondered, "where is the comparison" until I found the drop down
menu...

~~~
wmf
It is "necessary" in the sense that AnandTech would be out of business
otherwise.

~~~
hayksaakian
this feels like a real problem that some startup should solve.

clearly, websites that do this are shooting themselves in the foot in terms of
UX, for the sake of pageviews and ad impressions. Is there now better way?

~~~
jasey
The other model is a paywall.

When I worked for a publisher there was a long debate over UX vs page views
and ad impressions.

I think Google has rules around how you can load ad's also so it might not be
posible to do anything dynamic. Google has all the ad inventory so is the
dominant player.

~~~
hadem
This makes me wonder further. Did you see higher bounce rates when using
multiple pages? If so, did the ad revenue brought in by displaying ads across
multiple pages out-weigh the higher bounce rate? Honestly curious about the
pros and cons.

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programminggeek
The only reason I could see that Microsoft would make the choices they did was
to save on cost or to be easier to scale up to 10's of millions of units a
year by getting higher/cheaper chip yields faster than Sony can with basically
identical chips. The only way that Microsoft can capitalize on that advantage
will be to actually have a lower price faster since they don't have a one year
head start this time.

Nintendo's only shot right now is to cut price on the Wii U.

Just remember that historically the magic number for console sales is $199.
That's why the Xbox 360's entry price is $199 now and the Wii worked so well
at $249 with a bundled game (basically $199 console + pack in game).

Mobile devices the sweet spot is more like say $150, which is why the DS did
better than the PSP, 3DS than the Vita and so on.

Price makes a huge difference on consumer products and getting to certain
price points can be the difference between success and failure other things
being basically equal.

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aclevernickname
So, I have a Linux Desktop PC, with 8GB of RAM, and an AMD A10 processor. I'm
running XBMC (or LXDE or Front Row), and running 5 VM's on it under KVM. Cost
about $450 when I bought it. price is about $570 now.

I've had this setup (with a slightly slower AMD proc) for over 2 years, and
I've been running BSNES, Dolphin, PCSX2, Nestopia, and MAME fairly regularly.
Today's announcement informed me that I've been enjoying much of the next-
generation gaming experience already, without any of the DRM Sony and
Microsoft promise to include with their systems.

~~~
joenathan
>I've been enjoying much of the next-generation gaming experience already.

You can't be serious. Although you can very soon be enjoying the next-
generation gaming experience, what's exciting to me about this as a PC gamer
is that all next gen games will be designed with x86 in mind, which should
make porting trivial compared to this generation.

~~~
teamonkey
Porting from console to PC is trivial. Getting it working well on an infinite
number of configurations is not and supporting it is expensive.

~~~
joenathan
That's what abstraction layers are for, think Direct X and OpenGL.

~~~
teamonkey
Those certainly help port it to the PC, but they don't guarantee it will work
well on every combination of components.

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michielvoo
I understand that native Xbox 360 games will not run on Xbox One, but games
developed using XNA should be able to run if Microsoft ports the CLR to Xbox
One no?

~~~
teamonkey
XNA has been discontinued. I wouldn't expect Microsoft to port the CLR.

~~~
InclinedPlane
The Xbox One runs on x86 hardware though, porting the CLR would be rather
trivial. Indeed, the CLR probably runs as part of the apps VM.

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fuzzywalrus
It's an interesting break down but ultimately the software will be the
ultimate factor.

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qompiler
tl;dr:

Sony PS4 has a better CPU and GPU

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godgod
There is no way in hell I'm going to buy the Xbox one always online spy box.
Skype has a backdoor.

