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.
Your comments (8) Click to add a new comment
linuxglobe
December 20th 2009
8. Why not have a 500GB or higher capacity SD-like card replacing DVDs AND Blu-Rays altogether?! Combine that with the fastest network that can stream films instantly! That would be so perfect!
Markus (linuxglobe on twitter.com | linuxglobemag.net)
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robert1966
September 10th 2008
7. Of course there will be another generation of consoles...and another after that...and another after that and...
Specialized hardware will ALWAYS outperform general purpose hardware. Games are computer performance driven experiences and we are not even close to being able to produce any interactive experience we can imagine.
You can always imagine (and then try to create) something more complex... more intense...needing more power, etc.
The only way consoles as they exist today would disappear anytime soon is if they become services where the graphics are sent (like a tv signal, but "narrowcast" to each user...you don't need graphics processing or anything like that locally..it just sends the images and sound already calculated remotely) from huge processing farms and sent to each user. Then you don't need hardly any processing on the client side. You just need something to process input and feedback and send those and the ability to receive same plus the video signal. The problem with such an idea (besides scalability) is response time. People are VERY finely tuned to notice delays in response. If I have to wait for some remote server farm to process my update and send it back, it will be noticeable.
The next gen of consoles will feature more of everything. More processing power, more graphics power, more RAM, more storage, better physics, better AI, etc. I know the popular thing to predict is the death of physical media, but I don't see that happening for quite a while (if ever). I do think the smart money though is on offering users a choice to buy either physical media or digital downloads of games. If I could buy a AAA title as either a store version for $59 or DD for $49 (provided there was a good way to transfer it to a new console if mine crapped out etc.) then I think that is something I would at least take advantage of some of the time. I imagine most people would. I think it would be particularly appealing for old catalog titles. If a game didn't interest me enough to buy it when it was new, but when it goes to the Platinum sellers and drops to $19.99, they should also offer the download version for $13.99 or whatever.
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neotechni
September 1st 2008
6. The KZ presentation http://www.develop-conference.com/developconference/downloads/vwsection/Deferred%20Rendering%20in%20Killzone.pdf
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1018853&postcount=1
"We will give in-depth description of each individual stage of our real-time rendering pipeline and the main ingredients of our lighting, post-processing and data management. We'll show how we utilize PS3's SPUs for fast rendering of a large set of primitives, parallel processing of geometry and computation of indirect lighting"
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neotechni
September 1st 2008
5. I agree with notsosilentbob. Using a 360 game is a poor example of space. What did you expect them to do? Remake the whole game to fill more space? If they made it for PS3 exclusively to begin with (like MGS4 and it's 50GB did) it would have taken more space
"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"
Actually it does. In the Killzone presentation they show they use SPUs to assist rendering. And other devs have offloaded culling to cell effectively doubling the polygon count.
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dosomo
September 1st 2008
4. The only person who thinks this is the end of consoles is Alex St. John, who coincidentally runs a company based around a virtual online "console" with subscription-based games.
Hmmm. I wonder why he might be hoping for the end of game consoles?
This just in: Print media thinks this whole "Internet" fad is going to blow over in a couple of years. They predict we will all be lining up at the newspaper stands soon!
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notsosilentbob
August 30th 2008
3. If your talking about Bioshock and Blu-ray you need to mention that Bioshock was built for the DVD9 medium. It was then PORTED to the Playstation 3. Thus it isn't built around the Cell and blu-ray, thus making your statement about blu-ray not needed unneed in this article. I suggest you show a NON biased assumption of what the next Xbox could be.
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