The Xbox One Thread - One X & One SXBOne

[dr_slump]

Hoho, what about an only US 2013 release? Rest of world a half year later or so...

 

[Wardez]

Rumor: Microsoft cancels E3 post press conference rountable with media.



We'll see if MS have a response to the news before/during E3. So far, Xbox One rumors are not positive.

Usually those post-conference roundtables are for spilling all the gritty details on how the systems really work. If this is true, it could end up being MS trying to avoid giving away controversial plans that can be widely considered to be anti-consumer or face tough questions about DRM, overheating problems, privacy concerns, and others they'd rather not have to address right away.

The most annoying part to me though, if this does end up being the case, is if we don't get the answers we're looking for, people that kept telling everyone to hold judgement and, "wait till E3," are simply going to switch to telling everyone to stop talking bad about the system to wait till launch. I can see it already, god damn.

 

[Eks]

"Xbox One being underclocked to deal with overheating issues:"

http://www.gamingvlog.net/2013/06/05/xbox-one-being-underclocked-to-deal-with-overheating-issues/

"TRUTHFACT: MS having eSRAM yield problems on Xbox One, RUMOR: downclocking GPU:"

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=576869

How come during the event, in which the console was on almost the whole time, the console wasn't having troubles? Or did it not start encountering problems until they started running games? Hmm..

Hopefully this doesn't mean 5 years of hardware failure...

Edit - Also, what are "yield problems?"

 

[RACECAR]

If this rumor is true, then Microsoft are not at all helping themselves out. People already have massive doubt in them after their unveiling and with more of these negative rumors popping up, they aren't putting anyone at ease.

 

[F1 fan]

How come during the event, in which the console was on almost the whole time, the console wasn't having troubles? Or did it not start encountering problems until they started running games? Hmm..

It was only on for about an hour at the event. And that's if it was actually a working console and not just a simulation.

 

[TokoTurismo]

WOW. If that rumor is true than just, wow... I have nothing to say about MS, honestly I don't.....

 

[Ridox2JZGTE]

How come during the event, in which the console was on almost the whole time, the console wasn't having troubles? Or did it not start encountering problems until they started running games? Hmm..

Hopefully this doesn't mean 5 years of hardware failure...

Edit - Also, what are "yield problems?"

They might have put the underclocked Xbone there ?

Anyway here are some links for the yield problems of eSRAM that leads to underclocking :

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=61347677&postcount=671

Originally Posted by Piggus:
Underclocking the GPU wouldn't really make sense to me if they're having problems with the eSRAM. I could be wrong, but yields usually have to do with the number of working chips coming off the assembly line and not their thermal performance. If the GPU is getting too hot and that is causing problems for the eSRAM (which seems pretty unlikely to me) then yeah, underclocking could mitigate that a bit. But it really just sounds like the eSRAM is too complex (that's A LOT of transistors) and therefore is more difficult to produce. Sony ran into the same issue on PS3 with CELL and they ended up disabling one of the SPUs since many chips came off the line with at least one non-working SPU.

If MS is indeed having trouble with just the eSRAM then it could definitely lead to shortages. There isn't anything on the APU that they could disable as far as I know that would improve yields.
Think this way.
--

Sony's APU is 3 billion transistors. MS's is 5 billion. And more complex because of added parts.

Because they are all in one part, one part ****ed up means the whole APU will be affected by it. And since 25% of APU's die is dedicated for ESRAM (in my opinion this is not smart at all. With this many transistors MS should have just outright put more GPU power), the heat issue can be quite real.

and since ESRAM's bandwidth is directly correlated with GPU's speed (lower GPU speed and lower the ESRAM bandwidth therefore lower the thermal issue) seems plausible, but I still don't think MS can be THAT stupid to figure out this in the blueprint stage.

If they did then this is colossal **** UP.

come to think of it the yield for this chip must be horrible.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=61372981&postcount=1084

Originally Posted by Y2Kev:
I read the OP but I can't find the explanation. Why would an esram issue cause a gpu downgrade?
There are many theories. IMO, the more I think about this one, the more it makes sense, and I generally discount a lot of what is read on B3D:

Originally Posted by Brad Grenz:
It's been suggested on Beyond3D that the SRAM array may literally be too large for signals to travel the physical distance in time to be considered valid in a single clock cycle. No one has ever made a pool of SRAM this large before. IBM uses EDRAM for their large CPU caches. Maybe that's in part because they were not sure SRAM could scale effectively do to such issues. If correct, that means the normal measures you'd take to improve yields (additional cooling, deactivating defective regions, even increasing production runs) would not be effective. But lowering the clock would give a signal more time to travel through a wire.
This explanation would require one to believe that either MS had originally designed the eSRAM pool on a razor's edge, with maximum transistor density in mind, and the design failed, either because of leakage/thermal/yield reasons, or they designed the pool with a smaller process in mind, and yields sucked, so they had to shift to a larger process.

If this turns out to be true, the story of this misadventure will be very very interesting.

Basically they create a large circular silicon wafer and put the conducting pathways for the (processor or memory) chip on it. (http://www.geek.com/chips/from-sand-...s-made-832492/ if you want to know how it works)

On one of these wafers they can fit many chips which they then cut out (like baking a pizza and cutting it into identical slices)

There will however be defects on the wafer, the chips that occupy the areas that have the defects on them are either useless or can be used as lower end parts by disabling part of the chip
(like if a gpu has 18 compute units you could only use 16 if the defect is on one of the others, ps4 already does this by only using 18 out of 20 cus so they can have two for redundancy to improve yields)

Not all of them come out as well as the others and some can handle more voltage than others, so they can be higher clocked.

Now the problem is that when you have really large chips.
The larger the chip the bigger the chance that each chip will have a defect. (exponentially much so)
If you have 10 defects on your wafer but you fit 100 small dies on the wafer then only at most 10 , so ten percent, will be throwaway or salvaged as low end part, but if you only fit 10 on there then it's likely that many of them may have one of those defects.
You could easily have to throw away 30-50 percent or even all of them.

Xbox one uses APU which is a really big die that needs to house the cpu, gpu AND in xbox one's case also the ESRAM which takes up a huge amount of transistors and therefor physical space on the chip.
They end up with little hardware power yet a huge (5 billion transistor) die, so they have low yields.
Normally low end hardware only takes a tiny little die so yields are good, but for some reason that either MS engineers or suits/beancounters can only know they decided to go for this huge ass APU with esram.

From my limited knowledge Sony ended up with a lot more bang for their buck... they put their die space into a bit more gpu power and didn't design their apu around needing esram (since they didn't cheap out on the vram, which is a collection of seperate chips that are embedded on a PCB and connected to the APU through a memory bus)
Meanwhile MS seems to have thrown the baby out with the bathwater.

 

[Earth]

It was only on for about an hour at the event. And that's if it was actually a working console and not just a simulation.

The Price is Right episode used in the reveal was not the same as the live episode being aired

The picture in picture TV shown from 1:12 - 1:22 in the following video looks very choppy, nothing like the reveal. Looks like 2fps

 

[chromatic9]

Hope they can sort the esram out. MS don't need more negativity.

I've read a few reports and heard a few podcasts and they all say the demos that they witnessed at offices and at MS have been on pc, all Kinect stuff and the new joypad was going through pc.

Anyways, wouldn't read too much into the lag but any hint of lag in the final system would be a huge deal I think.

 

[dice1998]

http://news.xbox.com/2013/06/connected

With Xbox One you can game offline for up to 24 hours on your primary console, or one hour if you are logged on to a separate console accessing your library. Offline gaming is not possible after these prescribed times until you re-establish a connection, but you can still watch live TV and enjoy Blu-ray and DVD movies.

http://news.xbox.com/2013/06/license

Give your games to friends: Xbox One is designed so game publishers can enable you to give your disc-based games to your friends. There are no fees charged as part of these transfers. There are two requirements: you can only give them to people who have been on your friends list for at least 30 days and each game can only be given once.

 

[Tornado]

I love how carefully worded even that is. People are being "enabled" to resell their games (unless a publisher decides that they don't want to allow it at all), but only at specific places that Microsoft decides. Otherwise, they have to know that they are your friends.


I also like how they attempted to spin "don't worry, you can still watch TV" as if that was a positive or as if Microsoft could stop you if they even wanted to.

Usually those post-conference roundtables are for spilling all the gritty details on how the systems really work. If this is true, it could end up being MS trying to avoid giving away controversial plans that can be widely considered to be anti-consumer or face tough questions about DRM, overheating problems, privacy concerns, and others they'd rather not have to address right away.

Like when they sneak the details of the 24 hour system check and the used games issue onto their website while everyone is busy looking at E3 news?

 

[Sanji Himura]

I think that the way that it is worded is to target stores like Blockbuster.

 

[Ridox2JZGTE]

Microsoft at it's best, what are they trying to achieve with all those restrictions ?

 

[Saidur_Ali]

Microsoft at it's best, what are they trying to achieve with all those restrictions ?

Setting themselves up for a potential DDoS attack . Imagine if that happened on launch day...

 

[dice1998]

I'm curious how the Microsoft PR department will handle the firestorm they'll have on their hands due to all of this new info.

 

[Sanji Himura]

Talk about victim of bad timing, they put this BS up as soon as the Washington Post puts up an article saying that the NSA is data mining MS servers.

"Oh, Microsoft won't spy on you, but the NSA will!"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/inves...0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html

 

[Ridox2JZGTE]

Setting themselves up for a potential DDoS attack . Imagine if that happened on launch day...

I kind of wanted this to happen - MS servers down for a week at least, and see how MS will react to the holy **** storm from millions of people unable to play even offline after not logging in every 24 hours

 

[Ddrizle]

The rumors of Respawn Entertainments first title exclusivity with MS were valid. Titanfall to release on Xbox One, X360 & PC.

 

[chromatic9]

Could be a huge game

Interesting how this and Destiny play out.

 

[maxpontiac]

Talk about victim of bad timing, they put this BS up as soon as the Washington Post puts up an article saying that the NSA is data mining MS servers.

"Oh, Microsoft won't spy on you, but the NSA will!"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/inves...0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html

Not surprised by this at all. It's almost as if its Revelation: Prologue

 

[LeMansAid]

Titanfall eh? A prophetic game perhaps?

 

[Rainbow Dash]

I heard the rumor about the One needing to be online at least once in 24 hours to play games is true. MS confirmed it.

 

[dice1998]

Do you have proof?

 

[C_Raccoon23]

Do you have proof?

http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/06/06/microsoft-details-xbox-one-used-games-always-online

 

[Snaeper]

http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/06/06/microsoft-details-xbox-one-used-games-always-online

I love reading the comments on that article. A couple of soldiers mentioned that they'd be going to the PS4 since they won't have internet during deployment and suddenly everyone starts mentioning that "They're working on an exception for soldiers!"

Umm, why not just remove the damn 24 hour requirement for everyone? If I, for some reason, lose access to the internet... why do I have to suffer my system punishing me? It's a problem that is so infrequent, that the 24-hour restriction's implementation is idiotic. Everyone is connected to the internet, those few that are not should still be able to play on their game console.

 

[Tornado]

http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/06/06/microsoft-details-xbox-one-used-games-always-online

The joke was that dice1998 just posted the announcement from Microsoft on the last page.

 

[Wolfe]

Is the XBone still a videogame console? Or is it a DVR and DVD/BluRay player that can also function as a client for an online gaming network?

I think the only way to consider these policies "reasonable" is to go with the second choice. But that's obviously not what anyone expected of the next Xbox.

 

[dice1998]

Is the XBone still a videogame console? Or is it a DVR and DVD/BluRay player that can also function as a client for an online gaming network?

If it can play video games, why can't it be a video game console with online gaming capabilities as well as the capability to watch TV and Movies?

 

[Wolfe]

I don't think I need to outline the various ways the XBone is different from every other game console, from Ataris to the Xbox 360...

Honestly, it just seems to make more sense to look at it as a DVD/BluRay player that connects to an online gaming network, with (optional) "install discs" available in stores. It's an entertainment portal for your TV that happens to play games. Which is pretty much what they were telling us in the reveal.

 

[dice1998]

So, even though the Xbox One can play video games, it's not a video game console?

With the added benefit of the ability to watch movies and TV on it, obviously.