Microsoft's Xbox 360, Sony's PS3 - A Hardware Discussion
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on June 24, 2005 4:05 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Storage Devices
Both the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 feature removable 2.5” HDDs as an option for storage; the difference being that the PS3 won’t ship with a hard drive, while the Xbox 360 will.
In the original Xbox, developers used the hard drive to cache game data in order to decrease load times and improve responsiveness of games. Compared to the built in 5X CAV DVD drive in the Xbox, the hard drive offered much faster performance. With the Xbox 360, the performance demands on the hard drive are lessened, the console now ships with a 12X CAV DVD-DL drive. You can expect read performance to more than double over the first DVD drive that shipped with the original Xbox, which obviously decreases the need for a hard drive in the system (but definitely doesn’t eliminate it).
This time around, Microsoft has outfitted the 360 with a 20GB removable 2.5” HDD, but its role is slightly different. While developers will still be able to use the drive to cache data if necessary, its role in the system will be more of a storage device for downloaded content. Microsoft is very serious about their Xbox Live push with this next console generation, and they fully expect users to download demos, game content updates and much more to their removable hard drive. The fact that it’s removable means that users can carry it around with them to friends’ houses to play their content on other 360s.
It is important to note that disc capacity remains unchanged from the original Xbox, the 360 will still only have a maximum capacity of 9GB per disc. Given that the current Xbox titles generally use less than half of this capacity, there’s still some room for growth.
Microsoft has also reduced the size of the data that is required to be on each disc by a few hundred megabytes, combine that with the fact that larger game data can be compressed further thanks to more powerful hardware and game developers shouldn’t run into capacity limitations on Xbox 360 discs anytime soon.
The PS3 is a bit more forward looking in its storage devices, unfortunately as of now it will not ship with a hard drive. The optical drive of choice in the PS3 will be a Blu-ray player, which originally looked quite promising but now is not as big of a feature as it once was.
The two main competitors for the DVD video successor are the HD-DVD and Blu-ray standards. Around the announcement of the PS3 at E3, there was a lot of discussion going on surrounding an attempt to unify the HD-DVD and Blu-ray standards, which would obviously make the PS3 Blu-ray support a huge selling feature. It would mean that next year you would be able to buy a console, generally estimated to be priced around the $400 mark, that could double as a HD-DVD/Blu-ray player. Given that standalone HD-DVD/Blu-ray players are expected to be priced no less than $500, it would definitely increase the adoption rate of the PS3. However, talks between unifying the two standards appear to have broken down without any hope for resolution meaning that there will be two competing standards for the next-generation DVD format. As such, until unified HD-DVD/Blu-ray players are produced, the PS3 won’t have as big of an advantage in this regard as once thought. It may, however, tilt the balance in favor of Blu-ray as the appropriate next-generation disc standard if enough units are sold.
When we first disassembled the original Xbox, we noticed that it basically featured a PC DVD drive. From what we can tell, the Xbox 360 will also use a fairly standard dual layer DVD drive. As such, it would not be totally unfeasible for Microsoft to, later on, outfit the Xbox 360 with a HD-DVD or Blu-ray drive, once a true standard is agreed upon.
The one advantage that Sony does have is that developers can use BD-ROM (Blu-ray) discs for their games, while if MS introduces Blu-ray or HD-DVD support later on it will be strictly as a video player (game developers won’t offer content for only owners of Blu-ray/HD-DVD Xbox 360 versions). The advantage is quite tangible in that PS3 developers will be able to store a minimum of 23.3GB of data on a single disc, which could mean that they could use uncompressed video and game content, freeing up the CPU to handle other tasks instead of dealing with decompression on the fly. Of course, Blu-ray media will cost more than standard DVD discs, but over the life of the PS3 that cost will go down as production increases.
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tipoo - Wednesday, August 6, 2014 - link
That was such bullshit. RSX was worth under 200Gflops, Cell about the same and much harder to extract that much from, Xenos was over 200, Xenon was around 100. Nothing was near the terraflop range except in marketing bullspeak.LanceVance - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link
#59"Does every xbox game needs to be playable? No."
"How many of you still play your old games? Market research shows not a lot."
Backwards compatibility is a feature. It's just like any other feature on a mass market consumer product. Some people value it and others don't.
You clearly don't value that and won't consider it when making consumer decisions.
Other people clearly DO value that and you are trying to persuade them not to. That's none of your business. If people value a specific feature they have every right to consider it in their buying behaviors.
Sorry, I know this post has now gone way off topic from the original article of technical analysis. Beautiful article; but any open forum on such a political topic is doomed to degenerate into this.
knitecrow - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link
software emulation is difficult and takes a lot of man power to get right.The main advantage for microsoft was that they didn't have to stuck with poor business and engineering design choices of the past.
Does every xbox game needs to be playable? No. I don't care for games like "big rigs"
I abviously want halo to work, but also the lesser known good titles on xbox ... like Panzer Dargoon Orta, Kingdom Under Fire, Otogi 1 & 2 and so on.
How many of you still play your old games? Market research shows not a lot.I have an 80+ games library for the xbox. I don't mind.
BenSkywalker - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link
milomnderbnder21-They are flipping consumers off. Sony and Nintendo at this point are both adding costs to their consoles to incorporate hardware to make certain that their systems have full compatability with the prior generation. MS has decided that you and I are not good enough to offer that same assurance. They have decided to save themselves a couple of dollars and render useless all of their games they can't get running on their new platform so they can save a few dollars. They will take a shot at software hacks- if they don't work we are out of luck. They are also stopping production of current gen XBox hardware. I have about thirty games for my XB currently, what do I do with them if my XB dies and they aren't supported by XB360(which there is no assurance they will)? I keep my legacy hardware around, back to my 2600, and my games.
Olaf van der Spek - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link
> Compared to the built in 5X CAV DVD drive in the Xbox, the hard drive offered much faster performance. With the Xbox 360, the performance demands on the hard drive are lessened, the console now ships with a 12X CAV DVD-DL drive.Aren't all read-only DVD drives dual-layer?
Starglider - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link
I'm a game programmer and I take issue with the statement on page 4 that BSP collision detection benefits from branch prediction. It doesn't; it's one of the rare types of code where the branches are effectively impossible to predict. The algorithm /does/ benefit heavily from speculative execution, but as I understand it neither the XBox360 or the PS3 are capable of this. As such this is one area where PC style processors have an advantage; neither console is going to beat a modern PC at SuperPi.devilzblood - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
altho this is my first post at anandtech, i have been reading ur articles from the geforce 3 launch.newayz.....im posting here coz im wondering if neone knos this.....what degrees do Anand and Derek hold?? they seem to be such a bank of information, i never thought it was humanly possible to know so much about computers..needless to say im impressed by u people..and all i would like to say about the article is that it was an informative and enjoying read
milomnderbnder21 - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
#46MS is by no means "flipping off it's supporters" with regards to backwards compatibility. They have flat out stated that it is there goal that EVERY Xbox game be compatible on the 360, but they simply cannot guarentee it. In any case, look for a majority of them to be so. And if they can't get everything working, I'm not going to miss outlaw golf on my 360...
MDme - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
#50Sony WILL support 1080p. They are supporting it so that they can BRAG about it. It's all about the hype, even if they only have 1 game supporting it, they will BRAG about it. heck, if you really think about it, if sony played a video (H.264) at 1080p then ran the game at 720p they will still claim, WE HAVE SUPPORT FOR 1080p. It's all marketing. Even X360 can claim this.
finbarqs - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
bla bla bla, which one is better?