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
System Costs
One thing that a surprising number of people seem to overlook is the idea that consoles are built to take a loss on the hardware itself. If the Xbox 360 retails for $299, it may very well cost Microsoft $399, or even more. This has been the way consoles have been manufactured for quite some time now, and it has not changed with the latest generation of consoles.
However, given the very high system costs of the original Xbox, it isn’t surprising to see that Microsoft is quite concerned with keeping costs down to a minimum this time around. There are a number of decisions that Microsoft has made in order to limit their loss on the 360 hardware.
First and foremost, Microsoft owns the IP in the Xbox 360 and thus they can handle manufacturing on their own without having to re-negotiate contracts with ATI or IBM. It remains to be seen how much of a money saver this will be for Microsoft, but it does present itself as a departure from the way things were done the first time around for the folks at Redmond.
Assuming Xenon is nothing more than 3 PPEs put on the same die coupled with twice the L2 cache, it looks like Xenon is a smaller chip than Cell.
The Xenos GPU features a higher transistor count than the RSX (332M vs. 300.4M), but a lower clock speed.
Microsoft didn’t skimp much on the CPU or GPU hardware, which isn’t surprising, but it is in the auxiliary hardware that the console ends up being cheaper in. The best way to understand the areas that Microsoft didn’t spend money in, is to look at the areas that Sony did spend money in.
The Xbox 360 is using a tried and true 12X dual layer DVD drive, probably very similar to what you can buy for the PC today. A very popular drive format with mass produced internals is a sure fire way to keep costs down. Sony’s solution? A very expensive, not yet in production, Blu-ray drive. As we mentioned earlier, the first Blu-ray players are expected to retail for more than $500. The PlayStation 3 isn’t going to be successful as a $800 console, so we’d expect its MSRP to be less than $500, meaning that Sony will have to absorb a lot of the cost (initially) of including a Blu-ray player, until production picks up.
Both the Xbox 360 and the PS3 feature wireless controller support, although Sony supports a maximum of 7 Bluetooth controllers compared to Microsoft’s 4 2.4GHz RF controllers.
The PS3 also ships with built in 802.11b/g and three Gigabit Ethernet ports so the system can act as a Gigabit router right out of the box. Adding wireless support isn’t a huge deal, but the physical layer as well as the antenna do drive costs up a bit. The same goes for getting controllers to drive the three GigE ports on the unit.
Sony also offers built in support for more USB 2.0 ports (6 vs 4), media card slots (Memory Stick, SD and Compact Flash) where the 360 has none and two HDMI outputs where the 360 only offers component. Again, not major features but they are nice to have, and do contribute to the overall price of the system.
The one difference that favors Microsoft however is the inclusion of a 2.5” HDD with the Xbox 360 console; Sony’s hard drive will be optional and won’t ship with the system.
In the end it seems that Microsoft was more focused on spending money where it counts (e.g. CPU, GPU, HDD) and skimped on areas that would have otherwise completed the package (e.g. more USB ports, built in wireless, router functionality, flash card readers, HDMI support in the box, etc...). Whereas Sony appears to have just spent money everywhere, but balanced things out by shipping with no hard drive.
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Doormat - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
@#22: Yes 1080P is an OFFICIAL ATSC spec. There are 18 different video formats in the ATSC specification. 1080/60P is one of them.FWIW, Even the first 1080P TVs coming out this year will *NOT* support 1080P in over HDMI. Why? I dunno. The TVs will upscale everything to 1080P (from 1080i, 720p, etc), but they cant accept input as 1080P. Some TVs will be able to do it over VGA (the Samsung HLR-xx68/78/88s will), but still thats not the highest quality input.
Pastuch - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
RE: 1080P"We do think it was a mistake for Microsoft not to support 1080p, even if only supported by a handful of games/developers."
I couldnt disagree more. At the current rate of HDTV adoption we'll be lucky if half of the Xbox 360 users have 1280x720 displays by 2010. Think about how long it took for us to get passed 480i. Average Joe doesnt like to buy new TVs very often. Unless 1080P HDTVs drop to $400 or less no one will buy them for a console. We the eger geeks of Anandtech will obviously have 42 widescreen 1080P displays but we are far from the Average Joe.
RE: Adult Gamers
Anyone who thinks games are for kids needs a wakeup call. The largest player base of gamers is around 25 years old right now. By 2010 we will be daddys looking for our next source of interactive porn. I see mature sexually oriented gaming taking off around that time. I honestly believe that videogames will have the popularity of television in the next 20 years. I know a ton of people that dont have cable TV but they do have cable internet, a PC, xbox, PS2 and about a million games for each device.
Pannenkoek - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
#19 fitten: That's the whole point, people pretend that even rotten fruit laying on the ground is "hard" to pick up. It's not simply about restructuring algorithms to accomodate massive parallelism, but also how it will take ages and how no current game could be patched to run multithreaded on a mere dual core system.Taking advantage of parallism is a hot topic in computer science as far as I can tell and there are undoubtedly many interesting challanges involved. But that's no excuse for not being able to simply multithread a simple application.
And before people cry that game engines are comparable to rocket science (pointing to John Carmack's endeavours) and are the bleeding edge technology in software, I'll say that's simply not the reality, and even less an excuse to not be able to take advantage of parallelism.
Indeed, game developers are not making that excuse and will come with multithreaded games once we have enough dual core processors and when their new games stop being videocard limited. Only Anandtech thinks that multithreading is a serious technical hurdle.
This and those bloody obnoxious "sponsored links" all through the text of articles are the only serious objections I have towards Anandtech.
jotch - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
#26 - yeah i know that happens all over but I was just commenting on the fact that the console's market is mainly teens and adults not mainly kids.expletive - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
"If you’re wondering whether or not there is a tangible image quality difference between 1080p and 720p, think about it this way - 1920 x 1080 looks better on a monitor than 1280 x 720, now imagine that blown up to a 36 - 60” HDTV - the difference will be noticeable. "This statement should be further qualified. There is only a tangible benefit to 1080p if the display device is native 1080p resolution. Otherwise, the display itself will scale the image down to its native resolution (i.e. 720p for most DLP televisions). If youre display is native 720p then youre better off outputting 720p becuase all that extra processing is being wasted.
There are only a handful of TVs that support native 1080p right now and they are all over $5k.
These points are really important when discussing the real-world applications of 1080p for a game console. The people using this type of device (a $300 game console) are very different then those that go out and buy 7800GTX cards the first week they are released. Based on my reading in the home theater space, less than 10% of the people that own a PS3 will be able to display 1080p natively during its lifecycle (5 years).
Also, can someone explain how the Xenos unified shaders was distelled from 48 down to 24 in this article? That didnt quite make sense to me...
John
nserra - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
I was on the supermarket, and there was a kid (12year old girl) buying the game that you mention with the daddy that know sh*t about games, and about looking for the 18 year old logo.Maybe if they put a pen*s on the box instead of the carton girl, some dads will then know the difference between a game for 8 year old and an 18.
#21 I don’t know about your country, but this is what happen in mine and not only with games.
knitecrow - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
would you be able to tell the difference at Standard resolution?instead of drawing more pixels on the screen, the revolution can use that processing power and/or die space for other functions... e.g. shaders
If the revolution opts to pick an out-of-order processor, something like PPC970FX, i don't see why i can't be competitive.
But seriously, all speculation aside, the small form factor limits the ammount of heat components can put out, and the processing power of the system.
perseus3d - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
--"Sony appears to have the most forward-looking set of outputs on the PlayStation 3, featuring two HDMI video outputs. There is no explicit support for DVI, but creating a HDMI-to-DVI adapter isn’t too hard to do. Microsoft has unfortunately only committed to offering component or VGA outputs for HD resolutions."--Does that mean, as it stands now, the PS3 will require an adapter to be played on an LCD Monitor, and the X360 won't be able to be used with an LCD Monitor with DVI?
Dukemaster - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
At least we know Nintendo's Revolution is the lozer when it comes to pure power.freebst - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
I just wanted to remind everyone that 1080P at 60 Frames isn't even an approved ATSC Signal. 1080P at 30 and 24 frames is, but not 60. 1280x720 can run at 60, 30, and 24 that is unless you are running at 50 or 25 frames/sec in Europe.