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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jotch - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
#20 well that can't be right for the whole consumer base, as I'm 24 and only know other adults that have consoles and alot of them have flashy tv's for them as well, I do. I think if you look at the market for consoles it is mainly teens and adults that have consoles - not kids. Alot of people I know started with a NES or an Atari 2500, etc and have continued to like games as they have grown up. Why is it that the best selling game has an 18 rating?? (GTA: San Andreas)The burning of the screen would be minimal unless you have a game paused for hours and the tv left on - TV technology is moving on and they often turn themselves off if a static image is displayed for an amount of time. So burning shouldn't occur.
nserra - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
All the people that i know having consoles is kids (80%), and their parents have bought an TV just for the console, an 70€ TV.....Who is the parent that will let kids on an LCD or PLASMA (3000€) to play games (burn them).
Or there will be good 480i "compatibility" in games, or forget it....
#17 I agree.
fitten - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
#14 There are a number of issues being discussed.For example, given the nature of current AI code, making that code parallel (as in more than one thread executing AI code working together) seems non-trivial. Data dependencies and the very branch heavy code making data dependencies less predictable probably cause headaches here. Sure, one could probably take the simple approach and say one thread for AI, one for physics, one for blah but that has already been discussed by numerous people as a possibility.
Parallel code comes in many flavors. The parallelism in the graphics card, for instance, is sometimes classified as "embarassingly parallel" which means it's trivial to do. Then there are pipelines (dataflow) which CPUs and GPUs also use. These are usually fairly easy too because the data partitioning is pretty easy. You break out a thread for each overall task that you want to do. You want to do OpA on the data, then OpB, then OpC. All OpB depends on is the output data of OpA and OpC just depends on OpB's final product. Three threads, each one doing an Op on the output of the previous.
Then there are codes that are quite a bit more complex where, for example, there are numerous threads that all execute on parts of the whole data instead of all of it at once but the solution they are solving for requires many iterations on the data and at the end of each iteration, all the threads exchange data with each other (or just their 'neighbors') so that the next iteration can be performed. These are a bit more work to develop.
Anyway, I got long-winded anyway. Basically... there are *many* kinds of parallelism and many kinds of algorithms and implementations of parallelism. Some are low hanging fruit and some are non-trivial. Since I've already read that numerous developers for each platform already see low hanging fruit (run one thread for AI, another for physics, etc.) I can only believe they are talking about things that are non-trivial, such as a multithreaded AI engine, for example (again, as opposed to just breaking out the AI engine into one thread seperate from the rest of game play).
probedb - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
Nice article! I'll wait till they're both out and have a play before I buy either. Last console I bought was an original PlayStation :) But gotta love that hi-def loveliness at last!#3 yeah 1080i is interlaced and at such a high res and low refresh the text is really difficult to read, it'd be far better at 1080p I think since that would effectively be the same as 1920x1080 on a normal monitor. 1080i is flickery as hell for me for desktop use but fine for any video and media centre type interfaces on the PC.
A5 - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
You know, the vast majority of the TVs these systems will be hooked up to will only do 480i (standard TV)...jotch - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
#14 - here here!jotch - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
#10 - sounds to me like they're way ahead of they're time, future-proofing is good as they'll need another 6 years to develop the PS4 - but the Cell and Xenon will force developers to change their ways and will prepare them for the future of developing on PC's that eventually have this kind of CPU chip design (ref intel's chip design future pic on the first page of the article), like the article says the initial round of games will be single threaded etc etc...You might get alot of mediocre games but then you should get ones that really shine bright on the PS3, noticeably Unreal 3 and I bet the Gran Turismo (polyphony) guys will put in the effort.
Pannenkoek - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
I'm quite tired of hearing how difficult it is to develop a multithreaded game. Only pathetic programmers can not grasp the concept of parallel code execution, it's not as if the current CPU/GPU duality does not qualify as one.knitecrow - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
you'll need HDD for online service and MMOPhow many people are going to buy a $100 HDD if they don't have to?
LanceVance - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
"the PS3 won’t ship with a hard drive"If that's true, then will it be like:
- PS2 Memory Card; non-included but standard equipment required by all games.
- PS2 Hard Drive; non-included and considered exotic unusual equipment and used by very few games.