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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
93 Comments
View All Comments
LanceVance - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
Excellent article. Definitely the most thorough, informative, well researched article on the PS3/Xbox360.And most importantly, unlike every other article on the subject, it's not strongly biased toward one camp while making comments of substance.
yacoub - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
I bet the PS3 debuts at a higher price.Also regarding statements made on the Conclusionary page:
--"That being said, it won’t be impossible to get the same level of performance out of the PS3, it will just take more work. In fact, specialized hardware can be significantly faster than general purpose hardware at certain tasks, giving the PS3 the potential to outperform the Xbox 360 in CPU tasks. It has yet to be seen how much work is required to truly exploit that potential however, and it will definitely be a while before we can truly answer that question."--
I find it funny that once again the PlayStation will be the harder system to code games for that take full advantage of its abilities. If trends mimic the past (as they often do) this will lead to a large amount of mediocre games by companies too small to afford the dev time necessary to take real advantage of the PS3's advantages or on deadlines too tight to spend the time doing more.
Furen - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
It does sound pretty low but (I'm guessing) it's more than enough, I dont think they would have separated the dies unless it didnt lead to a big performance penalty. also, I'm guessing that the 256MB/sec bandwidth between the eDRAM and its processing hardware is 256GB/sec? Microsoft was using that number to inflate their "system bandwidth" total.Woodchuck2000 - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
And for that matter, 32Mb/s inter-die communications in the Xenos GPU seems low to me:p
Good article though guys!
Furen - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
Is there any word on the media center extender capabilities on the xbox 360? I think Microsoft mentioned something about that but I'm not sure if that was oficial or not. Just hope they allow us to plug in some video capture device and use it as a dvr eventually.As much as I like sony's playstation, I find it quite boring on the technical side. It seems like they're just throwing everything they can into it but nothing is really that exciting, or useful. Come on, dual-HDMI. I dont see myself having two HDTVs in such close proximity to each other. Gigabit router? Seems like they're desperate to use the extra cpu muscle. I wonder how heavy ethernet traffic will affect cpu usage.
Woodchuck2000 - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
Surely porting between multi-core PC software and Xenon should be fairly trivial, not fairly Non-trivial as stated in the article...?jotch - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
I stands for interlaced whilst the P stands for progressive scan. Check out the difference at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/720por
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1080i
This should resolve this issue.
AnnihilatorX - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
1080i = 720p doesn't it? 1080p is the one Xbox 360 doesn't support.These "i"s and "p"s are confusing me
sprockkets - Friday, June 24, 2005 - link
How is 1080i on your tv's? On my 1 year old Mitsubishi native 1080i tv using dvi from the computer at 1080i is basically useless since the text is too small and the image looks like the refresh rate is below 60hz, whereas HDTV broadcasts look fine. Using the other mode of 720x480 looked great.Will HD output from a console be any better than a video card in a computer? Is it just my tv?
Cmon, did you really think nVidia would release something far more advanced for a console than for a video card, or perhaps, more specifically, having it way outperform 6800 ultras in sli?
If you need around a 400w power supply for even non sli setup, what kind of heat and power will these new consoles need anyhow???
Of course I am more interested in how the PS3 will work with Linux more than games hahahahaha, since Sony officially mentioned it.
emmap - Sunday, December 4, 2005 - link
And that's this article, Sony and M$ have missed:it's not the number of megapixels, shader pipelines, CPU / GPU bandwidth, multithreaded or single threaded code which do a great game. It's imagination put in the game, gameplay, artistic art quality, human feeling we get looking at the characters, fun and so on. It's not only mathematics and physics: we don't love a game because it has X millions polygons or run at Y fps, no it's totally different. Just see all the mame fans out there, you'll see that they don't care about the obsolete hardware the game they are playing on, they care about the most important thing about game: ENTERTAINMENT!