Xbox 360 gets soft start in Japan

[aegina]

Re: Xbox 360 gets soft start in Japan

i'm an american, and i find most first person shooters boreing.

i might get the xbox 360 for ffxi, and maybe one or two other titles, but that's about it.

i buy consols for the games. when ps1 first came out, the only reason i got it was for final fantasy 7. any other games i got on the playstation were just because i already had the console. this upcoming xbox and the ps3 will be no diferent, if there's no games i want to play on it, why buy the console?

i never bought the original xbox, because there were so few games on it i wanted to play. i borrowed a friend's xbox to try it our, and wasn't impressed enough to hand out the cash to get my own. i don't need good processor-chip thingeys. i need good GAMES

[Kittyneko]

Re: Xbox 360 gets soft start in Japan

btw, i just found the news at MSN Japan, that Microsoft will release the Xbox 360 w/ HD-DVD drive next year. (yes, next year.)

http://www.mainichi-msn.co.jp/today/...20143000c.html

this news was published 4 hrs ago.

Does this mean no more Xbox Premium next year(2006)? Darn it

[Macht]

Re: Xbox 360 gets soft start in Japan

On Cell engineering. It seems Cell isn't a complete "stream" as we first thought Macht. There is actually tiny 256k cache I think on each SPE which most likely gives it to do OooE. This is interesting, because we thought programers would have to "metal gear2" it to make it run smoothly...but with some stuff jumping around it makes it lot easier to "Compile" their way through it.

Kuu, relooked up the CBE info again to make sure my info on it was right. The SPEs have a 256K "Local Store" it is not like cache and it's design is more to that of a RISC processor. The Local Store is not transpartent to software and does not contain hardware data predition like a cache does. It's design actually seems to enforce a daisy chain setup, in which each SPE would load a small program telling it specific instructions on what it's job will be to do.

So for example say you have a graphic were the model will be running and you want the model to show signs of physical exhaustion (sweating, heavy breathing, etc..) then you could pull say 4 of the SPEs each with a small program that controls those small aspects to what's occuring while the PowerPC handles the rest.

So then SPE 1 takes care of the models motion, SPE 2 handle the display for how much sweat the model should have and adjusts it as time passes in this running state, SPE 3 controls the body frames expansion and compression to display heavy breathing. Each ones does their part and feeds back the stats to the PowerPC while the PowerPC is feeding out to them what state the model or environment is currently in for the SPEs to act accordingly.

This is were the beauty of the Rambus Flex I/O allows to enlist other idle SPEs it finds on other devices (PDA with CBE, Laptop with CBE, Camera with CBE, TV with CBE, etc...) and assign that SPE a job to carry out (SPEs are not job specific you actually assign them small "cell programs" that tells the SPE how it'll function for it's current assigned job.

So potentially the more CBEs that exist to a network (possibly including internet) the more elaborate they can build a graphic image and have each of these SPEs doing tiny functions but is giving an incredibly huge boost in graphic and sound possibilities. That is due if you haven't figured it out already to the fact that the Main processor isn't having to calculate out all these variables, it can pass them on to the SPEs to do allowing for greater detail.

More:

So taking the explination what I put up, the SPEs also work in the design that 1 SPE could be programmed to strickly decompress, 1 SPE programmed to strickly decode, 1 SPE programmed strickly to do error checking, 1 SPE programmed to strickly do scaling, etc...

What happens then once each SPE is assigned their job the data to be manipulated is then passed to SPE 1 it's results passed to SPE 2, and so on. So once SPE 1 is done decompressing something it can move on to decompressing something else while the other SPEs are still working on the first one that is still going through. Again what the SPEs are each programmed to do and such is again scalable in that it can also enlist other SPEs that are idle to take on a needed task through the Rambus Flex I/O.

Since each program set for an SPE is only 256K as max possible that would means something of a High Speed Internet Connection would provide you near the optimal level for the CBEs to work. Well a High Speed Internet Connection or DSL that isn't to shared since it'll get you 7Mbps and 15Mbps as max potential which if you actually achieved those is 875KB and 1.875MB a second. So at best about 7 SPEs over the internet could be enlisted to help with a task, but still have a tremendous amount more through local network still about 48 SPEs local on a 100Mbps network connection (Rough estimates depending on programming and more detail of how Rambus Flex I/O works it could probably be more).

[TheGrandMom]

Re: Xbox 360 gets soft start in Japan

Does this mean no more Xbox Premium next year(2006)? Darn it

They will have to run some type of promotion for this version. Some people will be pretty jaded that they bought theirs before this upgrade. So it wouldn't surprise me to see some type of package deal again.

[Auron517]

Re: Xbox 360 gets soft start in Japan

Out of curiosity, when was this and what rank were you? I know the majority of the good players are around rank 40 now I think. I'm by no means good, but about 6 months ago I played a cpl hours on free for all for rank. Never came in behind 2nd and got to rank 9 or 10 easily. That was when the best were only around rank 16 or 17. I also used Halo b/c it is a MS game. If you want to get really hardcore, then you'd have to go with something like UT, or Quake, or whatever the new pc fps is now. Those people border on ungodly good.

This wasn't that long ago, although I have trouble recalling a specific time period. The matches I played that night were all Team Slayer or Rumble Pit.

On Rumble Pit i'm only Rank 18, and on Team Slayer I'm a bit higher with a rank of 21. No my rank isn't extremly high, but my ability to own people that are my rank when I haven't played in months suprises me.

I used to an avid Counter Strike freak a few years ago. I remember it took me weeks to be decent at that game. I had to log on for hours on end, trying to learn the maps, recoil on guns, strategy and tactics, etc. But, I've never really hit that learning curve in Halo. I can just pick up a Battle Rifle, Sword, or Rocket Launcher and just go to town.

[Jei]

Re: Xbox 360 gets soft start in Japan

well, the basics are pretty simiar. You already picked up the initial training from CS, it's not hard to adapt it to other fps. so the learning curve factor is more or less unnecessary. This is not a bad thing, most games I picked up from stores these days I don't need to learn the controls anymore because they are all so similar no matter what kind of game I picked up.

very few games that I HAD to spent a while getting used to controls... resident evil 4 was one of them, and I can't really thing of any other game out of my head.

[bside]

Re: Xbox 360 gets soft start in Japan

They will have to run some type of promotion for this version. Some people will be pretty jaded that they bought theirs before this upgrade. So it wouldn't surprise me to see some type of package deal again.

sry i couldn't update u guys sooner. MS Japan denied in the news that they r NOT planning to release the Xbox w/ HD-DVD at this time. furthermore, they told the press that they have never released any information as to the possibility of installing the next generation DVD drives to 360, neither in Japan nor US.

still, as the news was originally published by Mainichi Interactive, in charge of MSN News Japan, there must be a source of the original information, although its reliability remains questionable.

http://www.mainichi-msn.co.jp/entert...00055000c.html

[TheGrandMom]

Re: Xbox 360 gets soft start in Japan

sry i couldn't update u guys sooner. MS Japan denied in the news that they r NOT planning to release the Xbox w/ HD-DVD at this time. furthermore, they told the press that they have never released any information as to the possibility of installing the next generation DVD drives to 360, neither in Japan nor US.

still, as the news was originally published by Mainichi Interactive, in charge of MSN News Japan, there must be a source of the original information, although its reliability remains questionable.

http://www.mainichi-msn.co.jp/entert...00055000c.html

I bet one of the reasons they deny the report is because they don't want to hurt current sales. People will not want to buy a system thats going to be upgraded soon! LOL

[Jei]

Re: Xbox 360 gets soft start in Japan

too soon. not even a month after 360 came out and we get this news already. almost gives us impression that the current 360 are damaged products MS just wanna get rid of

[WishMaster3K]

Re: Xbox 360 gets soft start in Japan

It's a false report. Even if MS was planning on that, they wouldnt announce it. That'd be like Sony announcing the PSX only a year after PS2 came out.