Xbox One Consoles Delivered In Armored Trucks

I find it impossible to get excited about this thing because it's larger, less powerful, and more expensive than something that ALREADY CAME OUT.
 
I find it impossible to get excited about this thing because it's larger, less powerful, and more expensive than something that ALREADY CAME OUT.
So is just about every apple product in the last 10 years, you forget it's hardware + software that makes the system appealing.

As far as the size of the xbox1 it doesn't bother me, i actually like it a bit more then the ps4 as it's not as deep, and it's how deep things are that fucks up when placing it on the shelving for the home entertainment.
 
I guess in Chicago they delivered them in tanks?;)
 
So is just about every apple product in the last 10 years, you forget it's hardware + software that makes the system appealing.

Already had enough of BSoD so I don't want it carried over to game console if there's any truth that it's running some flavor Windows. iOS is stale compared to the competition including iOS 7.
 
While I commend their efforts to protect the public from the xbone, this all seems really cheesy.
 
I find it impossible to get excited about this thing because it's larger, less powerful, and more expensive than something that ALREADY CAME OUT.

Both xbone and ps4 are way less powerful than what they should have been. IMHO.
 
I wish they did that with the PS4 for me. I ordered one from Amazon on day one back in June and apparently it got lost between Amazon and Fedex. So I'm left with nada
 
What idiots let's spend all that money and do a custom paint job advertise hey we have xbox ones !
 
Funny how much that paint job looks like it says "Xbone" if you squint.
 
Both xbone and ps4 are way less powerful than what they should have been. IMHO.

I agree. I was sorely disappointed by how poor the spec's jump was for this iteration. Down Under... we've gone from a 1000AUD PS3 launch day price to a 550AUD release. And while i like the near 50% drop for the same device... its specs make me absolutely not really give two fks to buy it in the first place when my next mobile phone will be more powerful then it will be in 2years! (i won't even mention the fact that i dont wish to buy any given all the limitations and shenanigans/hoops/bs they are trying to force gamers into).
 
It would have been more weird without the paint job.Microsoft tries to hard and that fake and plastic attitude comes through. Larry Hyrb (aka Major Nelson) is the worst.
 
More for attention then security. That has to be the biggest waste of money I've ever seen. Do they really think by putting these machines in armored cars with Xbox logos on them, will make people want to go buy one? Do banks put giant money symbols on them to let people know they're carrying around valuable stuff? No of course not, but the marketing department that Microsoft is clearly over paying, sure thinks if they make it look valuable then you'll want to buy one.

Sadly the amount of money spent for this stunt is probably more then the cost to develop some of the games on the Xbox One. Which the games so far are O.K. at best.
 
I've yet to see anybody level a crack along the lines of:

So that's how they are going to hide that they far less manufactured and ready to ship!

On a more serious note, to those talking about how powerful these new consoles are in comparison to the PS3 / 360... do keep in mind that most electronic vendors are now trying to at least exhibit some sort of fiscal responsibility. Keep in mind that Sony originally worked with IBM and Toshiba to develop an entire new method of thread-processing and scaling with the Cell architecture, billions upon billions of research dollars that were supposed to herald a shift in consumer electronics formed by the surge of developers using Cell's ability to scale the same code from 1 SPE units to 100 SPE units. Only, Cell was a failure. ARM took off in the consumer market that the Cell 1 and 2 SPE unit chips were supposed to attract... and Sony came pretty close to bouncing all of their cheques.

Yes, some argument could be made that both Sony and Microsoft could have used the same business strategy that they used with the PS3 and Xbox 360; sell the console for a significant lost on production costs and make up the difference in software sales. Not to be too much a jerk making this particular point, but that strategy just about killed Sony.

Microsoft wasn't nearly killed by the strategy, but Microsoft's management has been pumping money from Office and OS licensing into whatever division is unlucky enough to host the Xbox franchise. Nearly a decade after Microsoft got into the console business the Xbox franchise has still yet to make a profit against it's own internal expenses; nor has the franchise managed to do better than 3rd place worldwide. Case(s) in point, when total worldwide sales of the Xbox were adjusted for Microsoft's multiple restatements, the console never actually outsold the Gamecube. The Xbox 360 got dusted by the Wii console; and it was... what.. within the last 2 years that the Playstation 3 overtook the Xbox 360 with more retail units... even including the funky math for all of the lowest-cost 360 units that were bought to replace red-ringed units.

Little wonder then that potential Microsoft CEO Steven Elop wants to take Samsung up on their bid for the Xbox Franchise that Steve Ballmer turned down. Also not a big surprise that Alan Mulally is open to dropping the Xbox franchise as well.

Anyways, back to the point here; both Sony and Microsoft were effectively put into positions were they could not rely on the same strategy's that they used for previous consoles. I don't fault either company for the hardware choices that they made... okay, that's a lie. I do fault Microsoft for using DDR3 memory with a 32mb ESRAM buffer. Granted I suspect that had more to do with Microsoft not knowing how to add HUMA support to their software stack.

All other issues aside, I have my own personal issues for not buying an Xbox One... and right now... I really have to wonder just what's going to happen when Microsoft's new CEO is chosen. We already know that the PS4 cleared 1million units in it's first 24 hours... and likely will top ~2.5 million or more by next week as shipping issues are worked out and retail stocks are picked up.

If the Xbox One moves less than 250,000 units within 24 hours of launch... and struggles to top 500,000 within a week... I don't think it matters who the new CEO for Microsoft is... they'll probably look at stunts like this one here... and say "enough is enough, we're dumping this trainwreck.
 
I agree. I was sorely disappointed by how poor the spec's jump was for this iteration. Down Under... we've gone from a 1000AUD PS3 launch day price to a 550AUD release. And while i like the near 50% drop for the same device... its specs make me absolutely not really give two fks to buy it in the first place when my next mobile phone will be more powerful then it will be in 2years! (i won't even mention the fact that i dont wish to buy any given all the limitations and shenanigans/hoops/bs they are trying to force gamers into).

... which, in reality, is rather true.

One of the highest end ARM-based SoCs beats a low end Atom and is nearly on par with an out-of-order "mid-range" Atom SoC. (If my memory serves me well...)

Current [high end] mobile GPUs already give the same graphics fidelity as a PS3/360-- just look at the Vita. A few years ago, PS2/Xbox quality. And, technology is advancing at a rapid rate.

I have yet to see benchmarks between a Jaguar-based APU (Temash, Kabini, Brazos 2.0) versus something like a Snapdragon 600 or 800, or Exynos 5 clocked at 1.6 GHz, and an Atom SoC (Silvermont or higher) at the same speed. I guarantee you that the next Snapdragon, Atom SoC (Valley View?), and Exynos 6 will out-clock it in 2014 or 2015.

The current console GPU as it stands is a Radeon 7750-7770 (XONE) and 7850-7870 (PS4). The highest end PowerVR (in Apple's A7) is 166 GFLOPS running at 650MHz/core, and the A7 has four 4 cores of it. To put it into perspective, the PS3's and WiiU's GPU "Latte" has an approximate GFLOPS of 176 GFLOPS.running each. So, yeah, the A7 is currently nearly as powerful as the WiiU and PS3, and more powerful than the PS Vita. That same PowerVR chip (6430) pushes 20.8 GP/s compared to 4.4 GP/s in the WiiU and PS3. Comparatively, the Adreno 420 in the Snapdragon 805 is 4.8 GP/s, so even that is more powerful than the WiiU and PS3 in terms of filling a screen at pixels/second. The ARM Mali 400 (Galaxy Note 3) is 129.3 GFLOPS.

Where will mobile GPUs be in a decade?

Well, if take a look at the PowerVR 6430 (A7) compared to the 543 (PS Vita), the floating point operations increased over 20-fold-- 166.4 GFLOPS vs.7.2 GFLOPS. That's only in two years time. If there was another 20-fold increase in two years, that's 3328 GFLOPS, or 3.3 TFLOPS. The PS4 currently does 1.84 TFLOPS and the XONE at 1.3 TFLOPS, so technically, if my math is right, they will be out-performed in two years time. By the end of the decade, you could probably run a PS4 and XONE-level game on your phone and then some.

The next SoCs seeing how rapidly they're advancing will most likely outperform the Jaguar-based cores by 2014 minimum to 2015 at most. After 2015, these consoles will be much less powerful than any SoC released by Samsung, Qualcomm, and even Intel, and any new AMD-based SoC released in 2014-2015.

We'll have smartphones and tablets on the level of mid-range desktop PC graphics cards OR FASTER by the end of this decade at the rate mobile GPUs are advancing.

So, hold onto those PS4 and XONE consoles, they'll be outdated at least two years from now. By mobile devices, no less.
 
Keep in mind that Sony originally worked with IBM and Toshiba to develop an entire new method of thread-processing and scaling with the Cell architecture, billions upon billions of research dollars that were supposed to herald a shift in consumer electronics formed by the surge of developers using Cell's ability to scale the same code from 1 SPE units to 100 SPE units. Only, Cell was a failure. ARM took off in the consumer market that the Cell 1 and 2 SPE unit chips were supposed to attract... and Sony came pretty close to bouncing all of their cheques.
The Cell chip was suppose to be an APU itself. There wasn't suppose to be an Nvidia GPU in the PS3, because the SPE's were there for that reason. Sony was betting that the PS3 would have such huge market dominance that developers would have to code for it, and the code wasn't going to work on any other platform. So pretty much all games made for the PS3 were going to stay exclusive. Developers bitched, and the Nvidia GPU was thrown in just before release to make developers happy.

Majority of PS3 games use the 1 PowerPC core and the Nvidia GPU exclusively, while ignoring the SPE's. Did Sony really think the PS3 could herald in a market shift? Probably more marketing then reality.

If the Xbox One moves less than 250,000 units within 24 hours of launch... and struggles to top 500,000 within a week... I don't think it matters who the new CEO for Microsoft is... they'll probably look at stunts like this one here... and say "enough is enough, we're dumping this trainwreck.
The reasons the Xbox One is doing terrible is because the PS4 is cheaper and the game lineup sucks. Actually, here's a short list.

#1 PS4 is $100 cheaper
#2 Both have similar games
#3 PS4 is more powerful
#4 PSN online is cheaper
#5 PS4 has a removable hard drive
#6 Believe it or not NSA. I bet you some people thought about it.

We'll have smartphones and tablets on the level of mid-range desktop PC graphics cards OR FASTER by the end of this decade at the rate mobile GPUs are advancing.
Not really no. You already see issues with these devices due to heat and power consumption. The only reason the mobile market was able to compete so well is because of manufacturing, which allowed these chips to compete fairly well with 10 year old desktop PCs.

But very soon we'll hit a manufacturing limit, and you won't be able to increase a CPU's speed without increasing it's power consumption as well as heat. Tablets and smart phones already get very hot when you start using an application that turns on all the cores. The only reason people haven't gotten mad about heat problems, is because there's very few applications that will use all four cores of your tablet/smartphone device. Angry Birds and Facebook won't cook these devices.

So yea, I don't think any tablet will play PS4/Xbone graphics level quality of games in 2 years. And that's just the hardware, cause the software is a major issue as well. The drivers for the graphics chips in them are so bad that it's proving to be a major hurdle for a lot of developers. The Dolphin developers really hate ARM/Mali, and just despise Qualcomm/Adreno. From what I hear, the PowerVR drivers are extremely buggy as well.

So unless they can turn around their drivers within 2 years, the drivers are so immature that they can't even render Wii games at the moment.

20130917_223443.jpg
 
Majority of PS3 games use the 1 PowerPC core and the Nvidia GPU exclusively, while ignoring the SPE's. Did Sony really think the PS3 could herald in a market shift? Probably more marketing then reality.

The reasons the Xbox One is doing terrible is because the PS4 is cheaper and the game lineup sucks. Actually, here's a short list.

#1 PS4 is $100 cheaper
#2 Both have similar games
#3 PS4 is more powerful
#4 PSN online is cheaper
#5 PS4 has a removable hard drive
#6 Believe it or not NSA. I bet you some people thought about it.

Not really no. You already see issues with these devices due to heat and power consumption. The only reason the mobile market was able to compete so well is because of manufacturing, which allowed these chips to compete fairly well with 10 year old desktop PCs.

But very soon we'll hit a manufacturing limit, and you won't be able to increase a CPU's speed without increasing it's power consumption as well as heat. Tablets and smart phones already get very hot when you start using an application that turns on all the cores. The only reason people haven't gotten mad about heat problems, is because there's very few applications that will use all four cores of your tablet/smartphone device. Angry Birds and Facebook won't cook these devices.

So yea, I don't think any tablet will play PS4/Xbone graphics level quality of games in 2 years. And that's just the hardware, cause the software is a major issue as well. The drivers for the graphics chips in them are so bad that it's proving to be a major hurdle for a lot of developers. The Dolphin developers really hate ARM/Mali, and just despise Qualcomm/Adreno. From what I hear, the PowerVR drivers are extremely buggy as well.

So unless they can turn around their drivers within 2 years, the drivers are so immature that they can't even render Wii games at the moment.


20130917_223443.jpg

You make a very good point.

Even if something like PowerVR hits 3.3 TFLOPS (estimated) in two years, unlikely any software or mobile game is going to utilize that power. What's the most demanding mobile game currently? Or, better yet, how many graphically demanding mobile games are out there outside the PS Vita games?

Pretty much that when you think about it.

Especially when it comes to heat and power-- something has to both cool and effectively power that. Our battery tech is, more or less, archaic now. It's why electric vehicles won't be as popular as gasoline combustion engines anytime soon-- the battery tech and ones that last a long time is not available at this time.

I have probably more hopes that maybe, just maybe, Intel's Atom SoC and AMD's future APUs for tablets will change this. My friend, an Android and iOS developer, knows all too well how bad the drivers and software is on the Android side especially when trying to make a piece of software work on the multitude of Android devices out there. Apple and iOS, not so much. He's had better support there than on Android itself from his own personal experience. But, an X86 mobile processor like an AMD APU with its Radeon GCN cores running at 2W to 4W (like the one recently announced at APU13), with Mantle and DirectX/OpenGL support looks like it may be the ticket to help developers out there. Intel's upcoming SoC with possible Iris-level graphics on it may help there too.

The problem: OEMs need to look into these x86 SoCs in the first place and supporting them in future devices. And, that's going to be a steep hill to climb given how widespread AND affordable ARM-based processors are, and Android being a free mobile OS compared to Windows 8 RT (ARM). Maybe that will change when Ubuntu releases their mobile variant? Who knows? Too early to tell.
 
The reasons the Xbox One is doing terrible is because the PS4 is cheaper and the game lineup sucks. Actually, here's a short list.

#1 PS4 is $100 cheaper

I'm not sure if the cost difference between the PS4 and Xbox One can be fairly compared. You could say that the extra $100 landed you a Kinect whereas with the PS4 you'd need to spend an extra $60 for a PlayStation Camera which doesn't even hold a flame to the Kinect.
 
I'm not sure if the cost difference between the PS4 and Xbox One can be fairly compared. You could say that the extra $100 landed you a Kinect whereas with the PS4 you'd need to spend an extra $60 for a PlayStation Camera which doesn't even hold a flame to the Kinect.

Or you could say that paying $100 less landed you better hardware?

I would buy the PS4 [assuming I was going to buy a console] even if the prices were flipped. The kinect is of 0 interest to me.
 
I'm not sure if the cost difference between the PS4 and Xbox One can be fairly compared. You could say that the extra $100 landed you a Kinect whereas with the PS4 you'd need to spend an extra $60 for a PlayStation Camera which doesn't even hold a flame to the Kinect.
Kinect is really interesting for people like me who will try to use it and it's SDK to derp around. I don't think the avg consumer will take it into account fully, mostly it will be a 100 dollar expensive good quality microphone for people. And voice commands are the only thing i see good enough to transition into games. Gestures even when precise is too much. Can't distinguish between voluntary and involuntary gestures.
 
ofc kinect is a bit more then just a mic array because it can look at you it can discern who is talking.
 
Or you could say that paying $100 less landed you better hardware?

I would buy the PS4 [assuming I was going to buy a console] even if the prices were flipped. The kinect is of 0 interest to me.

To be fair, one's interest is irrelevant. The Kinect is there regardless. I suppose Microsoft should sell a Kinect-less bundle and price them $100 less to compete with PS4 on even ground for those who do not plan to use the Kinect.

Then again I have no idea how tightly integrated the Kinect is with Xbox that it cannot do without.
 
Despite all the technological advances the Xbox One has, I picked mine up from a a local gamestop at midnight launch, downloaded patch, tried to play forza 5, got the disc error message.

GameStop acknowledged that the disc drive was faulty and accepted to refund me, I'll never be an early adopter ever again.

It's a great machine guys, everything worked except the disc drive.
 
Conspiracy?

You be the judge.

Did Microsoft bribe Congress to outlaw .50 BMG rifles because they will punch right though a Brink's truck?
 
Despite all the technological advances the Xbox One has, I picked mine up from a a local gamestop at midnight launch, downloaded patch, tried to play forza 5, got the disc error message.

GameStop acknowledged that the disc drive was faulty and accepted to refund me, I'll never be an early adopter ever again.

It's a great machine guys, everything worked except the disc drive.

That sucks. I got one also last night. Wasn't planning on it at first. Just happen to be at Walmart and was going to pick up a game for the weekend around 11:30pm and heard them say that they just found they had a few extra consoles from what they thought and could sell 4 more. decided would go ahead and get one.

I wonder if it really was the console or if it was your game that was the issue. I noticed a few other people report issues on a site about trying to install Forza.

I got Ryse: Son of Rome and that installed fine for me.
 
So is just about every apple product in the last 10 years, you forget it's hardware + software that makes the system appealing.

As far as the size of the xbox1 it doesn't bother me, i actually like it a bit more then the ps4 as it's not as deep, and it's how deep things are that fucks up when placing it on the shelving for the home entertainment.

It's restricted crippleware that has less functionality than an HTPC. What is there to get excited about?
 
More for attention then security. That has to be the biggest waste of money I've ever seen. Do they really think by putting these machines in armored cars with Xbox logos on them, will make people want to go buy one? Do banks put giant money symbols on them to let people know they're carrying around valuable stuff? No of course not, but the marketing department that Microsoft is clearly over paying, sure thinks if they make it look valuable then you'll want to buy one.

Sadly the amount of money spent for this stunt is probably more then the cost to develop some of the games on the Xbox One. Which the games so far are O.K. at best.

^This. Exactly what it is -- a dumbass publicity/marketing stunt. Armored trucks, GTFO.

If "safety" of the Xboxes being assuredly delivered is what they're worried about, they wouldn't/shouldn't paint a big-ass target on their vehicles for any would-be Xbone-jackers.
 
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