4 ms·

This goofy stuff shows up every time there's a new Microsoft console (or console Microsoft is involved in.) It won't happen. The whole point of a gaming conso

This goofy stuff shows up every time there's a new Microsoft console (or console Microsoft is involved in.) It won't happen. The whole point of a gaming console is that developers know exactly what they have available in terms of processing power and memory. As soon as you let a general purpose OS run behind the scenes, you give up that control, and with it, the ease of use and quality user experience that comes from (in theory) never having to worry about a game running out of memory and crashing, or running sluggish because of background processes. Multitasking outside of the gaming processes is something that will always be kept to a minimum in order to keep the experience as flawless as possible for the user. Right now, you can do the bare minimum required for the basics of today's gaming environment, which is downloads, voice chat, friends lists, etc. These processes use minimal known CPU, and a finite but known amount of memory, and that's why it's a console and not just a Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo branded computer.

jerf 15y ago
"As soon as you let a general purpose OS run behind the scenes, you give up that control" That's less true than it used to be. The PS3 certainly reserves resources for the top-level OS, I assume the XBox360 does too. The next generation could easily carve out resources dedicated at the hardware level for the top-level OS while exposing constant hardware resources for the games, and with the further progression of Moore's Law they could definitely have a usable top-level OS without starving the game level. (Theoretically this reservation could be done by a software hypervisor, but I suspect that if you're actually designing this in from scratch, it's easier to "secure" the system with actual dedicated hardware.)
- mrcharles 15y ago
  It's still true, because the PS4/Xbox720/Whatever run limited hardware specs that basically wouldn't allow enough ram/cpu available for a general purpose OS running at the same time to come even close to replicating the speed of an actual desktop system. On top of that, the processors these game systems use suck for desktop style applications. Right now, the PS3/360 reserves somewhere between 30-50mb of system ram, and only requires that game processes yield occasionally on one of their multiple processors. That's a far cry from having full desktop power available at the beck and call of the OS. The price point of consoles will limit the ability for that to happen all by itself. You aren't going to see 4gb of ram in the next consoles, frankly I'll be happy if they even allow 2gb, but I've been hearing it probably won't even be that high.
  - jerf 15y ago
    "It's still true, because the PS4/Xbox720/Whatever run limited hardware specs that basically wouldn't allow enough ram/cpu available for a general purpose OS running at the same time to come even close to replicating the speed of an actual desktop system." Nonsense. You don't need quad-core 3GHz machines with 4 GB of RAM to run a general-purpose OS. You don't need anything close to it, and you certainly don't need anything close to that when you're running things that, even if written for a "general-purpose OS", will still at least have an optimized mode for this very common case. You're not going to run an unmodified Firefox 2 with its GBs of memory use on these things. Carving out resources equivalent to a 2011 mid-grade smartphone on a machine that won't exist for at least one more year and probably two won't be that hard. Even "Windows" doesn't have to be that hard to run, if it isn't running every service a desktop needs and the vast swathes of reverse-compatibility code. How quickly people forget what you can do with even just 256MB of RAM, half-a-gigahertz, and some hardware graphics acceleration.
    - mrcharles 15y ago
      We're talking about putting a consumer OS on a console, here. We're not talking about 'what can be done' with limited hardware, we're talking about the viability of a consumer using an OS on limited hardware as if it's full hardware. We're not talking about making a custom version of firefox, we're talking about actually using Firefox.
      - jerf 15y ago
        I didn't say Firefox, I said Firefox 2, the memory leaking piece of crap. There's no reason that you won't be able to run Firefox 7 or whatever on the XBox 720. People have forgotten that you don't need huge machines to run this stuff. Anything you see running on a tablet or smart phone today is perfectly feasible on a carved-out, hardware-dedicated element XBox 720, proof by observation (it exists!). Moreover, it's not like I'm hypothesizing the existence of a Microsoft mobile OS... it exists. In fact this makes the whole Windows Mobile play make sense in a way that it doesn't in any other way; on its own it stands 0 chance of taking over the phone market. Oh, I get it now! Microsoft hasn't let go of a unified OS running on desktops, tablets, consoles, and cell phones. They just realized that they can't just slap the desktop OS on a cell phone and call it a day, but in fact they need to go the other way; take their tech base, build the mobile OS, then extend it for the desktop case for desktop uses. Hey, that could work.
endlessvoid94 15y ago
I wouldn't assume there will be a "general purpose" OS running. I'm betting that the desktop-like manager will be treated like another application in a loosely coupled way, so that the only thing running behind the game is the kernel. That sorta seems like a no-brainer to me.
- mrcharles 15y ago
  Sure. That's radically different from "Running Windows 8" however. Simulating a Windows 8-like environment? Sure. Not the same thing though.

jerf 15y ago

"As soon as you let a general purpose OS run behind the scenes, you give up that control" That's less true than it used to be. The PS3 certainly reserves resources for the top-level OS, I assume the XBox360 does too. The next generation could easily carve out resources dedicated at the hardware level for the top-level OS while exposing constant hardware resources for the games, and with the further progression of Moore's Law they could definitely have a usable top-level OS without starving the game level. (Theoretically this reservation could be done by a software hypervisor, but I suspect that if you're actually designing this in from scratch, it's easier to "secure" the system with actual dedicated hardware.)

mrcharles 15y ago
It's still true, because the PS4/Xbox720/Whatever run limited hardware specs that basically wouldn't allow enough ram/cpu available for a general purpose OS running at the same time to come even close to replicating the speed of an actual desktop system. On top of that, the processors these game systems use suck for desktop style applications. Right now, the PS3/360 reserves somewhere between 30-50mb of system ram, and only requires that game processes yield occasionally on one of their multiple processors. That's a far cry from having full desktop power available at the beck and call of the OS. The price point of consoles will limit the ability for that to happen all by itself. You aren't going to see 4gb of ram in the next consoles, frankly I'll be happy if they even allow 2gb, but I've been hearing it probably won't even be that high.
- jerf 15y ago
  "It's still true, because the PS4/Xbox720/Whatever run limited hardware specs that basically wouldn't allow enough ram/cpu available for a general purpose OS running at the same time to come even close to replicating the speed of an actual desktop system." Nonsense. You don't need quad-core 3GHz machines with 4 GB of RAM to run a general-purpose OS. You don't need anything close to it, and you certainly don't need anything close to that when you're running things that, even if written for a "general-purpose OS", will still at least have an optimized mode for this very common case. You're not going to run an unmodified Firefox 2 with its GBs of memory use on these things. Carving out resources equivalent to a 2011 mid-grade smartphone on a machine that won't exist for at least one more year and probably two won't be that hard. Even "Windows" doesn't have to be that hard to run, if it isn't running every service a desktop needs and the vast swathes of reverse-compatibility code. How quickly people forget what you can do with even just 256MB of RAM, half-a-gigahertz, and some hardware graphics acceleration.
  - mrcharles 15y ago
    We're talking about putting a consumer OS on a console, here. We're not talking about 'what can be done' with limited hardware, we're talking about the viability of a consumer using an OS on limited hardware as if it's full hardware. We're not talking about making a custom version of firefox, we're talking about actually using Firefox.
    - jerf 15y ago
      I didn't say Firefox, I said Firefox 2, the memory leaking piece of crap. There's no reason that you won't be able to run Firefox 7 or whatever on the XBox 720. People have forgotten that you don't need huge machines to run this stuff. Anything you see running on a tablet or smart phone today is perfectly feasible on a carved-out, hardware-dedicated element XBox 720, proof by observation (it exists!). Moreover, it's not like I'm hypothesizing the existence of a Microsoft mobile OS... it exists. In fact this makes the whole Windows Mobile play make sense in a way that it doesn't in any other way; on its own it stands 0 chance of taking over the phone market. Oh, I get it now! Microsoft hasn't let go of a unified OS running on desktops, tablets, consoles, and cell phones. They just realized that they can't just slap the desktop OS on a cell phone and call it a day, but in fact they need to go the other way; take their tech base, build the mobile OS, then extend it for the desktop case for desktop uses. Hey, that could work.

endlessvoid94 15y ago

I wouldn't assume there will be a "general purpose" OS running. I'm betting that the desktop-like manager will be treated like another application in a loosely coupled way, so that the only thing running behind the game is the kernel. That sorta seems like a no-brainer to me.

mrcharles 15y ago
Sure. That's radically different from "Running Windows 8" however. Simulating a Windows 8-like environment? Sure. Not the same thing though.