4 ms·

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 run

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.
    - mrcharles 15y ago
      You realize that even tiny netbook computers have a gig of ram in them, right? I mean, I don't want to keep this argument going forever, I just think you are woefully overestimating the slice of power that could be spared from a console without making the whole venture kind of pointless.

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.
  - mrcharles 15y ago
    You realize that even tiny netbook computers have a gig of ram in them, right? I mean, I don't want to keep this argument going forever, I just think you are woefully overestimating the slice of power that could be spared from a console without making the whole venture kind of pointless.