Okay, well I’m kind of here to lay down the line as to how stupid people are with their rumors about the hardware in the new gen consoles. For the past 3 months all I’ve been seeing is this talk about Quad Core CPU’s in the new Xbox, 8GB of RAM, and even heard the imbecile ideas of a GTX 680 graphics card into a console. I’ll start off by saying this, I am no expert on consoles, but I do know the differences between a custom built PC and a console.
So lets start off with the first incoming rumors about the hardware in the new consoles that are yet to be announced which is the concept of needing a quad core CPU in a console. Well this is very capable of happening, but a little unlikely…why? Well you need to take a step back and understand a very easy structure of consoles compared to regular PC’s. For a PC they are almost all running Windows 7 nowadays (or XP), then you add in a bunch of other bloat ware for pre built systems, and then you have the installation of other programs. Once this has happened you have a hunk of information all stuffed into a hard drive and it all doesn’t work together well (at least not always). Why is this? Well I won’t go into too much detail, but these programs on a computer aren’t heavily regulated as to what they can do, and what they can “modify”. Now lets take a look at how a console’s operating system runs. For the Xbox 360 we have the Xbox 360 software, it’s unique compared to every other system (other than Microsoft has kind of taken their own product the Xbox 360 and implemented a lot of parts of it into their new PC OS, Windows 8) and every program that is allowed to run on the Xbox 360 without illegal modification is heavily regulated. This means that programs that are put on the Xbox 360 don’t alter things in a way that could make the OS run differently. Only official Xbox 360 updates can do this, and they are heavily tested before hand anyway. So where am I going with all of this? Well because these programs are “regulated” beyond belief, it doesn’t call for extreme measures of hardware. In other words when you take an operating system like a consoles, you don’t need extreme hardware to take care of the crap that is effecting it’s speed.
Now this is mostly for the hardware of the motherboard, CPU and RAM. The operating system will only allow the CPU and RAM to work so much, and it’ll “cap out” but the guys over at Sony, and Microsoft will ensure that it’s more than enough. This doesn’t mean there won’t be a Quad Core in the next gen, but it does mean that something like a high powered dual or even triple will be more than enough.
Lets move onto graphics for a few moments because this is the “tricky part” in my opinion because I don’t even fully understand it in consoles. I’ve never been a console hardware guy but after doing some research I’m still a little lost because it’s not as easily laid out like a graphics card I’d buy for my computer. So sum it up though the chips used in the current gen consoles are pretty crappy actually. For instance Battlefield 3 on the console looks fantastic (except it’s limitation of being 30 FPS) but with the low grade GPU architecture it makes me wonder “How the hell did they get this to look so good still?” Well that my friends goes back to the Operating system…but it’s beyond that. I can’t really go more into this, but if someone has a great deal of knowledge on this I would appreciate a conversation or 2 with them to educate me on this…researching it on my own just doesn’t seem to be working…maybe it’s because I’m researching it at 03:00A.M.?
So to sum this whole thing up, don’t listen to the spewed bullshit of “A 3770k CPU is gonna be in the new gen consoles” because honestly it’s just a guy like me who knows PC parts, but doesn’t know crap about console hardware, and is just trying to get you to click on his link to read it. I wrote this today to put in my 2 cents on those kind of articles, and my knowledge of why those rumors probably aren’t true exactly. Especially the ones who put in specific hardware names that go into computers….the hardware in a console is much much much different from a computer.
Before I go ahead and end this, I’d like to apologize if my writing technique seems “shitty”, but I haven’t written anything in like a month and I needed to feel productive on the site. I promise you more material that will be good in the near future. We have some pretty cool plans here at TOG and The Nerd Hour.
Check out The Nerd Hour Podcast on Stitcher Radio! Also on iTunes! We are revamping the show, and revamping thisordinaryguy.com in general. We are looking for writers for topics of gaming, tech, politics, and more! Email Justin at [email protected] and he can get you started. For you nerds, gamers, and geeks we are looking for a co-host for The Nerd Hour podcast…again just email Justin for more information on that. Thanks for reading guys.
