The next generation Xbox is little more than speculation at this point, backed up with a few rumours that it might be announced and/or appear in 2012. However, it’s fairly obvious that there will be a next-gen Xbox and this inevitable piece of tech has been nick-named the Xbox 720.
As reported by Examiner.com, who are citing the August issue of the US Official Xbox Magazine, AMD has said that ‘the next Xbox will be capable of the level of graphical detail seen in James Cameron’s movie Avatar’.
Neal Robison is indirectly attributed the quote; he is director of Independent Software Vendor (ISV) relationships at AMD, a position which means he works closely with software developers to ensure they can get the best out of AMD hardware. Previously he was ATI’s global Director for Developer Relations.
It should be noted that at this point AMD hasn’t said anything official about being involved with Microsoft on a next-gen Xbox.
Robison was also paraphrased to have said “the A.I. and physics capabilities of the next-gen hardware will allow for every pedestrian in a game such as Grand Theft Auto or Saints Row to have a totally individual mentality, meaning when you shoot a gun or run someone over they don’t all just do the same thing. There will be no more mob mentality, where everyone just screams and runs away; every NPC will actually be an individual character.”
Assuming nothing has been lost in transcription; those are some fairly bold claims. Perhaps Robison didn’t mean to be taken literally, or maybe he didn’t watch Avatar.
The computing power required to create Avatar was on a massive scale relative to even the most advanced GPUs currently available for desktop PC gaming. Weta Digital, the company behind the visual effects in Avatar, operates a cluster of processors that entered the TOP500 list of the world’s supercomputers at position 143 when it was first added in mid 2009. It has since fallen off the list, but nonetheless remains impressive.
At the time Avatar was being produced, the Weta processing array consisted of more than 4,000 HP BL2x220c blades, connected via 10 Gigabit Ethernet networking to create over 1,000 machines and over 40,000 processor cores utilising 104TB of memory, according to Weta systems administrator Paul Gunn.
A floating point operation per second (FLOPS) measurement speaks of a system’s raw power. A top-of-the-range AMD Radeon HD 6990, which sports a dual-GPU setup, can crank out 5,099 GigaFLOPS. The Weta Digital setup can churn 31,527.8 GigaFLOPS.
With advances in technology being exponential and the ‘Xbox 720’ a little more than rumour at this point, is it feasible that Microsoft will somehow cram 30,000 odd GigaFLOPS of computing power into a gaming console? Will settling for 20,000 GigaFLOPS be good enough?
The long-running trend of Moore’s law still holds true; it describes long-term hardware development trends as doubling every two years the number of transistors that can fit on an integrated circuit. Come July 2013, we will likely be seeing top-end desktop gaming GPU’s pushing 10,000 GigaFLOPS.
With some clever design decisions and engineering magic, could AMD and Microsoft have an immensely powerful multi-GPU console on the cards for launch within the next two years?
Mythical Xbox 720 will deliver Avatar-like visuals says AMD << Comments and views
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