Xbox One: Microsoft’s supergeeks reveal what’s inside the hardware

[fmstephe]

I am very curious about the use of a stripped down VM manager that creates and destroys multiple OSes.

"One of the machine’s operating systems boots up and is “created” when the machine turns on, Multerer said. Then it stays operating while the machine is on, and then disappears when the machine is turned off."

"There’s a third operating system as well that handles other kinds of services, such as the TV services. Switching between these operating systems quickly gives the system its instantaneous feel, Multerer said."

It isn't immediately obvious to me why we would want to use multiple operating systems? Is this a kind of super strong separation of processes? Why aren't standard processes sufficient? Is it done for reliability?

I am not criticising, I am just confused and this indicates that there are concerns here that I am not familiar with. Anyone with any insights?

[berkut]

I think it's so that the Game VM can stay constant, and game developers can develop for that for the next ~6 years knowing each XBox will have exactly the same behaviour, whereas the third one for TV services and internet can be continually upgraded and updated, without affecting the game one.

[threeseed]

So it seems as though there is basically a Hypervisor OS and two Virtual Machines. One for TV and one for Gaming. Given that TV and Gaming have vastly different resource requirements and use cases it isn't surprising that you would optimise for each use case.

Also it wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft in the future releases a cheap AppleTV competitor with just the TV VM and a cheap gaming only XBox with just the Gaming VM.

[zokier]

From technical standpoint I'd guess that separating the game and "everything else" to different OSs allows tighter control of resources, ensuring that games run with consistent performance. It might not be completely unlike the approach taken by RTLinux <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTLinux>;

[adventured]

Maybe it separates the development teams in a way that they didn't have to rely on the whole potato being literally integrated. Microsoft, like many huge companies, is known to be hyper territorial. With the computational resources available, this might have been both a pragmatic and easy choice. Each group perhaps wouldn't have to be so careful about crashing the rest of the system, and it might make it easier to develop and update each segment individually.

This might also make it easier to rip pieces off later, or add large pieces later, without needing to do a comprehensive integration across the Xbox One system, while keeping everything in its own sandbox.

[sycren]

Doesn't this also mean that everything is sandboxed in terms of security?

[gordaco]

"There isn't enough silicon on the box", "We move loads into the cloud to free up resources on the box", "The cloud can tackle tasks in games like physics, artificial intelligence, and even some rendering".

So, will it need always online? In that case, here is a console I will never buy.

[xedarius]

Cloud doing any of these things is bonkers. The cloud is good at things like running Xbox live, making my profile available anywhere, saving my games. Using the internet, let me emphasis this, the transient, unreliable communication system that is the internet to deliver pivotal game deterministic results in nano seconds is unfeasible and unworkable.

[morsch]

So they're basically saying the same things that EA said for Sim City, and which, for Sim City, turned out to be a sack of lies (almost none of the game logic runs on EAs servers and it'd be entirely pointless if it did because SC requires a beefy machine anyway). OnLive, on the other hand, has been doing it properly for a while now, with some, but less than stellar success. Microsoft is in a much better position to deliver on the premise than either of these, but I remain unconvinced.

The basic question is, is it more efficient and overall cheaper to have #(max. concurrent clients) times the hardware running in a hosted (remote) environment than having #(all clients) times the hardware running locally. Clearly #(max. concurrent clients) is much lower than #(all clients). MS, as the owner of the platform is in a pretty good position of balancing between thin and thick client and forcing developers to work within this model, ie. making the client thin (read: cheap) enough that critical calculations need to be done on the server but thick enough to run some latency critical stuff and probably some of the rendering on the client.

[siamore]

No, according to an interview with the president of Xbox Live only internet specific features like smartGlass will need a connection, some games that use such features may optionally require a connection[1]

[1] http://www.wpcentral.com/xbox-one-no-bc-not-always-online

[rbanffy]

The box is too big not to have decent processing inside it.

[forgotAgain]

So they're targeting recurring revenue: family subscriptions for games, Office 365, movies, ... .

Nothing wrong with that, others do it. But it does mean that gaming performance is compromised to achieve other objectives.

[unsigner]

Translation: "game developers are now strongly encouraged to use Azure for backend".

[Clepsydra]

From Mary Jo Foley's blog: Xbox Live does not run on Windows Azure; it runs on its own servers in Microsoft's datacenters.

[AndrewDucker]

Hang on - they want to offload game-critical code (like AI) to the internet?

And how are people who don't have high-speed internet supposed to use it???

[HyprMusic]

This could be for multiplayer though. It's been a while since I've had xbox live, but when I used to play Perfect Dark Zero, there was always a host. The host often had an advantage due to latency. Perhaps with Xbox live's increased computing power, more of this can be moved in to the cloud?

[TheAnimus]

Well what percentage of the target market is that going to be? And when are they planning to make it a mandatory requirement for things.

Given that at the moment it appears to be related to things such as voice + facial recognition and processing (which frankly I would want to see the privacy policy around) that's fine. No internet, means I have to press a button rather than yell. OK with that.

If its offloading games physics and AI when playing, well that's fine if its optional. I appreciate that certain kinds of ANNs distribute really well on server farms, in a way that makes sense. But so long as its optional.

However I think it is only a few years before we look back and laugh at the idea of not having internet access available. At least I hope we will.

[hahainternet]

I don't believe a single thing in this article. From start to finish it lists 'cool sounding' but mindless engineering or software choices. A virtual machine to run games so you can do two things at once? Moving rendering tasks to 'cloud tasks' on the GPU?

I'll believe it in a couple of years when someone finds jtag headers on the board.

[xedarius]

It's making me very angry the more I read about the Xbox One press launch. There's two things you needed to do Microsoft.

1) Make the console 5x to 10x more powerful than the previous generation.

2) Open the platform up to indies, like Apple have, with an annual subscription of $100, coupled with a reasonable percentage cut (not 60%!).

The rest takes care of itself.

[zokier]

So they have done 1) and being mostly supportive about 2). What's there to be angry about?

[workbench]

Sony are definitely making it easier for indies and are courting a few major ones now.

[VikingCoder]

http://xbox.com was down for most of the day.

That does not inspire confidence in your ability to move to the cloud, Xbox team.

[freehunter]

That's one thing I've noticed about Microsoft services: they're always down. Outlook.com was down for several days as I was trying to merge my GMail to Outlook. Xbox.com is seemingly always slow and frequently gives me page not found errors. The marketplace and Xbox Music Pass are down a lot more often than they should be. Technet is a nightmare.

Why does it seem like Microsoft has such a hard time keeping their servers running? Then the next question that comes to mind is why do they still have cloud customers? I mean, I'm one of them; I use Xbox Music Pass and Technet and Xbox Live and Outlook.com but I can't answer the question as to why. Why do people put up with it?

[quotha]

I cannot wait to skype and watch tv, at the same time!

[smegel]

Jeez im glad i