23 January 2020

Analyse This: Next Gen Consoles (Part 5)


Last time I wrote about the possibility of the next gen consoles utilising the latest NVMe PCIe Gen 4 SSD controllers from Phison and SMI. There's an update to this rumour taken from the work profile of an ex-employee of Phison where the person mentions that they worked on the project team that were designing the controller that would be used in the Xbox Series X (labelled as Xbox Scarlett by the engineer). The controller in question is, according to the profile, the PS5019-E19. Unfortunately, this is a bit disappointing.

15 January 2020

Analyse This: Next Gen Consoles (Part 4)




It seems there has been a couple of further developments over the last few days for next gen console news. First off, Digitmes reported that both Phison and Silicon Motion Technology (confusingly, SMI) are both linked to the next generation consoles. Secondly, there was a leaked estimate of the relative size of the PS5 die size compared to the Xbox SX.

I had noted previously that I didn't believe that current write and read speeds were adequate for the types of experiences hinted at by SONY and Microsoft... well it appears that I missed this article from Anandtech and this article from TweakTown where Phison reports their E18 controller can do 7.0 GB/s sequential writes and 1 million 4 KB random IOPS and SMI can do 6.5 GB/s sequential writes with 0.7 million IOPS (I presume they're also using a standard 4 KB package size).

10 January 2020

Analyse This: The Next Gen Consoles (Part 3) (UPDATED)



CES is here and we were almost losing our collective minds over "will they or won't they" commentary regarding peeps from the next generation of consoles. Of course, there were/are no reveals. However, there are some interesting tidbits regarding AMD's platforms which could provide some further insight to the nature of the CPU/GPU (or APU) inside the consoles from Microsoft and SONY.

9 January 2020

The End of an Era...


There are few items of PC paraphernalia that you don't replace or fiddle with very often. Sure, you can keep a PC for 4-5 years without having to mess around with internal components and, with some luck, you can potentially get away with only messing around with a GPU upgrade in the 6-10 year period. I've never been that lucky and there have been component upgrades or replacements due to wear and tear over the last 10 years. However, I have been using the same mouse during that period.

Now its time is up...