Xbox One Revealed!

[Dog]

Source-Wired.com
My first thought, honestly, is how boxy it is. In 2010, Microsoft released a “slim” version of the Xbox 360 that was literally streamlined, with a curvilinear X-shaped form that made its predecessor feel clumsy in comparison. The Xbox One is a bit bigger than the 360 and as rectangular as it gets. It’s not without its flourishes, though. It’s a deep, glossy black that the industrial design team calls liquid black. The top of the console is subdivided into two 16:9 rectangles, derived from the traditional aspect ratio of widescreen televisions—one is solid and glossy, the other a matte panel that’s entirely vented to help as much air pass through the system as possible. The front is nearly without embellishment; even the optical disc drive slot blends into the frontpiece of the box. On the whole, it looks more like a TiVo than any gaming console I’ve ever known.

 

A deep chamfer at the base of the front panel makes it appear to levitate, and similar touches on the Kinect sensor make it look almost cantilevered, like Wright’s Fallingwater. Both are squatter than their predecessors, with a powerful heft. The controller, too, is noticeably changed: the humplike battery pack on the underside is all but gone; the odd circular directional pad has been replaced by a more precise cross-shaped one, the triggers and shoulder buttons are carved from a single graceful swath of material that extends from one side to the other. Over the next two days at Microsoft, I’ll see just about everything that went into making the Xbox One, from laser-printed controller mock-ups to Kinect-enhanced game prototypes. But standing on that pedestal right now, it’s all just a cipher.

 

The bumplike battery pack on the controller’s underside is all but gone; the triggers and shoulder buttons are carved from a single graceful swath of material.

 

 

THE MISSION

The Xbox 360 has been on the market for 90 months now. Seven and a half years is a long time for a game console, especially when you consider that the original Xbox lasted barely four. Each year since the 360 came out, Whitten, who reports to Don Mattrick, president of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business division, has asked himself one question: Is it time to build the next console?

 

For a long time, the answer to that question was, “No.” But by the time 2011 rolled around, even Whitten had to admit that the 360 was, he says, “a bit long in the tooth.” While it had received a hardware refresh, its specs still sounded like a Model T in the age of the Tesla Model S: 512 megabytes of RAM and a graphics processor that had been overtaken by halfway-decent PCs years before. While game developers were eking everything they could out of the 360’s ancient architecture, Whitten and the rest of the entertainment division also knew that a fundamental shift had happened—not necessarily in gaming itself, but around it, and in ways that would change it permanently.

 

When the 360 launched, smartphones hadn’t yet trickled out of the corporate world; Netflix was strictly a DVD delivery service; the “cloud” was something that got in the way of a suntan. (Hell, in 2005, people suntanned.) And a big part of the 360’s longevity was Microsoft’s ability not only to develop games but also to forge partnerships that took advantage of these new staples of online life. So as those deals proliferated, so did the things the Xbox 360 could do. People played Halo 3 on their Xbox, but they also watched Netflix. They bought Kinect sensors for controller-free experiences, but they also burned through seasons of Deadwood on HBO Go and caught sports highlights on an ESPN app. But all of this new functionality was built on patches and firmware updates. The 360 simply wasn’t constructed that way, so when the Xbox One was greenlit in the fall of 2011, “the decision wasn’t, ‘We need a gamebox,’” Whitten says. “It was, ‘We need a living-room experience.’” Built that way from the ground up.

 

still, first it is a game device. And to that end, it needs to feel like a step forward. For seven generations now, consoles have delivered increasingly sophisticated visual experiences, from the soundless and rudimentary Magnavox Odyssey in the pre-Pong mid-’70s through the Nintendo-Sega wars of the ’90s to the lens-flare and motion-capture effects of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 today. As we brush against photorealism in our games, though, we also reach the problem of too perfect. It’s a corollary of the uncanny valley, that conceptual chasm that induces a faint feeling of disgust when we see virtual humans that are not quite right: the ideal is actually not ideal. So early demos of racing game Forza Motorsport 5 for the Xbox One try to skirt that issue by modeling imperfection itself: scuffs on wheels, orange-peel pattern on paint, tire marks where Armor-All has worn away.

 

Quantifying graphical performance is notoriously squishy. That being said, Microsoft touts the Xbox One as delivering 8 times the graphic performance of the 360. If you were to go by raw transistor count, that performance jump would be closer to tenfold: the Xbox One boasts 5 billion to the 360’s 500 million. More concretely, those paltry 512 MB of memory have been boosted to 8 GB.

 

Quantifying graphical performance is notoriously squishy. That being said, Microsoft touts the Xbox One as delivering 8 times the graphic performance of the 360.

As PC gamers know, though, the more horsepower you’ve got under the hood, the more heat you generate; the more heat you generate, the more airflow you’re going to need to dissipate that heat. Usually, that is going to come from fans, but the engineering team kept things quiet by shrinking a number of internal components for better airflow within the console. Allow me a few sentences of total geek-out on this: A new 500-GB hard drive was designed in-house, likewise a custom-built Blu-ray–capable optical drive. A single 40-nanometer chip contains both the CPU and GPU rather than the two dedicated 90-nm chips needed in the 360. In fact, a custom SOC (system on a chip) module made by AMD contains the CPU/GPU chip, the memory, the controller logic, the DRAM, and the audio processors, and connects directly to the heat sink via a phase-change interface material. Whew.