Microsoft Forecasts Kinect to Sell Five Million; CPU Usage Down to Single-Digit Percentage
The increase is based upon pre-orders, retail orders, and consumer interest, according to Bloomberg, which interviewed Don Mattrick, president of Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business today.
On the technical side, Microsoft's Alex Kipman, director of incubation--yes, that's his actual title--has told GamesIndustry that the Kinect sensor is down to a single-digit percentage of usage on the Xbox 360 CPU. It had previously been stated to be between 10 and 15 percent.
Now, single-digit has some spin-capacity baked into it as we could be looking at a 9% usage, which isn't very different from 10%, really. The Kinect sensor was originally going to include its own processor, but it was removed to bring costs down, which placed the burden on the Xbox 360.
The answer is, as much as we like to talk about bits and percentages, you take a game like, I don't know, Call of Duty: Black Ops - there's a significant amount of processing, be it CPU or GPU, that still remains on the table.So after that, when we came to this revelation about games, and future games that would be coming to Xbox, we looked at it and we said - "is it worth the trade-off to put on-board processing on the device when we think we can create magical, unique, deep, thorough experiences without it?"
Gamers will be able to decide for themselves if the trade-off is worth it as Kinect launches tomorrow.
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valcan_s
replyHmm so is that 9% of :
- one cores thread(relate to a desktop PC)
- or a whole core which has two threads
- or is that overall performance think task manager on a pc
- or 9% of the systems memory(512megs)?
I don't think it really matters, to tell you the truth, I pretty sure the CPU is not the bottle neck in 360 at all. The system memory and the GPU are the hurt spots and bottle necks.
Really unless this is talking about system memory I don't think it matters at all for games.
Still be interesting to know what 9% are they talking about? Maybe I have mis read the article.-
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I always prefer more hardware though. You only have one chance to do something like this right, so might as well go balls to the wall and make it as powerful as possible. Of course the cost is already pretty high, so I understand why they had to make the decision they did.
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Nothing to worry about, 9% overall CPU is nothing.
We will be happy if anyone ever makes a game for the 360 or ps3 that pegs/uses efficiently and purposely the CPU to say 90% on all cores and threads and depletes all the memory and GPU power(I only dev on XNA so I could be wrong, thats my knowledge).
That would be a insane game, mem and gpu probably will happen soon or already has happened by now, but CPU juice I doubt it, a new system will be out by then for sure.
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