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It will be a compact Linux based system with real wood veneer. Priced between $250-$300.
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Read more.Quote:
It will be a compact Linux based system with real wood veneer. Priced between $250-$300.
This is going to tank so quickly.
Once upon a time (in the early 80's) i liked Atari, but for so long the name seems to have been a joke.
This wont help.
I did love Atari back in the day , lets see how they get on now..
Atari is long gone. Infogrammes bought Atari then changed their name to Atari. Sucked the life out the IP and left it in the sorry state it is today.
This will plummet, seen it before, Commodore springs to mind, hoping people would buy into it because of nostalgia. Look what happened there.
Frustrating part of this is I like the idea of the product but I doubt it'll catch on and I just can't see it beating a dedicated PC with steam link (or similar) in the market place.
Don't see what they couldn't just do a mini type system with the best of their numerous machines from the 80's & 90's. Biggest problem with this is the price, I got an Atari 520 STe 3 year ago come Christmas. I upgraded the ram to 4Mb and bought the Ultra Satan external hard drive which is now filled with hundreds of games, that cost me less than what one of these Ataribox will cost.
Neat idea with good intentions but pricing is way of the mark for what you are getting
I am guessing this is aimed at the same market as the not very popular steam box idea, and won't be much different from one either, shame.
It will be much cheaper than a Steam box, and also better looking (IMO). Depending on the hardware (and expansion options), I can certainly see myself buying one as a PC alternative (especially if it will be compatible with Windows).Quote:
Originally Posted by EvilCycle
Completely agree. Plus when they say "mid range PC" and then go on about "minecraft" you have to ask what they're thinking. If you take a mid range "gaming" PC then this thing has to have some poke for a small SoC but if you take ALL PCs and take the mean performance then it comes down quite low and makes this basically a mobile phone outputting to a TV. Which already exists in the form of the Amazon Fire boxes and so on.Quote:
Originally Posted by PrettyFlower1
If Apple did this then it might have a chance but Atari doesn't have the kind of market poke it once did (it's basically a nothing now) and the fact that they're crowdfunding it shows just how little they believe in the project.
EDIT: Dunno where I got SoC from, I assume it will be given the format. Or at least a very low powered CPU with integrated GPU.
i think I want some wood veneer on my PC now......
Inwin recently showed some PC cases with wood veneer... :)
I don't think it is a bad product, but I have to wonder if it is a bad price.
Nvidia shield and the 100 Atari games pack on the Google Play store for a tenner gets you this for £200 right now.
There are plenty of dirt cheap Android boxes on Gearbest as well, including dual boot Linux ones.
It's a nice idea but I doubt they have the resources to pull it off.
SteamOS failed for a whole bunch of reasons but one key issue was that Valve did not understand the console market and tried to bring it's PC experience into a market that didn't want that.
Ease of use should be maximum priority, everything should just work, games should at bare minimum be tested against the system and auto run with the optimal settings, always require a game controller as default interface - this is why SteamOS failed as none of that was done and Valve even let keyboard/mouse games be listed as SteamOS compatible of course so long as you have the oddball Steam controller, linux ports ran bad even on official Steam Machines (sucker that I was bought one).
So Atari could make Steam work but they would have to find a way to curate content optimized for the box and get game developers on board to at least deliver a reasonably good experience, this is were they need lots of resources I doubt they have.
It comes with a back catalogue of Atari classics. Exactly like Xbox and PS have. Atari classic bundles are already available everywhere. And being able to handle Minecraft and Terraria isn't really selling it as a powerful modern console.
With PS4 Pro, Xbox One S available for about the same price as the Atari (£230) then, unfortunately, I can't see the Atari doing anything but fail.
I think that SteamOS failed because the only benefit it had was lower cost than Windows, and for gaming PC's, which typically cost a lot more than consoles, that doesn't compensate for the vastly reduced gaming library.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kato-2
That said, I agree that curation and developer relations could help. However, I'd love to know the hardware for a start. If it's old AMD CPU cores, there would be a lot of need for adapting games, and it won't be that useful as a PC. If it's Raven-Ridge-based, it's likely to be a lot more attractive for the price.
Raven ridge for the price would be amazing (and probably worth getting just to put windows on it, as a media PC or similar) - I'm expecting bristol ridge. Shouldn't be too hard to get games to run on it (other than the foibles of linux), even old AMD cpu's are more than what the current gen consoles have for the CPUQuote:
Originally Posted by ET3D
... and yet for similar money the Xbox and PS4 get Jaguar cores?Quote:
Originally Posted by Xlucine
Edit to add: Might be more interesting if they gave this an Atari ST mode. Or maybe that would be another product.
Certainly a possibility, and would fit the low cost and the focus on low end games. I can hope for Raven Ridge, but yeah, I'm worried it might be Stoney Ridge. Atari did say that the box would play games like a mid-range PC, which makes me a little hopeful, but I don't trust Atari enough, so we'll have to wait and see.Quote:
Originally Posted by Xlucine
The interesting question is what's custom about the chip being used.
First of all, Xbox and PS4 have costs beyond the APU. Blu-ray drive, hard drive, extra cooling, etc. They are relatively big, bulky and power hungry. I suspect that the Ataribox will have 4GB of RAM and 64GB eMMC (hopefully not less than this, but it's possible), not the 8GB (GDDR5, in case of the PS4) + HDD of the consoles.Quote:
Originally Posted by DanceswithUnix
As for the Jaguar cores, they were put in the Xbox One / PS4 before Excavator was available, and naturally changing things would break compatibility. Far as I know 8 Jaguar cores take about the same silicon area as 4 Excavator cores, and provide better overall performance if all cores are taken advantage of. Which isn't usually the case for PC games, where Excavator is likely to perform better (as well as for general usage).
Blue ray drive is a few dollars, you can buy a PC disc reader for a tenner with extra metal casing and power electronics that wouldn't be needed in a console.Quote:
Originally Posted by ET3D
As for eMMC, well it may not be Apple pricing but the stuff isn't cheap. Here is 64GB of eMMC on a cheap carrier PCB for £62: https://lilliputdirect.com/64gb-emmc...n¤cy=GBP
compared with 1TB of hard disk storage for £46: https://www.ebuyer.com/726218-toshib...e-hdwj110uzsva
I'm sure you can get a better deal on the eMMC than that if you can get the volumes up, but not to the point of comparing it with hard drives. So the hard drive is a cost reduction exercise. If you want really cheap storage you have to go Nintendo style, tiny flash and make the customer add an SD card to store more.
So the bulk of the price is going to be on the APU, it needs to be a big old lump of silicon if you want the games to be any good. Excavator probably wouldn't have helped here, the thing about Jaguar cores was their ability to perform at low power. Ryzen can do that, none of the construction cores really could. Regardless of cpu core used, lots of shaders means heat and hence the cooling.
A single Ryzen core (not CCX, single core two threads) and enough shaders would make for an interesting APU *if* AMD can wire that up without their standard fabric. That would be $10M in up front costs to make the masks, and probably the same again in engineering costs for not using standard AMD modules in the design.
In short, if you can't find some way of subsidising the console which lets face it Atari can't, you need something you can sell at a profit from day one. If they are aiming at Nvidia Shield pricing, I am expecting something on par with the Nvidia Shield.
The whole focus of Excavator was improved performance in a mobile envelope - the top end 15W TDP Bristol Ridge runs 4 cores at 2.7GHz base (3.3GHz turbo) and has a 512 shader IGP at ~ 750MHz. That's a pretty significant performance boost all-round over - for instance - my aging Trinity laptop, in less than half the TDP. And my laptop is still pulling daily duty with no issues, including some (lightish) gaming.Quote:
Originally Posted by DanceswithUnix
That said, I'd fully expect a quad core (8 thread) Raven Ridge to hit similar clocks in a 15W envelope but of course it has ~ 50% higher IPC, so would be unquestionably better.
A lot of the early Zen presentations hinted strongly at two APU dies - a quad core with up to 11 CUs, and a dual core with up to 3 CUs. 2 Cores/4 Threads + 196 vega shaders would be pretty passable for entry level machine. Something like 2 Zen cores + 6 CUs should still be pretty cheap and give Bristol Ridge levels of performance. I guess it all depends on just how "custom" they've gone ... the more customisation they've requested the more it's going to cost...
Oh that was certainly the best of the bunch for low power use, but would you really use one in a modern design? If only for the reputational baggage it drags behind it, I would try not to even if there was a really good deal on 28nm wafers.Quote:
Originally Posted by scaryjim
I notice the Intel cpu with AMD Vega rumours are back. Now that would be interesting, and going with Intel's fancy MCM tech probably wouldn't add too much to cost :D
http://www.game-debate.com/news/2386...el-mobile-cpusDidn't know about that, but looks like it has been disproved.Quote:
Originally Posted by DanceswithUnix
Under $35 in small quantities.Quote:
Originally Posted by DanceswithUnix
The rumour keeps coming up and keeps getting dismissed, at first I was really dismissive of it but for a bonkers rumour it seems to have some real staying power. Still, my thought wasn't that Intel are interested in such a product but more that if someone turned up and asked for an Intel cpu and radeon gpu in an MCM could probably get it made. A games console should have the volume to make it happen. I would be shocked if it actually came to pass, but as I said it is an interesting thought.Quote:
Originally Posted by ET3D
About the same as 500GB of hard disk, and probably $34 dollars more than putting on a micro SD or USB connector and making the user buy their own storage.Quote:
Originally Posted by ET3D