To be honest, I would like a box that just streams my PC output to the TV with low latency, and accepts USB or Bluetooth input and sends that back to my PC. I don't really want a second PC just to hook up to the TV.

Then it wouldn't matter what hardware was sitting next to my TV in that box - and if I upgraded my main PC - presto - my gaming on my TV just got better too. And I don't have to worry about installing and maintaining 2 copies of everything, or having 2 setups for everything.

Supposedly nVidia Shield will do this (output to the TV rather than just the 5" screen); I just don't know how well. I suppose I could do this with some pre-existing software, but so far I haven't found anything that works with low enough latency to work for gaming.

Originally posted by Castillle

@Quiz - I didnt check those specs I just copy pasta'd their page for the X5 lol.

 

"Conversely, we believe our X3A Modular Computer will be the ideal entry-level machine. Powered by a Dual-Core 64-bit, x86-based 1.65GHz chip and 4GB of DDR3 RAM, the X3A Modular Computer is designed for most home and office applications. The X3A Modular Computer will come standard with 32GB of solid-state storage (upgradeable to 1TB), can support two high-definition displays simultaneously, and will have two USB 3.0/2.0 ports, four eSATAp ports, four USB 2.0 ports, and a 10/100/1000 Ethernet port.

Housed in a cube-like chassis roughly the size of a grapefruit (4.27x3.56x3.656-inches) and needing an energy-friendly 18 Watts of power to run, Xi3’s X3A Modular Computer is slated to begin shipping in early 2013 at prices starting at under $500."

However its been rebranded int othe X5A with a slightly better processor (or higher bin) rated at 1.8GHz now.  It seems woefully expensive though if you wanted a better SSD.

Searching Xi3 in google will give you the prices theyre selling for but with the Xi3 main website down, its hard to see their own prices.  One website shows it as an Athlon Dual Core for the X5A which mimics how the rest of the stores say its a dual core AMD chip

@Lizard - Without Valve promoting them, they failed to kickstart.  I doubt Valves name would add THAT much to their sales.

1.65 GHz is probably an AMD E-450.  An 18 W TDP almost surely means that.  But $500 for a nettop is awfully steep.

Originally posted by Kuppa
It's a great idea, unfortunately I expect them to be pretty low end and very expensive for now.

I bet they end up being pretty reasonably priced and competitive with consoles.  But yeah, I imagine they won't be particularly powerful. 

At $700, This is what you will get from an Xi3 X7A.

AMD A4-5300 underclocked to 3.0ghz. (AMD 7420G, 128 cores) DX11, shader 5.0, OpenGL 4.2

32GB SSD

4GB ddr3 180bit dual channel

Taxes not included

You can find the info on their failed kickstarter  page which I linked somehwere before x.x Im off to get some medicine :(

Edit :

Quad core versions are going to be 1000ish for the Quad core ones which will  be clocked at 2.8ghz using 7640G with 256 gpu cores.  If they say that starting prices for the X7A models will be 1000 then they probably ditched the lower versions such as the $700 price point version I posted above. 

ACTUAL, REAL STEAM BOX DETAILS FROM VALVE CEO GABE NEWELL:

LINK TO INTERVIEW

Guess I was right and this software company is making their own Steam Box that isn't the damn Xi3 Piston.  Huh, who woulda seen that coming?  Oh, I did.  But yeah it's cool that others in this thread were all "they're all steam boxes, valve has no intent to make one themselves"  It's kinda cute how incredibly wrong they were, and that it took such a short amount of time for their mistake to come to light.

To those who figured the Xi3 was not the real Steam Box and details were coming soon: I applaud you.

To those who thought Valve wasn't making any hardware themselves, much less their own Steam Box: HURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

That is all.

Originally posted by Kuppa

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2414039,00.asp

 

I think we can call it debunked. There is really no such thing as a "steam box" like someone around here has been saying it's more of a system that would run on different hardwares. Not one piece of hardware made by Valve.

How very very wrong you turned out to be.  Sorry, sport.

Originally posted by kadepsyson

ACTUAL, REAL STEAM BOX DETAILS FROM VALVE CEO GABE NEWELL:

 

LINK TO INTERVIEW

 

Guess I was right and this software company is making their own Steam Box that isn't the damn Xi3 Piston.  Huh, who woulda seen that coming?  Oh, I did.  But yeah it's cool that others in this thread were all "they're all steam boxes, valve has no intent to make one themselves"  It's kinda cute how incredibly wrong they were, and that it took such a short amount of time for their mistake to come to light.

 

To those who figured the Xi3 was not the real Steam Box and details were coming soon: I applaud you.

To those who thought Valve wasn't making any hardware themselves, much less their own Steam Box: HURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

 

That is all.

Yep, from that it sounds like they are. Though they are wanting to make a micro PC that can act as a server so that 8 people can play on 8 different screens at once, so I don't see it coming any time soon. 

Originally posted by kadepsyson

Originally posted by Kuppa

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2414039,00.asp

 

I think we can call it debunked. There is really no such thing as a "steam box" like someone around here has been saying it's more of a system that would run on different hardwares. Not one piece of hardware made by Valve.

How very very wrong you turned out to be.  Sorry, sport.

Did I miss something?

Originally posted by Kuppa

Originally posted by kadepsyson

Originally posted by Kuppa

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2414039,00.asp

 

I think we can call it debunked. There is really no such thing as a "steam box" like someone around here has been saying it's more of a system that would run on different hardwares. Not one piece of hardware made by Valve.

How very very wrong you turned out to be.  Sorry, sport.

Did I miss something?

Originally posted by kadepsyson

ACTUAL, REAL STEAM BOX DETAILS FROM VALVE CEO GABE NEWELL:

 

LINK TO INTERVIEW

 

Guess I was right and this software company is making their own Steam Box that isn't the damn Xi3 Piston.  Huh, who woulda seen that coming?  Oh, I did.  But yeah it's cool that others in this thread were all "they're all steam boxes, valve has no intent to make one themselves"  It's kinda cute how incredibly wrong they were, and that it took such a short amount of time for their mistake to come to light.

 

To those who figured the Xi3 was not the real Steam Box and details were coming soon: I applaud you.

To those who thought Valve wasn't making any hardware themselves, much less their own Steam Box: HURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

 

That is all.

*YAWN*

I'd wait for E3 when Microsoft tells us the Xbox:Infinity will play any PC game utilizing DX10+ 'cause the damn thing will be running Windows 9 (Blue).

Originally posted by Castillle
They did say that they had no plans for releasing steambox this year. o.o  They actually said this many times

Yep, which makes it vaporware currently lol. With so many devices coming out that stream and run steam natively for on the go or in the home it just doesn't seem likely steam will spend the time and resources to develop and launch their own steam box. It seems they are thinking about it and wanting to do it for now, but theres already a dozen different types of systems coming out this year alone that are going to run steam and steam games. 

I concede that it's possible they will launch a steam box themselves after reading that interview, I still don't see it as very likely with how things are currently going. 

Originally posted by BadSpock

*YAWN*

I'd wait for E3 when Microsoft tells us the Xbox:Infinity will play any PC game utilizing DX10+ 'cause the damn thing will be running Windows 9 (Blue).

 

Hasnt that always been the case with the XBOXes? 

This new XBOX coming out will be able to play pc games!

This new XBOX 360 coming out will be able to play pc games!

This new XBOX Infinity will be able to play pc games! *

*only applies to games that are built for the user interface formerly known as metro.

The original XBox could plausibly have run a version of Windows - it had an Intel Pentium III CPU and a custom nVidia GPU.

The current 360 changed over to a customized multi-core IBM PowerPC (called Xenon originally and updated minorly through the years), which is not x86 compatible. Now there was a version of NT that ran on PPC architecture, but it was discontinued back in the late '90s. Pretty much every console uses PPC architecture today (Sony Cell in PS3 is PPC-based, the last 3 Nintendo consoles all have used PPC architecture). Older macintoshes used to use PPC architecture, and several workstations have used it in the past, but it's RISC (reduced instruction set) architecture has fallen out of favor in recent designs for general computing.

The 720 ~could~ conceivably go back to an x86 (or ARM) based architecture, and then it would be trivial for it to actually run a Windows (or Windows RT) variant, and MS is of course big enough that if they wanted to put a version on PPC (or whatever) architecture that they could do so fairly quickly. I don't expect it will though, because PPC has a fairly flexible and inexpensive license and it's pretty easy to get a customized CPU developed, that can be tailored directly to your application (and in the case of consoles they are heavily customized).

But I agree with Castille - it probably isn't going to happen, and I wouldn't hold my breath. What would be more likely is that the next-gen XBox could be x86 compatible, and that Windows 8/9/whatever would be able to play XBox games, but the Console itself would not be able to play PC games. I don't see that happening either though, but that would be more plausible.

Has IBM kept up with development of PowerPC?  I'm not aware of any recent products that use it.  There is Power7, but that's for mainframes, and not appropriate for consoles.  If the latest PowerPC architecture is 7 years old now, then that probably isn't what they'd want.

There's also the consideration that they want to move in the direction of integrating more functions into fewer chips, as that brings down the cost of production.  AMD is the only company that can offer both high-performance CPUs and high performance GPUs.  Furthermore, AMD demonstrably can put them together in a single chip.  While it is possible to integrate IP from multiple companies in a single chip (e.g., lots of ARM chips), high-performance CPUs and GPUs have traditionally used very different process nodes.  If you make a single chip, you get one process node.  That's why AMD struggled so mightily with Llano yields.

Even if the Xbox 720 were, say, an off-the-shelf AMD Kaveri chip (which it won't be), Microsoft wouldn't allow it to play PC games or Windows to play Xbox 720 games.  If it can play PC games, then people would buy it to play PC games and then not buy Xbox 720 games.  If the business plan is to lose money on every console you sell and make it up with game sales, you really don't want to sell consoles to people who aren't going to buy Xbox 720 games.

Meanwhile, the point of developing for consoles is the anti-piracy protections.  If Xbox 720 games will run on any old Windows computer, then you don't get those anti-piracy protections anymore.

Microsoft could conceivably make it very easy to port games between Xbox 720 and Windows, though, to the degree that if you release an Xbox 720 game, the only reason not to port it to Windows is that you want it not to run on PCs.

PowerPC still exists - IBM still maintains compatibility with it's POWER line, although as a stand-alone entity, the old AIM alliance has pretty much dropped it. PPC hasn't done anything main stream since Apple dropped them in 06 or so. There are still a lot of embedded systems that continue to use them (satellite control systems,, safety systems, etc).

As a stand-alone architecture it's been dormant for a while, but given that it isn't terribly complicated and therefore easy to customize (and cheap to license) we see it live on. I wouldn't be surprised to see it used in next gen consoles (which lean mainly on their GPU'S anyway, and just need sufficient CPU power), at least until ARM does some more catching up.

It is not going to be ANYTHING like everyone speculates. Forget what you think about consoles. Forget the Piston. That stupid box is a desperate attempt at grasping rumors.

“The Steam Box will also be a server. Any PC can serve multiple monitors, so over time, the next-generation (post-Kepler) you can have one GPU that’s serving up eight simultaneous game calls. So you could have one PC and eight televisions and eight controllers and everybody getting great performance out of it. We’re used to having one monitor, or two monitors -- now we’re saying lets expand that a little bit.”  - Gabe Newell

http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/01/09/what-is-valves-steam-box