Category: microsoft

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gaming microsoft tech

Breaking it Down: Console Evolution

I am likely somewhat biased, but I thought the E3 Xbox briefing was well done. Not only was there a nice mix of hardware and software announcements (with launch dates!), but more clarity was provided on the vision and roadmap for console hardware.

But wait, that’s been the focal point of much hand-wringing and teeth gnashing. Here’s one from Engadget, speculating that Xbox One sales will dry up, because something better will appear next year.

At the macro level, here are the critical take-aways on where the industry is headed:

  1. Expect console hardware to iterate more rapidly.
  2. Expect great developers that make great games to tune for the few “click-stops” of consoles and their respective capabilities, not unlike supporting N and N-1 console generations or cross-platforms, today.
    1. Consoles and PCs are becoming more and more alike, so assets and content should be sharable, but with an extra layer of closer-to-metal API access and specific settings to be tuned for consoles.
    2. Over time, the top-of-line AAA games will raise the min-bar, but expect studios to support N, N-1 and possibly N-2 iterations, to hit the experience-install base sweet spot.
  3. And, like nearly all other industries (TVs, phones, even your toothbrush and home furnishings), potential customers will have a cost-benefit trade-off to make. A novel concept.

For the Xbox family, specifically, the One S is the natural cost and form-factor reduction version of the original One. This time, the deal has been sweetened with additional functionality and hardware (UHD Blu-Ray). The change for next year is that both the One S and Project Scorpio will exist, side-by-side, and unlike compatibility breaks of some previous generations, there won’t be one here.

Some may postpone purchases until next year, for Scorpio, but given the S is incremental and a year earlier than the typical mid-cycle refresh, I doubt there will be significant overall sales cannibalization due to the Scorpio announcement. Instead, the S maintains the new entry-$299 price-point and entices new users with a smaller, nicer-looking console, riding the wave of 4K marketing. There isn’t remotely close to 100% TAM overlap, as some allude to, nor the even more outlandish claim that someone eying an Xbox will now suddenly buy a PS4. Because, why?

Change is challenging for most to accept. So while one might question why console gaming is the anomoly in consumer electronics (recall all those bemoaning that smartphone GPUs were more capable then previous-generation consoles), the fact that it’s about to change is the most anxiety-inducing part.

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microsoft

HoloLens Pre-orders Begin!

Just about two years after I joined the team and a couple public demonstrations of the device later, HoloLens is now available for pre-order! That means, in very short order, devices will begin showing up on developers’ doorsteps and the vision of a holographic future unfolds.

I’m usually pretty proud of the stuff I’ve worked on, but this one holds a special place. I joined the team without any inkling of what I’d be working on, only sold on a pitch of a complete upending of how we experience technology. But since finding out the truth, it’s consumed the vast majority of my waking moments, much to the chagrin of my friends and family, I’m certain. I’ve not only dedicated much to solving technical problems, but also to help build a team and culture that will foster many more programs of similar scope and aspiration in the future.

It’s already been a crazy journey, but this is only the first step towards a much grander vision. Off we go!

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computers microsoft

Surface Book: GPU Deep Dive

The Surface Book. It was an exciting moment to watch Panos unveil a premium laptop (finally!) and, shortly thereafter, pull the display off its keyboard base. With only a few weeks between launch and hard availability, anticipation and excitement has been maintained. I even stayed home to await delivery, the morning of October 26.

There are 3 important aspects that drew me to the Surface Book:

  • All the trappings of an excellent laptop (weight, size, battery life, display)
  • Form factor versatility
  • Discrete GPU for light-medium gaming

I have lots to say about the Surface Book, but I wanted to dwell on the last point, first. I’m not a heavy gamer, but I do enjoy some strategy games, occasionally. I’ve compromised that capability in my laptop choices, to date, as I value weight and mobility more. So, needless to say, I was eager to see how the Surface Book would handle those gaming scenarios.

Microsoft (and NVIDIA) continue to remain mum on the particulars of the discrete GPU. It was announced as a Maxwell-based part, with 1GB GDDR5. Now, this is a combination that has never been seen before and, interestingly enough, Panos spoke to its use primarily as an accelerator for professional content-creation applications, such as AutoCAD and the suite of Adobe tools. Yes, some light gaming was also mentioned, such as League of Legends, but with the Surface Book’s hardware and price points targeting prosumers and content professionals, no effort was made to match, performance-per-dollar, gaming laptops.

With Surface Books in the wild, we know that it’s a GM108-based part, with 1GB GDDR5 @ 5GT/s. The 940M-equivalent GPU disappointed some, but I also expected the GDDR5-enabled bandwidth to improve performance, not insignificantly, over the standard DDR3 configuration. Here’s a spec comparison. Note the 940M core and memory speeds vary, based on design implementation.

gpu_table

With 2.5X the memory bandwidth, we should see some substantial improvements. I’ve compared game performance, across a few titles, using an 840M (from which the 940M is rebranded), the Surface Book’s integrated Gen9 HD 520, and the discrete Surface Book GPU. Framerates are average and game settings are as follows:

  • Bioshock Infinite – 1080p, Medium setting
  • Total War: Attila – 1440×900, Performance setting, Shadows – Max Performance, Texture – Medium
  • Shadow of Mordor – Surface Book @ 1500×1000, 840M @ 1536×864, Low setting

surface_book_gpu_benchmarks

Across these three games, all of which have built-in benchmarking tools, the Surface Book dGPU is 2X faster than the integrated and anywhere between 20-33% faster than the 840M/940M, from which it is derived. It does stand that in many games, like Shadow of Mordor and Attila, in the tests, 1GB VRAM limits you to lower texture fidelity, compared to 2GB; in practice, the GM108 isn’t fast enough to drive those higher textures at sufficient framerates for a good experience, anyways.

While all of this pixel-pushing is going on, the fans (both in the clipboard and in the keyboard base) spin up to varying degrees. They make their presence known primarily by a rushing, whooshing sound, and limited amount of high-pitching whine, which makes the noise more bearable than most caused by small-diameter fans and blowers.

So, you can play some games on a Surface Book, as well as it use it as a pretty slick multi-use productivity machine, otherwise. But, I as found out over the subsequent couple weeks of use, it has its share of teething pains.

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gadgets microsoft reviews

ASUS X205 – First Impressions

For several years, I’ve watched low-cost Chromebooks chip away market share in the entry notebook segment and chomp away at the education market. In the Windows PC ecosystem, you could find notebooks within spitting distance of Chromebook costs ($200-300). Though price points were close, the actual devices were not. The notebooks were 15.6″, 6lb, 4hr battery life “portable desktops”. It was the equivalent of cross-selling a cost-reduced pickup truck against an affordable compact sedan.

Very recently, with the help of appropriate SoC platforms and Windows licensing programs, a trickle of ultraportable $199-249 Windows notebooks have come to market, and are being greeted by reasonable sales (5 out of the top 20 Amazon bestselling notebooks are PCs from this category) and good customer feedback (4.3/5 stars for those 5 bestseller models). I hope this encourages the thoughtful design compromises that are needed at this price segment. On a personal note, I like to think I had a role in these coming about; in my last weeks in the Windows PC Ecosystem team, I co-pitched a number of OEMs these SoC-eMMC-ultraportable notebook configurations in the <$250 segment. I recall consternation, from product managers, about the Windows 8.1 experience with these chipsets, 2GB RAM, and limited user storage (typically 32GB eMMC, due to cost pressures). As we’ll talk about later on, the optimizations to Windows 8.1 and efforts around WIM Boot helped make these systems possible.

I’m writing this from the keyboard of the ASUS X205, a faster, lighter, longer-lasting reincarnation of the netbook. It may be the purest form, to-date, of what the modern netbook can be, with its tablet silicon guts, optimized for consumer electronics-like, consumption-oriented usage. Its technical specs bear that out:

  • Intel Atom Z3735F – 1.33GHz base clock (HFM) and 1.83GHz Turbo clock, Bay Trail platform, tablet SoC. It has a 2.2W SDP, meaning in this chassis, it can be passively cooled.
  • 2GB DDR3L 1333MHz RAM – 1x64bit bus, 10.6GB/s bandwidth. Compared to LPDDR3, this will have a negative impact on Connected Standby battery life.
  • 32GB eMMC (Hynix) – As the perf benchmarks will show, this is a middle-to-upper tier eMMC 4.5 part, a bit slower in sequential R/W than a typical 2.5″ 5400RPM laptop drive, but easily an order of magnitude faster at <512KB random R/W. That matters a ton for system responsiveness.
  • 11.6″ non-touch display – 1366×768 TN panel, glossy, typical run of the mill
  • Broadcom dual band WiFi (up to 802.11n) – supports both 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands, which is fantastic for cramped airwaves in apartments
  • ELAN touchpad – has nearly identical dimensions to a 16:9 4.7″ display and while not a Precision Touchpad, at least exhibits a bunch of the characteristics – smooth two-finger scrolling, granular pinch-zoom, panning to the Windows 8 All Apps view via vertical scrolling.
  • Ports – 2xUSB 2.0, microHDMI, microSD slot
  • Dimensions – 286 x 193.3 x 17.5 mm (WxDxH)
  • Weight – 980g

First up, here’s what the out of box experience looks like:

  • You get a simple cardboard box containing the laptop, a charger, manuals and a redemption code for OneDrive storage.
  • Time from first power-on to having a configured system and Windows user profile was 5 minutes flat.
  • I hit a bug that prevented me from using a Microsoft Account during profile setup – I’ll have to check up on that.
  • The ~29GB of formatted storage has 8GB reserved for a recovery partition. To Windows, 17.2GB of free space remains out of the visible 20.8GB OS/data partition. This system uses WIM boot in order to shrink its required OS footprint.
  • Unfortunately, there are 600MB of Windows Updates pending; after download and installation, free storage space shrinks to  14.9GB.
  • After installing the client apps of Office 365, I have 13.1GB of free space.
  • After employing Windows’ function to create a copy of the recovery partition on a USB key, I’m mulling deleting the partition from the eMMC disk.

I’ve used the laptop as my regular couch or counter surfing machine, since I received it in early November. After a few weeks, there are already a few highlights to call out about the hardware:

  • It is very light and portable. It gets tossed around the condo, from the den to the kitchen counters to the couch to the bed. It’s a great reference/fact checker machine, since it resumes so quickly (thank you, Connected Standby).
  • What’s Connected Standby? Think of it as the smartphone or tablet-like responsive experience; your data is always up to date and system resume times are nearly instantaneous, shorter than the time it takes to open the lid to viewing position. That’s simply fabulous.
  • Quality of materials is good. Under normal typing pressure, the keyboard deck remains firm, wrist-rests don’t flex. There is some flex in the display lid, if you push on the back. There’s a bit of creaking, when picking it up from a corner, with the lid opened, which is the position of maximum leverage one can put on the device.
  • Battery life (active and standby) is stellar. I’m seeing 11.5-13 hours of real-world light usage battery life and 350-400 hours of Connected Standby (15 days). When I open the laptop and see 10% battery life left, I know I still have an hour (!) of use left.
  • Performance is sufficient, for consumption-oriented scenarios. I typically run IE with 6-8 tabs open, an Office app, and a couple Modern apps (Mail and Finance are regulars). There is no issue multitasking between them. Responsiveness is particularly high, compared to typical PCs in the price segment, given the order of magnitude advantage in random disk I/O performance.
  • Thermals are under control. With my workload, I’ve not felt any part of the device get warm, much less hot. There are no fans. Silence is golden.
  • The display is not a deal breaker, but it’s just a simple TN panel, and color-shift is evident at any viewing angle other than perpendicular. More annoyingly, due to the particularly narrow vertical viewing angles, common to TN, there is color shift across the vertical axis of the display, as the your viewing angle of incident varies down the display.
  • Physical input is nicely sized (particularly the touchpad), and again is functionally better than many larger, cheap laptops. In particular, the touchpad, for which we impressed importance time and time again with OEMs, actually does not suck.
  • The AC power adapter is a single cord segment type, providing 1.75A @ 19V (33W). The wall-wart does not have foldable prongs.

This isn’t a mobile powerhouse, nor is it a premium device, hewn from premium materials. However, for $179-199, there are a bunch of areas it exceeds expectations.

  • Input (keyboard and touchpad) quality
  • Weight-footprint-portability
  • Real world battery life
  • Responsiveness
  • Design and build quality

Don’t purchase this as a cheap replacement for the family desktop from 5 years ago. This will be slower, overall. Do purchase this, if you have tablet-like use cases and want tablet-like battery life and responsiveness, but think you need to buy a keyboard case, to make that tablet truly useful.

Another popular Windows option in this segment is the new HP Stream 11 (also $199). I mainly couldn’t accept the colour options, but you should get very similar performance with that PC. Trade off the free year of Office 365 Personal, 1TB OneDrive, and larger keyboard (Stream 11) against Connected Standby responsiveness, battery life, and portability of a smaller and 0.5lb lighter laptop (X205).

Categories
design microsoft

Card-like Design

Microsoft may have helped usher in the trend of “flat” elements in UI with Metro, all the way back in the Zune days, and Google’s take with several pieces of the Android 4.0 experiences had more than a passing resemblance. However, more recently, Google’s manifestation of the principles are evolving, taking some cues from Facebook and Pinterest. Particularly impressive is the information density that they’ve been able to achieve, while maintaining whitespace, cleanliness, and organization. Take a look at Google+.

Google Plus

And, so, as part of design feedback’s cyclical nature, I’m seeing hints of a similar evolution in Microsoft’s recently announced products, over the past couple days. First came the MSN Preview, ushering in a completely new design and information organization scheme. It includes fantastic ties into the cloud-connected experiences I already use on my Windows Phone. For example, the stocks I follow, added to the Bing MSN Finance app on my phone, show up on the MSN portal, automatically.

MSN Preview 2014

Second, Office Delve, launched earlier today, is all about using information and relationships discovered via the Office Graph to surface relevant content and information (primarily in the form of documents and SharePoint content, from what I can tell). Think of it as Google Now, but for your work content. Not only that, its design and organization are similar, as well.

Office Delve

I, for one, quite like the card-like designs that are popping up. The content chunks reflow well for both large, multi-format displays (everything from 16:9 notebooks to 4:3 iPads, as examples) and smaller, portrait displays, like those found on smartphones. The cards are self-contained entities that give the user enough information and quick-action hooks to either dive deeper or move on.