UFS 3.0 really just released. It just hit mass production a few months ago by only a handful of manufacturers. It's the next generation of UFS and it's pretty much inevitable. That said, it's not a competitor to NVMe, one is for high-end PC and laptops while the other is for mobile devices where power and space are more of an issue. You may start to see it in low and mid-tier devices soon as it doesn't win on pure performance, rather its a well rounded solution. No real tests on durability because its only be out for a few years, but for what it's worth I have yet to personally see a UFS device fail.

As for NVMe, there will always be a better/faster solution but that's not the main objective. You have to balance your solution for a console and give the best performance/price/space/and low power consumption.

NVM will have a theoretical performance of around 3.2GBps to UFS 3.0's 2.9GBps. Typical UFS 3.0 speeds average around 2.2-2.4GBps. I don't have an approximate price but its the next generation of the type of storage found in most smartphones so its pretty cheap. Also it can withstand much higher temperatures as well as part of the spec and has significantly less power draw and heat and size. Those last elements are vital for closed systems such as phones or consoles because it allows you to allot more of your "power budget" to other things. Realistically the ideal solution would be low power memory and storage and clock the APU where possible. A UFS 3.0 solution gives the best all around benefit and its the fastest type of NV storage I can think of that would fit the bill as well as meeting the criteria of being "unique" and not seen in PCs.

What? No, it even specifies the link you provided how Optane would be used directly by the processor as it sits directly on the memory bus. That's kinda the whole point of NVDIMMS is that its now fast enough to serve as a RAM alternative.

Optane operates either as memory or in App Direct mode. Memory mode

. . . uses Optane DC to expand main memory capacity without persistence. It combines a Optane DC PMM with a conventional DRAM DIMM that serves as a direct-mapped cache for the Optane DC PMM. The CPU and operating system simply see a larger pool of main memory.

But ignoring that Optane chips you links costs somewhere between a car payment and a mortgage payment.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-optane-dimm-pricing-performance,39007.html

Intel Optane DIMM Pricing: $695 for 128GB, $2595 for 256GB, $7816 for 512GB

So even ignoring the feasiblity of pricing, the low-end variant comes in 16GB ($30-$40) and 32GB ($60-$80) flavors over an M2 interface. Ignoring their small size which would be better served by just putting more RAM in, the Sequential reads and writes are less than half of what UFS 3.0 would be. Even ignoring everything else you still have the issue of space, heat, power draw to contend with which is substantially higher than UFS 3.0.

@ronvalencia:

I said theoretically as in it’s possible, not specifically for PS5 but for low end phones as UFS 3.0 is approaching LPDDR1 speeds. A 3.1 variant could likely allow low end phones to combine RAM and storage as a single unit. The point was to show how fast it is.

I

The choice of cloud providers is almost exclusively decided by costs and available hardware.

Sharing expense servers which would be stadia level is an immediate cost savings. It just comes down to who is offering the best deal for what they need. A three way alignment for Nin, Sony, and MS actually makes a lot of strategic sense.

Even If MS choose to leave home consoles it would still have the revenue for cloud infrastructure, for Sony it allows them to focus on games rather than infrastructur they don’t have, for Nintendo they don’t need to continue to worry about power wars or home consoles because they will always be able to provide comparable game hardware via the cloud Rather than produce an expense console.

Alternatively Googles success in that space would threaten the business of all three of them. Google can compete on infrastructure, buy up studio and exclusives for a game platform, and already has millions of handheld android devices out there ready to play stadia level games. Make no mistake though, if Google or Amazon offers any of them a good deal they partner up with them. MS really has to be making the pot very sweet for the others to get those deals.

@rzxv04: apples nvme isn’t faster than UFS 3.0. NVMe has higher theoretical bandwidth but in the real world UFS 3.0 transfer rates at are around 2.4GBps vs apples 1.8GBps. UFS 3.0 is also smaller, cheaper, and consumes less power. And in theory could sit directly on the interposer acting as an L4 cache. That said I’m also expecting DDR5 not 4 in these machines with a LP variant in later slim models.

Since this debate is still going on I’ll just plug this in again. I predict PS5 will use UFS 3.0 as the storage.

Apple really has very little to gain from a Sony purchase. There are only a handful of products doing well for Sony.

@Antwan3K: @slimdogmilionar:

Ehh, I'm a bit late but I'll just explain things and put them in perspective, both on known and speculative rumblings in various circles.

1)PS Now as it exists now has two components. The original deployment consisted of PS3 blades in rack servers in RackSpace locations. The second iteration consists primarily of AWS (Amazon) servers running PS4 VMs at low rez and framerate. The 720P/30fps cap on PS4 streamed games. They also have download for PS4 because of what I will discuss later on.

2) MS cannot run Xbox games on existing Azure hardware. They need to have AMD based high performance GPU solutions to accomplish this. The would need to either buy the servers or built their own. The chose to put Xbox S blade servers in just like Sony originally did with PS3.

3) The reality is that even if they only had 1 million initial users (2.5% of their total user base) they would still need to have enough servers to accommodate them. Currently the Xbox S blades are built with 8 XBS chips allowing 8 concurrent users and estimated at between $1500-$2000 a piece. Even at the these incredibly low-end spec estimates you are still talking close to a quarter billion just to get enough server to service 2.5% of your user base. This is a hefty investment no matter how you slice it. To put this another way, it would cost them 1 Billion dollars for every concurrent 4 million users. Moving their entire user base to cloud would cost more in servers than the entire xbox divisions revenue in a year. This is not cheap.

4) The Memorandum of Understanding isn't a binding agreement or anything really than an exploration. Sony still partners with Amazon and Rackspace and likely would continue to do so even if a deal were reached. This isn't an either/or scenario because Sony never planned to build this infrastructure alone and only uneducated fanboys would have made that assumption. Sony by and large partners for much of their infrastructure it was always just a question of who. The memorandum only specifies future projects so it appears Sony will continue its partnerships with Amazon and Rackspace for the time being. But in the case of MS, Sony helping to contribute to building the expense of the servers and infrastructure is mutually beneficial and I will explain with industry average numbers later.

5) The Memorandum of Understanding is consistent with a second rumor running on reddit and in development circles. The Xbox Anaconda chips were built for a dual purpose for both the high-end Xbox and to serve as the basis for their xCloud and AI service. Cloud AI requires much of the same hardware such as very high-end GPUs. The problem is that people are claiming the Anaconda was not designed only for gaming and thus suffers slightly from having AI specific enhancements which may not directly translate to gaming. Developers (rumored) are reporting better performance on PS5 kits due to this. PS5 & Xbox Next are (rumored) in the same realm of power but with Xbox Anaconda chips being used for three purposes. In the Xbox itself, in their future xCloud servers, and for cloud AI use.

6) This creates a complex multi-business unit problem. Sony needs a cloud service which has the hardware they need. Microsoft needs to do the same. They could build it together allowing Sony to gain access to these servers at a reduced cost while Sony in turn actually ends up subsidizing the hardware production of the Next Xbox chips. The alternative would be that Sony continues to work with other cloud vendors at much higher rates who may not even have the hardware needed. While MS takes on the cost of all these projects alone meaning they could have a slightly less gaming specific console for the same or slightly higher price, also building out their cloud servers at whatever it will likely cost at the time (Probably upwards of $5000 a server at least). If Sony official partnered with MS they would also run the risk of losing market share in the console space as MS would be able to lower prices or compete a bit better as their production costs would be partially subsidized by Sony.

7) How this all shakes out is primarily based on Sony's cloud business model. Currently we can estimate Sony's initial costs in 2014 were around $1.25 per hour of gaming. This is the industry standard. Since then we can surmise that Sony has since reduced its streaming (at least PS3 streaming) to around $0.75 or below per hour. Well below the industry standard. To receive a PS4 equivalent streaming devices, the industry rate is $1-$1.50 per hour of streaming which is also why Sony heavily promotes PS4 downloads because downloading the file a single time is actually cheaper for them. For specs of what we assume will be the next gen variant, the industry standard price per streaming is about $1.50-$2.50 per streaming hour. Let's say Sony decides to partner with MS and work out a deal where Sony continues its existing rate of $0.75 per streaming hour on the high end servers. MS can use the same servers and rather than it costing them $1-$1.25 per server in costs, they can deduct the money Sony pays them and significantly reduce their net costs. Meaning the same servers that cost Google/Amazon $1.50 to run now only cost Sony and MS $0.75 each to run because they share them.

8) However again this is all based on rumor and available information at this time. In this scenario, Sony would gain savings in cloud infrastructure but at the risk of allowing MS to be more competitive in the console space. In order for this to work, cloud gaming would need to be viable enough to for Sony to decide to partner with MS at the risk of helping lower their manufacturing costs and potentially increasing their market share in the console space. In addition, it would require that Amazon or Google do not come back and offer Sony a similar or better deal. Google could easily come in with a similar deal but with less risk because they have no intention of competing with Sony in the home console space.

Anyway, this is way way way more complex than a single post can put together but there is a lot of potential either way with just as many questions.

T

Because the “cloud” still doesn’t work as advertised and it never did. The cloud isn’t some static “thing” it’s literally network infrastructure including servers. Without putting the full on gaming experience in the cloud, farming out parts of a game to a remote server was never going to work for anything that would remotely affect gameplay which required low latency.

There is no question that Azure is the best cloud network. But it’s far far far from the best cloud GAMING network which appears to be what Sony and MS are building together specifically due to the AI blurb.

Cloud AI relies on powerful GPUs and components that would typically be found in very high end gaming units. it appears theres a three way strategy here. These servers can cost around 25-50k a piece and the cost to scale up enough for millions of simultaneous users will always be cost prohibitive. Also there’s the issue of what to do with the servers off peak hours that makes its cost effective.

Sony actually pioneered some of the idea of distributed processing with PS3 SETI at home but the principle would be similar.

Sony helps subsidize the cost of the gaming servers MS would buy either through a joint purchase or some type of guaranteed service structure. Both get access to more cloud gaming servers at a cost thats less than either of them would have alone and at night during off peak hours the servers double for AI or Graphic design usage which could also be offered at lower than market prices due to multiple uses.

Think of it as a roommate agreement and it becomes more cost effective for all parties involve.