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Microsoft Forecasts Kinect to Sell Five Million; CPU Usage Down to Single-Digit Percentage
by Brian Leahy, Nov 03, 2010 12:00pm PDTBloomberg is reporting that Microsoft has raised its sales forecast for the Kinect sensor from three million units in the quarter to five million in the same time period.
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.
Comments
The thing that strikes me about this most of all is that it shows more of the conflict or lack of cohesive vision for the console. It tries to do so much, to appeal to both the hard core and now to the soccer mom. It feels like Yahtzee's comparison of Fallout 3, "it's certainly closer to Branston Pickle than most games, but they chose too large a sandwich and spread the Branston Pickle so thin that there weren't any particularly chunky mouthfuls." I guess we will see what happens.........
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Though, I would like to follow up on one thing: If the lower processing power means that there is more available to the games, doesn't that also mean that the ability for the Kinect to offer more advanced features decrease? Or this "single-digit" processing power indicative of the power that the on-board CPU was going to have originally and therefore nothing is really lost except for that 10%- power?
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