Was there ever an actual statement from Valve on this? All I see is a company called Xi3 showing of their computer, while making some vague remarks about having received an investment from Valve - whatever that means. Not to doubt it, but if this is really "the thing", I'd like to hear some actual conformation.
The PRWire article [1] is somewhat vague on that point, but it does clearly claim that Xi3 received funding from Valve, and that Valve would have a unit at their CES booth as well. [2]
I got to see some intel test boards at one point. They tend to put the max number of ports possible during development to make sure the CPU and bus all behave properly. Adding ports after being in dev is really error prone. Removing ports tend to be easier.
There's no mention in these articles about the most important thing; what kind of GPU is in these if any? If they rely on the HD4000 included in an i3/i5 CPU then they're going to make for really shitty gaming consoles.
Not really. Throughput specwise HD4000 a little better than a XBox 360 or PS3 and way out in front of the Wii. Those are the competing consoles. It's true that it's well behind the discrete GPUs (and frankly no integrated on-SoC solution will ever compete with a separate chip with its own memory bus!).
But it will compete in the existing console market just fine, technically. It's not really clear if extra 3D rendering performance in the console market is really needed; people who want that are already in the PC market anyway.
A PC video card with the same specs as a console video card will perform significantly slower. Console games are optimized on a very low, platform-specific level, which simply isn't feasible on PC. (Not to mention, console ports often have much poorer performance in general.) The HD4000 is actually pretty good for an integrated card and runs a lot of older games well, but it won't run many modern games even on low settings.
I speak from experience on this. For some reason, if your PC is underspecced in the gaphics department, even going down to 640x480 and setting all the graphics settings to low won't make most modern games playable. I don't know why this is the case.
The Steam "box" is unlikely to be treated as much like a true console by developers when it comes to hitting the metal because Valve is still very much committed to the PC market and their public statements about TV gaming suggest they see themselves as only one of many providers for the "Steam on TV" experience.
Unlike a "true" console, they are likely to define a chipset-neutral minimal spec for games, which means the development model will be more PC-like than console-like.
performance wise the hd4000 is actually nowhere near as fast as what's in the 360 or ps3. the intel chips run a lot of stuff in software very very slowly.
for example tf2 a rather non complex game can barely run 1280720 on minimal settings with a hd4000 (<20fps) yet the ati x1950 that i used to own (1ish gen better than the xbox controller from memory) was able to do it in medium quality and 19201080 and significantly more than 60 fps
Apples and Oranges. That X1950 card may be 5 years older than Ivy Bridge, but it's sitting on a DRAM bus with almost twice the bandwidth as the CPU. I suspect it actually will have trouble keeping up with the Intel GPU in shader compute power, but for "non complex games" you're probably fill limited anyway.
Basically you're measuring DRAM with your test. DRAM hasn't changed much over the last decade, and that extra circuit board with all those chips is still a big advantage for some tasks.
But consoles don't have external GPU buses either (sort of, the XBox has some kind of specialized framebuffer-only bus I think).
As long as games released for this console would be regular Linux games runnable on the PC as well, it wouldn't be too bad. But in general old beaten console vs PC gaming arguments stay in place. Console market degrades games quality (interfaces and performance wise), which backfires to PC gaming scene with crippled console versions being adapted for PC by developers with minimal changes, instead of creating normal and rich PC interfaces for games from the beginning.
Most consoles sell at a loss, that is the price for a profit, including the cost of windows (while steambox will be linux), and at a manufacturing scale that is probably 1/500th or less of what Valve will be contracting.
Not to mention that may very well not be "the" steambox, as apparently Valve has said they will have multiple prototypes from multiple manufacturers.
you can already have the Steam console experience in your living room if you hook up a computer to your tv.
so buying this console wont even be a requirement, if it happens to be underpowered
"The Xi3 splits the core computer functions into three separate, replaceable components--one for the processor, one for external communications and one for video and power management."
