The Redmond Console Development Kit is a special unit called the XDK that is only distributed to developers who want to make games for Microsoft consoles. It is a piece of hardware that you cannot find in stores and therefore they are not commercial models. The surprise? The Xbox kit has 40 GB of RAM.
Development kits are one of the most sought after pieces by collectors, as these are not sold to developers, but are rented. What happens is that when a studio fails economically, a good part of its material ends up for sale and that is why many of the most staunch collectors end up having one of these pieces of hardware.
Its value? As a mere curiosity and historical collectibles, since these units cannot run commercial games. A few years ago the development kits required a PC to work, but in the case of the Xbox Series and thanks to the developer mode that they bring, it is possible to make games directly. However, the model we have in stores has much less RAM than what developers use.
The Xbox development kit has 40 GB of RAM
Well yes, through the people of GamerNexus, who have been able to get a last generation XDK, we have been able to know that it has a total of 40GB of GDDR6 memory and that its form factor is more typical of a traditional console than of the Series X, which is more reminiscent of the monolith from a certain Kubrick movie. What’s more, it reminds us greatly of the Xbox One X.
What of the 40GB on Xbox It has a very simple explanation, the processor is the same as the one used in the console and it is not more powerful neither in processing capacity nor in bandwidth. Since we have to remember that his memory bus with GDDR6 is 320 bits. which would allow the xbox series x that is in the stores to have 20 GB, however, Microsoft uses 1 and 2 GB chips at the same time, limiting the RAM of its console to 16 GB.
In any case, where does the 40 GB come from? Well, from a capacity that GDDR6 memory has, which is colloquially called clamshell mode. This consists of two chips being placed on the board, but one on each side of the board. The goal is that the data bus is shared. In such a way that each module stops transmitting 16 bits per channel to transmit 8 bits each. So the bandwidth does not increase, but the storage capacity does. This is the same as the NVIDIA RTX 3090, which has memory on both sides just because it uses the same feature.
Why do you need so much RAM in the XDK?
Traditionally, the development kits were nothing more than consoles on which the games developed from the PC were tested, so their hardware was directly the same as in the commercial version. What’s more, if we want to develop simple games we can leave the console in “Developer Mode” and during the process we won’t be able to load commercial games, but we can program on it.
However, we must not forget that we are dealing with a PC in terms of hardware and that Microsoft already used a trimmed-down version of Windows on Xbox One, however, with each new generation its capabilities have been improving. There is no reason why the Xbox developer version cannot load the entire development environment at the same time as the games to be tested. Which leads to the need for more RAM memory in order to host the applications.
