The Redmond Console Development Kit is a special unit called XDK which is only distributed to developers who want to make games for Microsoft consoles. This is a piece of hardware that you cannot find in stores and therefore 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 they are not sold to developers, but rented. What happens is that when a studio fails economically, a lot of their gear ends up for sale and that’s why many of the most avid collectors end up owning one of those pieces of hardware.
His value? As a mere curiosity and historical collectables, 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 they bring, it is possible to make games directly. However, the model we have in stores has much less RAM than what the developers are using.
The Xbox SDK has 40 GB of RAM
Well yes, thanks to the folks at GamerNexus, who were able to source a last-gen XDK, we were able to find out that it had a total of 40 GB of GDDR6 memory and that its form factor is more typical of a traditional console than the Series X, which is more reminiscent of the monolith of a certain Kubrick film. Plus, it reminds us a lot of the Xbox One X.
What about the 40 GB 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 must remember that his the memory bus with GDDR6 is 320 bits
In any case, where does the 40 GB come from? Well, from a capacity of GDDR6 memory, which is colloquially called mod valve. This consists of placing two tokens on the board, but one on each side of the board. The goal is for the data bus to be shared. So that each module stops transmitting 16 bits per channel to transmit 8 bits each. Thus, the bandwidth does not increase, but the storage capacity does. It’s the same as the NVIDIA RTX 3090, which has memory on both sides simply because it uses the same feature.
Why do you need so much RAM in the XDK?
Traditionally, development kits were nothing more than consoles on which games developed from the PC were tested, so their hardware was directly the same as in the commercial version. Also, if we want to develop simple games, we can leave the console in “developer mode” and during the process we will not be able to load commercial games, but we can program on them.
However, we must not forget that we are dealing with a PC in terms of hardware and that Microsoft was already using a light version of Windows on Xbox One, however, with each new generation its capabilities have improved. There’s no reason the Xbox developer version can’t load the entire development environment along with the games to be tested. This results in the need for more RAM memory to host the applications.
