PS4 will use a A10 APU?
- Thread starter ECH
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Understood...but the question is more available from what?
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Rory Read made the following statement in their Q3 conference call two weeks ago: "Our semi-custom APUs already have a number of confidential high-volume design wins in place".
Along with the tidbit that they expect a significant shift towards "embedded" (including gaming) up to 20% of revenue by Q4 2013, it's not a large leap to speculate on console design win(s) for either the next Xbox or PlayStation (or both).
Along with the tidbit that they expect a significant shift towards "embedded" (including gaming) up to 20% of revenue by Q4 2013, it's not a large leap to speculate on console design win(s) for either the next Xbox or PlayStation (or both).
I thought, it is already accepted knowledge, that AMD has won both consoles (+ Wii U GPU).
But of course, the PS4 will not be equipped just with an A10 Trinity APU or an off-the-shelf APU at all.
It's a smart move on Sony's part. I set up a trinity apu (the a6) for my gf's htpc and it plays all media we throw at it and it has very low cpu utilization. The a10 will be great in a console , it will run games just fine cpu wise and when consuming media they can cut the dedicated gpu and just run them on the a10 at a very low tdp.
The real question is what gpu they are going with.
The real question is what gpu they are going with.
If current devkits have an A10, the one thing we can be pretty sure of is that the final thing won't have an A10 (but probably an AMD APU that's kinda, somewhat similar). The ISA and software environment would be much more important at this stage than the actual hardware. For instance, IIRC, early Xbox 360 devkits were dual PowerMac G5s with an ATI X800.
Not in CPU flops it isn't. On that aspect, cell holds up surprisingly well despite its age. You need an intel sandy bridge-E or similar to really beat cell on float performance.
Especially if it had all eight SPUs and overclock to 5+ GHz, which I am sure it can by now.
I'm really curious, why Sony just don't go with the current Cell with all the SPUs and faster clock paired with another NV GPU, like the upcoming GK110. Better possibility of BC with PS3 and they can sort of continue with all their software investments in Cell and NV GPU. Heck they might even able to release more of their PS2 catalog on PSN for cheap. NV will probably rape them for the GK110 pricing but I just thought it would be less headache in the long run.
Yeah all the reason more we wont be seeing an A10 level system then, also remember when Sony is constantly pitching a generation leap in their forth coming console? And A10 alone is nowhere near a generation leap that's for certain. It's simply impossible for them to release something even its predecessor can beat.
Cell is pretty awful to program. It has monster performance on software that benefits its architecture, thanks to the super low latency and high bandwidth local stores in the cell SPUs, but on software that isn't easily squished into that 256k of RAM it is not nearly as quick... There's a lot of main memory latency on cell as well thanks to the ring bus (1000+ cycles I've read on this board).
Also, you'd need to re-engineer cell to accept some other form of RAM than XDR, as that is kinda dead right now. There's no roadmap for faster XDR than what currently exist AFAIK, and having even more flops all sharing the same 22GB/s as in current PS3 wouldn't be much of an increase.
Well, uh, yeah that is somewhat of a benefit in cell's plus column, but overall I think sony would prefer to just forget cell altogether. That one was Ken Kutaragi's baby, and he's long gone from sony by now.
Not sure how much "complexity" really that would be, considering consoles have consisted of a separate CPU and GPU pretty much ever since the original playstation era. Heck, separate CPU and graphics chips have been the day since forever really.
A PCIe link between APU and GPU, and some power regulation for an external GPU isn't much in the way of complexity really. Any decent integrated GPU would lead to a very large APU chip, which wouldn't neccesarily be a cost benefit overall, considering manufacturing yields and such.
Yields are improving over time. One gets more and more transistors functional on a single die each year. One also stopped building logic manually from individual transistors (or tubes for that matter) at some point. And soldering two chips to a board, requires a more complex board with routing of signals between the two chips, two coolers and so on. It all costs also money. At some point one reaches a threshold, it simply becomes cheaper overall to invest in integrating everything into a single die. In the past we weren't there, now we probably are.
Yes, but I think that Sony can achieve backwards compatibility through Gaikai and probably as part of PSN+ (insert your old disc into the PS4 and it authenticate with the cloud and stream the game to you). In the grand scheme of things, I don't think there are enough users of backwards compatibility to warrant additional hardware in every single console sold.
What's Cell real life Gflop rating?
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