Xbox One (Durango) Technical hardware investigation

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Yeah and that is in relation to the 360 gpu which, according to their estimate, had about 53% efficiency.

I can see where EA is now quoting 8-10x more powerful than last gen if you use these quoted MS numbers:

240GF(Xenos) * 53% = 127GF. 10 * 127GF = 1.27TF.
 
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Yeah and that is in relation to the 360 gpu which, according to their estimate, had about 53% efficiency.

53%. Very interesting, I would've imagined it would be higher than that. Good to know Durango GPU is very efficient. I guess that's a basic function of it being GCN? Or maybe a combination of esram + GCN?
 
i just wonder why MS didn't put these IBM ex Engineers to work with AMD.
Maybe they aren't working on Xbox? Maybe they did work with AMD, saw what AMD was doing with its APU, and said, "Yeah, you know what? You guys actually know what you're doing and there's not much more we can add to the APU design" (or do you think AMD are a bunch klutzes and they'll make stupid mistakes in design that only ex-IBMers can fix?). Maybe they were there to determine minimal backwards compatibility hardware to be added, and the MS decided to drop BC as an unnecessary cost?
 
It's possible they were just there for their expertise in talking through a set of design gameplans and ideas with AMD's engineers, as you clearly probably won't have your run of the mill suits in there. You need people that know what they're doing on your end as well to work with AMD's experts and help steer the design in a direction that fits completely with Microsoft's intents.

All of which I'm certain could have been done just fine purely with AMD people, but it's always good to have some of your own people at the table, too.
 
There are also plenty of other things they could work on other than ripping apart a ready-made Jaguar core design, and the innards of that part of the SoC might be one of the areas AMD would rather mess with themselves.

It's quite a bit to expect of an outside engineering contingent to just waltz into another company's complex core design (possibly after some number of that company's engineers have been fired) and just run with it.

Other things that are actually different about Durango, like the memory interfaces, memory pool, custom logic, and uncore are places where it would make more sense that they'd want to customize. Resetting to some point in Jaguar's design process several years back is probably not the best risk/reward tradeoff.
 
I was thinking if these ex-IBM people were employed for anything at all for Durango, it would be for their possible expertise with eSRAM/eDRAM?

Although most will probably be for future products.
 
I was thinking if these ex-IBM people were employed for anything at all for Durango, it would be for their possible expertise with eSRAM/eDRAM?

Although most will probably be for future products.

Integrating the Valhalla chip onto the Durango motherboard for backwards compatibility?
 
Integrating the Valhalla chip onto the Durango motherboard for backwards compatibility?

Thinking more about it, could be forward compatibility rather than backward compatibility. That is, designing scaled up versions of this architecture for a 2-3 year iterative console lifecycle.


They could pull that rabbit out of their hat at the reveal I suppose. But with how much tech is already in the Durango and the rumours of a new 360 SKU I doubt HW BC is in.

What about the current Durango architecture cant 'handle' the 360 games? Is it just the CPU or the whole thing is the wrong fit in the wrong places (CPU, GPU,edram)?
 
I wonder if EDRAM is the reason they have to gimp the GPU. It takes the silicon..

Yes they were gonna have 32CU's but they decided it would be useful to have bandwidth to make the GPU useful.

They made design choices about how to spend their silicon budget, they didn't gimp anything. I doubt the eSRAM uses anywhere near the power a similar die space of CU's would use which is probably a bigger issue than die space.
 
mmm, what about ESRAM being 1t-SRAM and so the chip size being 200mm2...and having two of them?. This would still be 2 times the CPU. And having a 7970 in the alpha kits would have sense as well as the 2 computers tapped together rumor.

There's no 7970 in the alpha kit, that rumour was debunked by bkilian himself.

It was a 1.2 TF GPU and that hasn't changed for the beta kits and probably won't change for final unless MS decides to overclock it (unlikely)

Is that the same one that was being talked about where it's said the Durango gpu is 100% efficient?

The doc does say this, but it's in comparison to Xenos' efficiency and is more to do with Xenos being vector4 and GCN scalar.

So it's not like the Durango GPU is super efficient compared to Orbis as the efficiency MS is claiming in the doc is simply inherent in the GCN architecture both machines will be using.
 
They could pull that rabbit out of their hat at the reveal I suppose. But with how much tech is already in the Durango and the rumours of a new 360 SKU I doubt HW BC is in.

What if the new X360 is a USB stick that you plug into one of the USB ports on the Xbox? :D Yeah yeah, not likely. But some kind of add-on to the new Xbox would be interesting.

Erm... Huh, just thought of something. What if the main purpose of that HDMI in is so that you can route your X360 through it?

Just throwing out random ideas here. :p So don't take any of this seriously.

But it would be interesting if the new X360 was basically a "box" that you plugged into the next gen Xbox. Sell it for 99 USD or something. USB 3.0 would theoretically be enough to load games from either the next gen Xbox's HDD or optical drive. So, in theory, basically you just need the X360 "addon" to have a USB input, HDMI output, and power connector. :D

Yes, as I said, completely wild speculation that no one should take seriously. :) It would be brilliant, IMO, however.

Regards,
SB
 
There's no 7970 in the alpha kit, that rumour was debunked by bkilian himself.

It was a 1.2 TF GPU and that hasn't changed for the beta kits and probably won't change for final unless MS decides to overclock it (unlikely)



The doc does say this, but it's in comparison to Xenos' efficiency and is more to do with Xenos being vector4 and GCN scalar.

So it's not like the Durango GPU is super efficient compared to Orbis as the efficiency MS is claiming in the doc is simply inherent in the GCN architecture both machines will be using.
The architecture of the console sounds very interesting in different ways but it isn't the most powerful next generation.

That being said, next gent I want a CONSOLE. A true one. Imho, it's not worth paying an extra 200$ to push every single possible game to the max either.
 
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