PlayStation 4 (codename Orbis) technical hardware investigation (news and rumours)

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Nothing special in those links. Only major change is bandwidth (192 to 176 GB/s).

Already knew an audio DSP was in there (my friend is working on it at AMD). It could have been expected special hardware would do video decoding as well. That leaves the Jaguar cores to do gaming tasks and OS tasks then, which is good.

However, it still doesn't talk about the GPGPU functionality (or Orbis' secret sauce) that everyone here seems to ignore, and that was explicitly stated in Eurogamer's article. Everyone talks about secret sauce of Durango giving 'essential' parity to the consoles, but can't remember that Eurogamer's DF explicitly stated there is one other piece of hardware still missing from the mix and unaccounted for:
However, there's a fair amount of "secret sauce" in Orbis and we can disclose details on one of the more interesting additions. Paired up with the eight AMD cores, we find a bespoke GPU-like "Compute" module, designed to ease the burden on certain operations - physics calculations are a good example of traditional CPU work that are often hived off to GPU cores. We're assured that this is bespoke hardware that is not a part of the main graphics pipeline but we remain rather mystified by its standalone inclusion, bearing in mind Compute functions could be run off the main graphics cores and that devs could have the option to utilise that power for additional graphical grunt, if they so chose.
This compute model has been completely ignored, even by VGleaks. I wonder if they have no information on it, or it isn't even in the system anymore.

There's nothing else interesting in the Orbis anymore except that extra chip and what it will be used for.
 
How about streaming speed? 6x Bluray and I'm guessing 5400 rpm HDD looks barely inadequate. I imagine that would be around 100mb/s? At max theoretical too...
 
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LIVERPOOL SOC

Custom implementation of AMD Fusion APU Arquitecture (Accelerated Processing Unit)
Provides good performance with low power consumtion
Integrated CPU and GPU
Considerably bigger and more powerful than AMD’s other APUs

so cpu and gpu is in the soc . Is the ram in the soc ? if so then its stacked .

hd 7770 has 40 texture units , but 18 texture units in ps4 ???
 
SOC means everything on the same piece of silicon, and no consumer SOC is going to fit its RAM on the same die.
It might be on the same package, maybe. I wouldn't want the DRAM on top of the CPU or GPU, however.
 
Nothing special in those links. Only major change is bandwidth (192 to 176 GB/s).

Already knew an audio DSP was in there (my friend is working on it at AMD). It could have been expected special hardware would do video decoding as well. That leaves the Jaguar cores to do gaming tasks and OS tasks then, which is good.

However, it still doesn't talk about the GPGPU functionality (or Orbis' secret sauce) that everyone here seems to ignore, and that was explicitly stated in Eurogamer's article. Everyone talks about secret sauce of Durango giving 'essential' parity to the consoles, but can't remember that Eurogamer's DF explicitly stated there is one other piece of hardware still missing from the mix and unaccounted for: This compute model has been completely ignored, even by VGleaks. I wonder if they have no information on it, or it isn't even in the system anymore.

There's nothing else interesting in the Orbis anymore except that extra chip and what it will be used for.

All this secret sauce nonsense is just getting messy(!) What we have is two very similar machines, besides the memory setups. it's like they were talking to each other.
 
That's 8 4gbit GDDR5 chips at minimum and 16 if they go 2gbit. It's gotta be stacked or off the package with a regular bus.
 
Nothing special in those links. Only major change is bandwidth (192 to 176 GB/s).

Already knew an audio DSP was in there (my friend is working on it at AMD). It could have been expected special hardware would do video decoding as well. That leaves the Jaguar cores to do gaming tasks and OS tasks then, which is good.

However, it still doesn't talk about the GPGPU functionality (or Orbis' secret sauce) that everyone here seems to ignore, and that was explicitly stated in Eurogamer's article. Everyone talks about secret sauce of Durango giving 'essential' parity to the consoles, but can't remember that Eurogamer's DF explicitly stated there is one other piece of hardware still missing from the mix and unaccounted for: This compute model has been completely ignored, even by VGleaks. I wonder if they have no information on it, or it isn't even in the system anymore.

There's nothing else interesting in the Orbis anymore except that extra chip and what it will be used for.

There is a missing sauce for Durango too.
 
All this secret sauce nonsense is just getting messy(!) What we have is two very similar machines, besides the memory setups. it's like they were talking to each other.

They hired the same company with the same pool of technologies; they target very similar price points; they need very similar consumer-facing technologies like inputs/outputs/media; they need to fit all this in the same boxes; they're using generally equivalent silicon processes, if not the same one, and they're trying to do this all within very close power budgets.

There's a really good chance they're only going to find so many non-stupid variations on the same theme.
 
They hired the same company with the same pool of technologies; they target very similar price points; they need very similar consumer-facing technologies like inputs/outputs/media; they need to fit all this in the same boxes; they're using generally equivalent silicon processes, if not the same one, and they're trying to do this all within very close power budgets.

There's a really good chance they're only going to find so many non-stupid variations on the same theme.

Agreed. It's no surprise they're so close.

As for the "sauce" comments, I think this is it:
Audio Processor (ACP)
Video encode and decode (VCE/UVD) units
Display ScanOut Engine (DCE)
Zlib Decompression Hardware

I don't know what else one might expect.
 
They hired the same company with the same pool of technologies; they target very similar price points; they need very similar consumer-facing technologies like inputs/outputs/media; they need to fit all this in the same boxes; they're using generally equivalent silicon processes, if not the same one, and they're trying to do this all within very close power budgets.

There's a really good chance they're only going to find so many non-stupid variations on the same theme.

Very true , but this must be first generation of home consoles that are this closely related.
 
There is a missing sauce for Durango too.

I said that, thank you....

I'm saying we have zero corroboration to Eurogamer DF's claim of what this GPGPU is.

There has been no other indication about GPGPU function in PS4 except from 2012 when it was rumoured PS4 would be APU + GPU design.

I'm not trying to win an e-peen war here, I have no interest in Durango. I just want to know what the GPGPU is in PS4.
 
Maybe vgleaks didn't leak any "special sauce" because it doesn't exist :cry:

Could there be some additional processing as part of the scanout engine (what can this do other than scaling, rotating and apply a lut?), or something special in the video codec engine that can work on textures in real time?
 
Maybe vgleaks didn't leak any "special sauce" because it doesn't exist?

Could there be some additional processing as part of the scanout engine (what can this do other than scaling, rotating and apply a lut?), or something special in the video codec engine that can work on textures in real time?

That is what I'm thinking now.

It either A) doesn't exist anymore or

B) less likely it's there and no one talks about it for some reason.
 
Maybe vgleaks didn't leak any "special sauce" because it doesn't exist :cry:

Could there be some additional processing as part of the scanout engine (what can this do other than scaling, rotating and apply a lut?), or something special in the video codec engine that can work on textures in real time?


Maybe vgleaks has leaked what they want that we must know?
 
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