Xbox One (Durango) Technical hardware investigation

[Deleted member 11852]

Never mind.. it is just decoding

Even decode is not to be sniffed at. Depending on how video was encoded, decode can eat a ton of CPU cycles.

 

[liquidboy]

another theory regarding tensilica ....

AMD video processors (UVD) are apparently tensilica cores ... AMD have been using them since 2009 ...


so PSP(security), Audio and UVD are all tensilica cores ...

what if the light green blocks at the bottom are all possibly ARM tensilica on the axi bus

Further more what if that entire block were a reconfigured xtensa DPU, i know its a big leap BUT something to think about ...

Also the xtensa DPU happens to support HEVC/H.265 (sw programmability)..

... anyway it was an argument being made a while back, and ive never really ruled it out ....

 

[Cyan]

A Technomancer developer has said that the extra CPU core of the Xbox One will allow super smooth framerates.

http://gamingbolt.com/xbox-one-extra-cpu-core-will-allow-smoother-frame-rates-technomancer-dev

 

[iroboto]

A Technomancer developer has said that the extra CPU core of the Xbox One will allow super smooth framerates.

http://gamingbolt.com/xbox-one-extra-cpu-core-will-allow-smoother-frame-rates-technomancer-dev

smh.

 

[Cyan]

smh.

What does smh stand for?

 

[BadTB25]

What does smh stand for?

shaking my head or shake my head

 

[DrJay24]

A Technomancer developer has said that the extra CPU core of the Xbox One will allow super smooth framerates.

http://gamingbolt.com/xbox-one-extra-cpu-core-will-allow-smoother-frame-rates-technomancer-dev

Did you read it?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Did you read it?

It's Cyan. Does he ever?

 

[Globalisateur]

All titles released after October 22nd 2014 can use the 7th core already. That's really old news (and it's not @Cyan 's fault anyways).

From the XDK leak:

As of October 22nd 2014, we are pleased to announce that we are removing the "preview" qualifier from this feature and any title planning to ship on the October XDK or later can take advantage of this additional processing power.

One thing interesting from the interview though:

In fact we designed our new engine to be very flexible about the number of processors.

Which is the real interesting news from the interview. 7th core stuff is clickbait.

 

[Cyan]

All titles released after October 22nd 2014 can use the 7th core already. That's really old news (and it's not @Cyan 's fault anyways).

From the XDK leak:


One thing interesting from the interview though:

Which is the real interesting news from the interview. 7th core stuff is clickbait.

There is more info in the Velocity 2x interview on what it is like to develop for the console, but it doesn't say a lot of new things about the hardware, although some points on the teraflops are quite interesting, and it gets even more interesting where the interviewed developer think those great amounts of teraflops can be used for -PS4 and XB1.

http://gamingbolt.com/velocity-2x-interview-porting-to-xbox-one-winning-hearts-and-future-plans

 

[iroboto]

These interviews are ridiculous. I need to stop reading gamingbolt. Every question is: did you have a problem with esram? Did you use the unlocked 7th core. What did you find easier to code for. Is there enough power??

Please gaming bolt: continue to ask these same questions in 2016 and beyond.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Typical of that site, the interviewer was blatantly fishing for flamebait.

Didn't get any, though.

 

[dobwal]

What does smh stand for?

"s^*^ing my Hanes!!!" An euphemism denoting iroboto's excitement at what you linked.



jk

 

[iroboto]

"s^*^ing my Hanes!!!" An euphemism denoting iroboto's excitement at what you linked.



jk

Wait a second, I do wear Hanes. Haha. Stop hacking into my kinect!

 

[Jwm]

Hard not to, you keep broadcasting everything! Thankfully Kinect turns itself off when it thinks something is nude. ;p

 

[iroboto]

I'm not sure where this one goes - I thought about audio and it's very well related, but may be worthwhile to discuss it in the technical thread.
The latest patch for Pcars XBO was just released and frame rate has reportedly improved in many areas, there are still dips, but overall I'm reading better performance.
Now this particular post came up from Ian Bell
http://forum.projectcarsgame.com/sh...now-Opinions&p=1051353&viewfull=1#post1051353

It's not (easier) unfortunately. We're running our audio tech on the newly 'opened' extra core which is shared with the OS. It will improve.

Nothing new here, we've known that MS opened up that 7th core for whomever decided they needed it. (which is a decent amount of cycles gained here) But interestingly what I wanted to ask you guys about was audio. This continually comes up as a topic and I don't seem to be getting it, how taxing is audio in a game? And what exactly in terms of alleviating the CPU should the audio systems in both consoles be doing?

I keep hearing about SHAPE and Tenscilla, but to me it sounds like the only thing these systems are doing is the actual mixing of different audio sources. Is this correct?

 

[Cyan]

I'm not sure where this one goes - I thought about audio and it's very well related, but may be worthwhile to discuss it in the technical thread.
The latest patch for Pcars XBO was just released and frame rate has reportedly improved in many areas, there are still dips, but overall I'm reading better performance.
Now this particular post came up from Ian Bell
http://forum.projectcarsgame.com/sh...now-Opinions&p=1051353&viewfull=1#post1051353


Nothing new here, we've known that MS opened up that 7th core for whomever decided they needed it. (which is a decent amount of cycles gained here) But interestingly what I wanted to ask you guys about was audio. This continually comes up as a topic and I don't seem to be getting it, how taxing is audio in a game? And what exactly in terms of alleviating the CPU should the audio systems in both consoles be doing?

I keep hearing about SHAPE and Tenscilla, but to me it sounds like the only thing these systems are doing is the actual mixing of different audio sources. Is this correct?

Wish @bkilian was around to tell you. But I don't get why are they using a CPU core for audio when they don't use Kinect and Shape has a few audio processors.

 

[bgroovy]

Large parts of SHAPE are inaccessible to game developers.

 

[turkey]

Middleware (?) which may or may not touch shape but will require cpu resources, possibly an easy offload?

 

[XpiderMX]

I'm not sure where this one goes - I thought about audio and it's very well related, but may be worthwhile to discuss it in the technical thread.
The latest patch for Pcars XBO was just released and frame rate has reportedly improved in many areas, there are still dips, but overall I'm reading better performance.
Now this particular post came up from Ian Bell
http://forum.projectcarsgame.com/sh...now-Opinions&p=1051353&viewfull=1#post1051353


Nothing new here, we've known that MS opened up that 7th core for whomever decided they needed it. (which is a decent amount of cycles gained here) But interestingly what I wanted to ask you guys about was audio. This continually comes up as a topic and I don't seem to be getting it, how taxing is audio in a game? And what exactly in terms of alleviating the CPU should the audio systems in both consoles be doing?

I keep hearing about SHAPE and Tenscilla, but to me it sounds like the only thing these systems are doing is the actual mixing of different audio sources. Is this correct?

from vgleaks:

The core hardware dedicated to audio processing is SHAPE. It is designed to perform many of the basic operations commonly required on a per-voice basis. This hardware allows a developer to reduce CPU impact—even for high polyphony and complex-signal routings—and still provide the flexibility of SHAPE/CPU data interchange if a title chooses to perform custom digital signal processing, analysis, or software synthesis.