Do you think there will be a mid gen refresh console from Sony and Microsoft?

[rntongo]

The whole reason for this discussion was to understand why Alex referred to 14M PS4 Pros.. as "incredibly low"... when the answer is obvious... because it is. 14M out of 120M+... IS incredibly low.

I didn't ever see Alex claim X number of high end GPUs.. was some high percentage.. so I'm not sure why the comparison to PC GPUs was made in the first place. We all know buying habits are different... and PCs serve far more uses. Not to mention comparing known numbers to estimates..

Alex he may not fully comprehend what Sony's goals were with the pro console that an equity research analyst or CFO may understand. We dont know the exact figures of how many PS4 pros were sold. But we do know with 100% certainty that Sony looked at PS4 pro sales numbers (and the synergies it brought about) and was so impressed they designed the current PS5 with a PS5 pro in mind.

To put it within context, what sales that an individual without finance training may consider low, may actually exceeds what Sony's finance team expected. The PS4 pro sales were great and filled a gap that wouldnt have been filled by a much weaker PS4 despite the PS4 continuing the sell well. And they're going to do it again this gen with the PS5 pro. Its not just about mere sales figures but business/product synergies.

 

[Johnny Awesome]

I'm not convinced that PS5 fans are thinking of jumping to PC and need a Pro to stop them from doing it.

The real reason Sony does it is so that the hardcore PS5 users upgrade and sell/give their PS5s to their little brother or whoever.

I agree with Alex, 12% of total sales is not that much. But if little Jimmy can get a PS5 from his big brother for $250 because he upgraded, it speeds adoption.

 

[techuse]

I’m not convinced there is a notable move from Playstation to PC mid gen. In general, I think the markets remain rather separate. I suspect the overwhelming majority of PS4 Pro sales were to existing PS4 owners and Sony just determined they can profit off the additional hardware sale.

 

[Kaotik]

Good point. I wonder if that's related to them all being RDNA1 (no IC) with a bunch of RDNA2 (all/largely with IC) features bolted on?

Xbox SoCs are RDNA2, Sony's are mostly RDNA2 apparently.

 

[rntongo]

Good point. I wonder if that's related to them all being RDNA1 (no IC) with a bunch of RDNA2 (all/largely with IC) features bolted on? Maybe simply cost? I'd love to know why they passed up something that PC benchmarks proves as beneficial.

Series X GPU is full RDNA 2. PS5's GPU is a mix between RDNA 1 and 2. Correct me if I'm wrong this is what I remember reading.

Although adding infinity cache would offer some benefit, the engineers at MSFT and Sony must have compared the added benefit and the overall cost of adding another cache level for the GPU and opted not to include it. In other words the benefits were quite marginal given the added latency in the memory hierarchy for what they needed at the time. Maybe the PS5 pro and future consoles may come with some form of infinity cache after more empirical data is available on the benefits. But I noticed as well AMD has been cutting down on the size of infinity cache. From initially 128MB now its at 96MB max.

 

[Shortbread]

Either he is taking the FTC documents at face value, or he has firsthand knowledge that the next XB will be ARM based.

 

[rntongo]

Either he is taking the FTC documents at face value, or he has firsthand knowledge that the next XB will be ARM based.

Wouldnt be surprised if next gen Playstation after the PS5 pro has an ARM CPU as well.

 

[Shortbread]

Wouldnt be surprised if next Playstation has an ARM CPU as well.

Maybe for background related task, similar to PS4, but not so much for gaming related needs. IIRC, Sony PS OS doesn't have the abstraction layer(s) like Microsoft OS to offer or maintain compatibility (backwards compatibility) between two different architectures. Unless something has totally changed with the PS OS over the last 3 or 4yrs (especially, on how they would handled all the low-level PS coding from one arch to another), I can't see them moving away from a AMD SOC/APU anytime soon. Mind you, I'm not simply talking about having or getting PS FreeBSD based OS up and running on ARM, but avoiding all the hassles that would come with Sony emulating and borking backwards compatibility, among other things.

 

[pjbliverpool]

With the whole cross PC development of first party titles these days, I'd be amazed if either console used Arm as its main processor. Especially especially Xbox which is actually a smaller market by quite a margin than than the PC for those games.

I'm not even sure how it would work tbh. How are AMD going to produce an APU with an ARM CPU? Do they have any IP in that space and if they do can they compete with their Ryzen offerings which are still up there with the best in the PC space?

Or are we suggesting that different vendors would be producing different core components of the APU? Because that does not sound like a recipe for success to me.

 

[Shortbread]

Or are we suggesting that different vendors would be producing different core components of the APU? Because that does not sound like a recipe for success to me.

Maybe it's strictly a cost savings method. From what I read, Microsoft's XB hardware isn't (or hasn't been) very profitable, especially this time around when compared to Sony. If Microsoft wants to keep making XB hardware, maybe cheaper components (that are still performance competitive) is the route they're seeking. They have a robust OS on doing so, more so than Sony.

 

[Charlietus]

With the whole cross PC development of first party titles these days, I'd be amazed if either console used Arm as its main processor. Especially especially Xbox which is actually a smaller market by quite a margin than than the PC for those games.

I'm not even sure how it would work tbh. How are AMD going to produce an APU with an ARM CPU? Do they have any IP in that space and if they do can they compete with their Ryzen offerings which are still up there with the best in the PC space?

Or are we suggesting that different vendors would be producing different core components of the APU? Because that does not sound like a recipe for success to me.

Apparently both amd and Nvidia are working on arm chips, launching in 2025.

Nvidia and AMD reportedly developing Arm-based PC processors - SiliconANGLE

Nvidia and AMD reportedly developing Arm-based PC processors - SiliconANGLE

siliconangle.com

Qualcomm has an exclusivity contract for arm on windows until 2025?

Also, ps6 and next box are probably launching in 2029, so a lot can happen in that timeframe.
I would love if they were arm based so that AAA games could launch simultaneously on console, PC and mobile. But that's not going to happen, I'm just dreaming right now

 

[Tkumpathenurpahl]

So I am. And you don't need dedicated hardware to do ML jobs as it can be done easily with FP16 like in God of War Ragnarok. Spider-man games also do ML inference on PS5 but i don't know how they do it. The point is you can perfectly do it without dedicated ML hardware available since RDNA2 era. Maybe Cerny will think the FP16 compute they have is enough to do what developers need for their games. I could see them adding ML silicon (like what's in RDNA3) if they had a new need with a specific upscaler technique similar to DLSS, but I doubt it because we haven't seen a Cerny patent looking anything like a DLSS technique.

Yeah, it's something I'm curious to see play out. The continued presence of tensor cores coupled with Nvidia's performance advantage does suggest their presence is a positive. However, as far as I'm aware, it's effectively only used for DLSS.

That might not be terribly appealing to a cost conscious console manufacturer, who potentially has more interest in letting developers choose how their rendering:upscaling ratio is portioned. If so, I'd expect the likes of dual FP16 CU's in place of exclusive tensor cores.

I'd argue that with cross-gen now the standard, PS5Pro would get, and inspire, higher-end PC features. Devs wouldn't target 5Pro directly, or even need to; they'd just make their cross-plat game in UE5 or whatever and set the appropriate settings, without needing bespoke 5Pro solutions like 4Pro needed.

That'd certainly be great. Now that I think about it, I don't think anything else on the market was really all that comparable to checkerboard rendering, so it being such a unique feature was pretty much always going to limit its adoption. Whereas adopting tech that either is or will be used wisely in the PC space probably bodes well.

Fingers crossed!

For PS5 on the hardware side, there was the custom I/O controller and weird solid state cells (slow writes, fast reads), plus whatever backwards compatibility AMD had be implement in hardware because PlayStation has well-documented super thin architecture abstraction layers. I reckon the vast majority of R&D is on the software stack and creating new tools and profilers for developers as this is produced in-house by Sony (SN Systems) and takes a long, long time - along with all the documentation ghat developers need.

For the last couple of console generations, PlayStation consoles have been more like lego-brick assemblies in terms of the hardware. No weird EmotionEngine, no baffling Cell architecture, or dual/ring-bus implementations. x64 APUs, unified RAM with some customer changes from what AMD were including as standard in commodity PC parts ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Aye, your speculation makes sense. Should a PS5Pro with an additively updated architecture materialise, I think you'll be proven right.

Xbox SoCs are RDNA2, Sony's are mostly RDNA2 apparently.

My mistake, thanks for the correction.

Series X GPU is full RDNA 2. PS5's GPU is a mix between RDNA 1 and 2. Correct me if I'm wrong this is what I remember reading.

Although adding infinity cache would offer some benefit, the engineers at MSFT and Sony must have compared the added benefit and the overall cost of adding another cache level for the GPU and opted not to include it. In other words the benefits were quite marginal given the added latency in the memory hierarchy for what they needed at the time. Maybe the PS5 pro and future consoles may come with some form of infinity cache after more empirical data is available on the benefits. But I noticed as well AMD has been cutting down on the size of infinity cache. From initially 128MB now its at 96MB max.

That cache reduction's interesting. Do you happen to know if it's incurred any performance penalty? It seems odd to reduce IC when the chiplet nature of RDNA3 seems entirely geared around modularity of IC.

You've made me wonder: maybe adding cache in a mid-gen would be more hassle than it's worth, and that's more within the purview of a new generation and paradigm?

 

[Tkumpathenurpahl]

But we do know with 100% certainty that Sony looked at PS4 pro sales numbers (and the synergies it brought about) and was so impressed they designed the current PS5 with a PS5 pro in mind.

Let's not get carried away mate. We don't *yet* know that with 100% certainty.

If the pro releases, then sure.

 

[rntongo]

Maybe for background related task, similar to PS4, but not so much for gaming related needs. IIRC, Sony PS OS doesn't have the abstraction layer(s) like Microsoft OS to offer or maintain compatibility (backwards compatibility) between two different architectures. Unless something has totally changed with the PS OS over the last 3 or 4yrs (especially, on how they would handled all the low-level PS coding from one arch to another), I can't see them moving away from a AMD SOC/APU anytime soon. Mind you, I'm not simply talking about having or getting PS FreeBSD based OS up and running on ARM, but avoiding all the hassles that would come with Sony emulating and borking backwards compatibility, among other things.

Yes you're 100% right. But AMD has made ARM CPUs before and I think its safe to say AMD will be the same chip maker for both next gen machines including Xbox which is likely going with ARM CPU. Lisa Su has stated several times they have no issues whatsoever making ARM processors for their clients and are not tied to any one architecture. The OS is the tricky part for Sony as you've stated as well as backwards compatibility since they havent invested in a software hypervisor approach like Xbox has, but I wouldnt be surprised as well if they're working on a dynamic translation layer for when they eventually move to ARM. Looking at the performance of ARM processors with Apple and including in the Japanese FUGAKU supercomputer, the writing is on the wall. I wouldnt be surprised or discount it as a possibility especially if Xbox is going in that direction.

 

[Seanspeed]

Either he is taking the FTC documents at face value, or he has firsthand knowledge that the next XB will be ARM based.

Even taking the documents at face value, it never says they are going to use ARM, it only said they're looking into it. Which is hardly surprising and I'd be shocked if Sony didn't have some research going into that as well.

Though if it's going to happen, I very much hope that Sony and MS are doing a bit of communicating to be on the same page here. Both companies, and likewise pretty much all 3rd party developers, benefit from having the same x86 basis. If they want to switch to ARM, sure, but I would hope they at least ALL do so, and keep in mind the state of ARM for PC as well which is a major platform for 3rd party and Xbox 1st party titles.

Developers really do not need more on their plate than absolutely necessary.

 

[Lurkmass]

Yes you're 100% right. But AMD has made ARM CPUs before and I think its safe to say AMD will be the same chip maker for both next gen machines including Xbox which is likely going with ARM CPU. Lisa Su has stated several times they have no issues whatsoever making ARM processors for their clients and are not tied to any one architecture. The OS is the tricky part for Sony as you've stated as well as backwards compatibility since they havent invested in a software hypervisor approach like Xbox has, but I wouldnt be surprised as well if they're working on a dynamic translation layer for when they eventually move to ARM. Looking at the performance of ARM processors with Apple and including in the Japanese FUGAKU supercomputer, the writing is on the wall. I wouldnt be surprised or discount it as a possibility especially if Xbox is going in that direction.

Any ARM CPU vendor is going to have to implement the SVE extensions with a 256-bit vector width to be able to adequately emulate user space x86 systems with AVX capabilities. Also ARM is never going to catch on in the PC gaming space since emulation will never be a viable option over there for the many games that implement online functionality with anti-cheat drivers ...

 

[Deleted member 11852]

But... you're the one who came up with the comparison to the PC market in the first place? Dictator didn't mention any comparison to PC GPU's in his post. If it's a nonsense comparison, then why make it?

I'll just keep repeating the same point, which you're doing a tremendous job of overlooking. I would add that I also did not make any performance comparison to PC GPUs either, I've only seen posts on that that from you and David Graham. So consider me baffled.

But I think you've really missed the point of my original post which is that in any market the high-end options generally sell far less in lower-spec'd and lower-priced variants and same is true for consoles and GPUs. Once launched, PS4 Pro represented 1 in 5 sales of consoles. Do you honestly think that 3080/3090/3080/3090 cards represent 1 in 5 Nvidia GPU sales?

I cannot think of any other way to express the aim was to demonstrate that high-end products. across all types of product categories, exist almost oblivious of economic realities in terms of market share, especially given the overheads of semiconductor manufacture. The only figure I can find that Nvidia have ever hinted at is 100,000 4090s GPU having been sold a month after release, which is. fraction of the number of PS4 Pros sold at launch.

 

[davis.anthony]

Also, ps6 and next box are probably launching in 2029, so a lot can happen in that time frame.

No chance are PS5 and Series S/X going to be on the market for 9 years before they get a replaced.

They're already starting to feel the performance pinch.

 

[Kaotik]

No chance are PS5 and Series S/X going to be on the market for 9 years before they get a replaced.

They're already starting to feel the performance pinch.

The Xbox leaked slides stated 2028 for next gen box

 

[fehu]

The Xbox leaked slides stated 2028 for next gen box

And more recent rumors stated 2026. Ok, rumors.