Personally, I would be excited to see an APU with 8 Jaguar cores and a decent number GCN cores. Since most CUDA developers I've met complain about the latency and bandwidth of PCI Express, I guess an APU might open up interesting possibilities to offload tasks to the GPU. We are quite unlikely to see this on the PC due to lack of market share.
Predict: The Next Generation Console Tech
- Thread starter Acert93
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The dev kits for last gen were G4 machines that absolutely crushed Xenon in single-threaded perf. The difference between a Jaguar core and a SB thread is much less than that.
I really don't think you can infer much of anything from the dev kits. Early dev kits are about software, not hardware.
DoctorFouad
Newcomer
what about off the shelf solutions in 2013 ? why paying a lot of money to research and develop something underpowered and not that much lower priced ?
some examples :
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i3-2120+@+3.30GHz
Intel Core i3-2120 @ 3.30GHz
Description: Socket: LGA1155, Clockspeed: 3.3 GHz, No of Cores: 2 (2 logical cores per physical), Max TDP: 65 W
Other names: Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-2120 CPU @ 3.30GHz
CPU Launched: Q1 2011
CPUmark/$Price: 34.24 Overall Rank: 274
Last Price Change: $116.74 USD (2011-02-26)
in 2013 with the same price I bet Intel would release a 4 core version at the same price. sony or Microsoft can buy higher amounts customized chipsets a much lower price.
concerning the GPU, an ATI 7850 at 200$ would do the job very well, in 2013, sony and microsoft can buy those chips for less than 100$.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias=aps&field-keywords=AMD Radeon HD 7850
I bet my 300$ configuration for nowaday retaileer prices, would crush any jaguar APU from AMD anytime. (incredible single thread performance, incredible if not best performance per watt/per dollar, out of order easy to develop for processor, 200+ GB/s GPU bandwidth...you can add 32 GB of DDR3 RAM at less than 100$ and another 100$ 60 Gb SSD and you get a dream console hardware for developers, and with the SSD and crazy amount of RAM, it will decrease developers headaches and could last 10 years without any problem)
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Sony and MS won't be buying their chips from Newegg, I'd be surprised if they are completely bog standard.
Please try to restrain from posting rants in the Console Tech forum. If you have a logical way for MS to profitably sell a console with $500 of chip costs (before motherboard, assembly, testing, case, PSU, shipping, controller, and possibly Kinect), I'd love to hear it.
So the IBM A2 CPU Architect was hired by Microsoft.
Really hard to believe AMD has a CPU in the Xbox 720.
Why not? I find it hard to believe that Microsoft would develop too much in house. What Microsoft could do is have CPU architecture engineers on it's pay roll working at AMD to help develop their custom SoC. Off roll employees working at AMD in other words. That would benefit Microsoft as well as AMD. All Microsoft will probably be doing in house afterwards will be future die shrinks and other cost saving features. I don't see the benefit for Microsoft to do too much in house otherwise, unless they plan to do a lot more custom hardware in other areas. Like more custom hardware for Surface or something. We're getting somewhat off topic though.
Perhaps the better way to design it would be to have one 4 core module work entirely on game code and the other module working entirely on OS code/apps/Kinect etc. If it is difficult to get two sets of Jaguar quad cores working together then perhaps this is the easy/logical way around this problem. They could also customise each 4 core module to work in different ways with the game cores being powergated so they can be turned off/suspended entirely. It'll also mean that if they choose to release a console which 'only' does multimedia they can release a 4 core version with no GPU because the game code is perfectly partitioned.
Good luck with that. Jaguar makes sense because it has a feature set and IPC much greater than Xenon, at an already small core size. However I would implore either a wider SIMD implementation (8 wide) or 8 CPU cores so that developers can enjoy the benefits of even more GFLOPS along with the vastly improved IPC.
How does this sound for Xbox Next?
APU
4 1.6 GhzJaguar cores for game code
4 1.6 Ghz cores for OS/Kinect/Apps/Multimedia with attached multimedia decoders/encoders
18 CUs @ 800Mhz ~ 2 Tflops shader performance. I think 2:1 clock domains seem the best fit given the speeds that the HD 78xx and Jaguar are expected to run at.
IO/Interposer chip.
Contains 80MB eSRAM + embedded ARM core for security which runs inside the embedded memory (16MB dedicated) and checks all code going in/leaving the IO processor whether it is from memory, SATA/USB etc.
Essentially this chip acts as a scratch pad, security and I/O co-processor and the majority of pinouts are on this chip which leaves Microsoft free to shrink the main APU as they please. They would attach the memory to this interposer.
The yield issues could be with the interposer itself rather than the APU as this seems the more complex of the two chips to fab and it solves the dilemma of DDR4 because if they're using DDR4 but AMD doesn't yet seem to have a memory controller to fit who would they be sourcing the controller/memory from?
If they want to they will be able to release a 'core system' without the ability to play games by simply releasing a variant of the above without a GPU and only a 4 core Jaguar processor which could compete in the sub $199 multimedia market.
I speculate that they may move towards a subscription based, all you can eat style service which is based on digital distribution backed up by physical cartridges when internet is impossible. Because the content is already paid for the users who don't have an adequate internet connection could pay a very low price to access content they effectively already have rights to.
I believe the overall design will be based on the design language of the Microsoft Surface with a sleek modern design taking advantage of 'peripheral venting' for improved cooling performance and good noise levels. Mentally if you merge the look of the Surface Pro and the 360 S it ought to look something similar to that. An optical drive would be irrelevant regardless because the system is not backwards compatible anyway.
I believe they'd offer 4 SKUs like they do with modern consoles.
1. Xbox Next media. $149-199 with just the 4 Core APU with 'Kinect support' 8-32GB flash.
2. Xbox Next Arcade $299 with 64-128GB of removable flash storage with read speeds of up to 50MB/S and write speeds of up to 35MB/S perhaps more, able to write an 8GB game in less than 4 minutes.
3. Xbox Next Premium $399 no flash but 1TB HDD removeable with Kinect 2.0
4. Xbox Next Elite $499 2TB HDD and 128GB removeable flash with Kinect 2.0
They'll give the media console away 'free' with a content subscription and they'll take $1-200 off the price of the consoles with an appropriate Live subscription.
APU
4 1.6 GhzJaguar cores for game code
4 1.6 Ghz cores for OS/Kinect/Apps/Multimedia with attached multimedia decoders/encoders
18 CUs @ 800Mhz ~ 2 Tflops shader performance. I think 2:1 clock domains seem the best fit given the speeds that the HD 78xx and Jaguar are expected to run at.
IO/Interposer chip.
Contains 80MB eSRAM + embedded ARM core for security which runs inside the embedded memory (16MB dedicated) and checks all code going in/leaving the IO processor whether it is from memory, SATA/USB etc.
Essentially this chip acts as a scratch pad, security and I/O co-processor and the majority of pinouts are on this chip which leaves Microsoft free to shrink the main APU as they please. They would attach the memory to this interposer.
The yield issues could be with the interposer itself rather than the APU as this seems the more complex of the two chips to fab and it solves the dilemma of DDR4 because if they're using DDR4 but AMD doesn't yet seem to have a memory controller to fit who would they be sourcing the controller/memory from?
If they want to they will be able to release a 'core system' without the ability to play games by simply releasing a variant of the above without a GPU and only a 4 core Jaguar processor which could compete in the sub $199 multimedia market.
I speculate that they may move towards a subscription based, all you can eat style service which is based on digital distribution backed up by physical cartridges when internet is impossible. Because the content is already paid for the users who don't have an adequate internet connection could pay a very low price to access content they effectively already have rights to.
I believe the overall design will be based on the design language of the Microsoft Surface with a sleek modern design taking advantage of 'peripheral venting' for improved cooling performance and good noise levels. Mentally if you merge the look of the Surface Pro and the 360 S it ought to look something similar to that. An optical drive would be irrelevant regardless because the system is not backwards compatible anyway.
I believe they'd offer 4 SKUs like they do with modern consoles.
1. Xbox Next media. $149-199 with just the 4 Core APU with 'Kinect support' 8-32GB flash.
2. Xbox Next Arcade $299 with 64-128GB of removable flash storage with read speeds of up to 50MB/S and write speeds of up to 35MB/S perhaps more, able to write an 8GB game in less than 4 minutes.
3. Xbox Next Premium $399 no flash but 1TB HDD removeable with Kinect 2.0
4. Xbox Next Elite $499 2TB HDD and 128GB removeable flash with Kinect 2.0
They'll give the media console away 'free' with a content subscription and they'll take $1-200 off the price of the consoles with an appropriate Live subscription.
I think if they manage to get an interposer working, they'll go for something like 256+ MB DRAM on a 1024-bit bus for 200+ GB/sec BW . If you put the money and resources into it, can deal with the potential yield issues early on, I say you go big.
Overkill?
Thats alot of transistors on eDRAM I would assume.
Microsoft would still open its wallet and hire IBM to build the CPU. Just like the previous cycle Microsoft still owns the CPU.
If there's an interposer it would be DRAM chips not eDRAM. That's the point behind the interposer.
And that's presumably what that Sony tech VP was talking about, as well. It'll be interesting to see how very high bandwidth RAM goes with the kind of CPU/GPU we've been talking about.
Blazkowicz
Legend
Normally the ARM core is part of the APU, it will be part of all future PC APU (including the one in Surface Pro tablet presumably) and I'd hope it uses something like 256K or even less, as a small SRAM chunk.
It will have to store keys and hashes, there are some boring details on wikepedia's article for the "Trusted Platform Module" and "Intel TXT" that give some insight on what kind of thing can be done (also a picture of the "evil" chip hanging out of the Low Pin Count bus of a PC motherboard!)
Confusing and admittedly incomplete information on "Trustzone" here :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Security_Extensions_.28TrustZone.29
So I believe the thing is pretty low profile on the hardware side. What it does have is a segregated environment and doing hashing, keygen stuff and being a source of authority, perhaps like the server that takes in the hash of your password and allows you to login on Beyond3D if the match is correct. [in a network, that role can be delegated to a separate server which maybe only does this, and may do it for mail, web site, proxy, desktop login etc.]
Sniffing all I/O at gigabit speeds, I doubt it'd be done, it feels pretty wild
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I figured they'd want the chip in a position where it could 'check' all information going into the CPU before it reached the CPU. If they had the security module in the I/O chip/interposer itself then all communication to and from the APU would be monitored.
Sniffing all I/O at gigabit speeds, I doubt it'd be done, it feels pretty wild
Couldn't it simply be something basic like a hash check to ensure that the data moving through the bus is kosher?
Depends. If the next Xbox is going to do real background multi-tasking, it needs to handle more than just one. A fairly reasonable request would be for it to play a game, download a game demo/DLC, record live TV, then stream a TV show to an extender all at the same time. Having multiple cores would certainly help with that. And most of what I just said shouldn't be too CPU or I/O intensive, but Microsoft needs to give an appropriate amount of resources and design the core OS so that it's possible to do what I just said. The Xbox 360 certainly has hardware capable today of all that, but not while playing a game, which is where it falls apart.
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