Predict: The Next Generation Console Tech

[liolio]

That's not the first time they've pulled quotes from B3D. I suppose they assume it's ok since it's an anonymous forum, however sooner or later someone connects the dots and that leads to trouble. That's pretty much the main reason I don't post here anything of substance anymore.

I remember you predicting a long time ago,years and years, that the next xbox CPU could be a 8 cores +4 way SMT monster, now we know that was a leak. It is an IBM CPU finally
Next thing you know, some dumb ass won't get the joke and...

Just kidding, though I think you got the number of cores right and years ago, most likely (way) before the final decision for the design was taken, good job

Bkillian, he did not ask.. for some reasons I expected that much... not really nice to say the least especially as he used to have an account here, might have learn quiet some stuffs from the helpful and bright people that hang aroud here, etc. and should know that some people are not making much of a mystery about their identity.

Business is business I guess .... ;(

 

[Hecatoncheires]

I can argue the Orbis is over engineered. It can access over 6GB per frame at 30 FPS, yet it's total RAM is only 3.5GB. Now what? Only thing you can do is go back and hit the hard disk or worse, blu ray disk and load more in. Good luck with that.

How can you call this "over-engineered"? An AMD Radeon HD 7970 has 3GB GDDR5-RAM with a bandwith of 288GB/s. That means this card can access more than 4.5GB per second at 60FPS. So what? Even if you overclock the RAM on this card you still get better and better Framerates.

In fact you can never have enough bandwith for gaming, but you will reach a point (especially in systems that are limited through TDP) where you have to make heavy sacrifices to reach a higher bandwith, be it computing power or amount of RAM or you as company bleeding money. 4GiB with ~200GB/s sounds great for a next gen game console, if you ask me.

 

[Rangers]

How can you call this "over-engineered"? An AMD Radeon HD 7970 has 3GB GDDR5-RAM with a bandwith of 288GB/s. That means this card can access more than 4.5GB per second at 60FPS. So what? Even if you overclock the RAM on this card you still get better and better Framerates.

In fact you can never have enough bandwith for gaming, but you will reach a point (especially in systems that are limited through TDP) where you have to make heavy sacrifices to reach a higher bandwith, be it computing power or amount of RAM or you as company bleeding money. 4GiB with ~200GB/s sounds great for a next gen game console, if you ask me.

Cause like I noted, I think BW requirements are a whole lot different in PC space.

Take my framerate to 60+FPS, even 100+, and my resolution to 4k (or even way higher in eyefinity setups), now I'm suddenly a lot more BW limited. Now instead of being able to access 6GB/s I can access a whole lot less per frame. Both scenarios have to be planned for on PC, but not really console.

I have to admit PS4 sounds like a video card on a stick and very beastly and fast, I've always said at a glance it appears more like the design I'd build, I'm just not entirely ready to cede complete supremacy to it just yet.

 

[Hecatoncheires]

Since Naughty Dog praises Texture Streaming as the holy grail of video gaming (more or less...), I'm sure the guys at SCE know exactly what to do with this bandwith.

 

[3dilettante]

I can argue the Orbis is over engineered. It can access over 6GB per frame at 30 FPS, yet it's total RAM is only 3.5GB. Now what? Only thing you can do is go back and hit the hard disk or worse, blu ray disk and load more in. Good luck with that.

This assumes you only load every byte you need once, only write to a location once per frame, are able to utilize the bus 100%, and that the system is doing nothing else with that memory but rendering.

It seems very likely that none of these conditions will be seen in real life on their own, much less all at once. If we are dealing a unified memory system, it would physically impossible for there only to be frame-related traffic.

 

[Rangers]

This assumes you only load every byte you need once, only write to a location once per frame, are able to utilize the bus 100%, and that the system is doing nothing else with that memory but rendering.

It seems very likely that none of these conditions will be seen in real life on their own, much less all at once. If we are dealing a unified memory system, it would physically impossible for there only to be frame-related traffic.

Is it going to slow it down so much the limiter is not going to disk, while Durango is busy drawing out of it's much bigger RAM reserves?

 

[3dilettante]

That would depend on what the game has the system doing. The rendering method used could be generating and consuming multiple buffers per frame, while the HSA compute stuff everyone his hoping for is running in parallel.
The cores and system traffic are also running in place, and getting in the way of good utilization, if the memory is unified.

A lot of the Durango speculation posits a faster pool of memory that specifically takes on the burden of a lot of the throwaway graphics bandwidth consumption. The bulk of rumors posit that Orbis doesn't do this, so its memory pool has to absorb the brunt of it.
At least until the pendulum makes them apply the rumors in reverse order every ten seconds.

 

[RedVi]

But all in all I'm pretty excited for the new System. In my eyes the new PlayStation has a massive architectural advantage over a modular constructed PC with homogeneous processors, much more than PS360 had over PCs a couple of years ago. This will compensate for the missing raw computing power. I'm wondering when desktop PCs will be able to catch up with the degree of heterogeneity that is achieved within this SoC...

This is what I'm hoping for on the PC front. I think such a system as the rumoured orbis and durango are the future for PC also. Yes, not for a few years and perhaps not in entirely the same manner, but I can see us having complete SoC's with high(er) end GPU's and stacked memory for laptops and even desktops in 3-5 years.

 

[Hornet]

Talking about the cores for OS, AndyH (NeoGAF):



6 cores will be free for games.

What if, like in the leaked documents, it is 8 cores for games plus 2 ARM cores for the OS? The most rumors come around about Durango, the more it seems similar to that leaked document. More cores for the applications and two separate ARM cores would not pollute the cache of quad-core Jaguar module.

 

[Proelite]

Last question , why would MS insist on using Win 8 for the Xbox ?

Possibly so that they don't have to write an OS from scratch? Win 8 core runs great on all configurations. App writers can leverage the same development environment.

It's not confirmed though that Durango will use Win 8.

 

[Xenio]

XBOX Will have 1xMars + 2xVenus
XBOX Surface may have 1xMars + 1xVenus
XBOX Lite may have 1xMars + 1xVenus

I believe the same, but Xbox Lite with only 1 Venus, just for arcade/kinect games

 

[Rangers]

lherre signed off on the article (well, these following quoted specs), with the exception of saying some details were wrong

Orbis
- CPU: 8-core Jaguar @ 1.6GHz
- GPU: ~ Radeon 7970M in power, 18 compute units @ 800MHz (I'd seen 8830-8850 rumoured but also comments that those - were fake)
- Memory: 4GB GDDR5 @ 192GB/s bandwidth - 512MB reserved for OS -> 3.5GB for games
- Extra: "Compute module"

Durango
- CPU: 8-core Jaguar @ 1.6GHz
- GPU: ~ ? in power (DF says potentially weaker than Orbis), 12 compute units
- Memory: 8GB DDR3 @ 68GB/s bandwidth - 3GB reserved for OS (rumoured it may be down to 1-1.5GB though) -> 5-7GB for games
- Extra: "ESRAM" (small amount of faster RAM, 102GB/s bandwidth), other custom chips

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=46599561&postcount=358

of course

Only "minor" details need to be changed.

But of course the "special sauce" inside of both machines is unknown.

Those people saying the mainstream rumors are still wrong have a hard time reconciling with lherre.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=46599811&postcount=400

Nah, as I said minor details in bandwith for example, and obviously we will need more info about the rest of things inside the machine to have a better picture of it. It's not only components, buses, additional components, etc.

I have a feeling the ESRAM BW may be wrong for example since it just sounds wrong. Very hard to say though.

Also, lherre seems to have picked a fight with the idea it's specifically a 7970m. I agree with him, that seemed odd. He said better to say it's from family xxx than any specific GPU.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=46601902&postcount=673

I mean, they only suggest a model to made their assumptions, but it's not a fact I think. I'm not sure if i'm explaining myself correctly. I'm not saying that it is incorrect at all but throw a model is a great assumtion when the gpu have custom parts inside it. I would have said the gpu family like other rumours (R10XX from AMD) instead a model.

 

[Hecatoncheires]

4GiB WideIO on Interposer instead of 4GiB GDDR5 would make most sense to me.

 

[MarkoIt]

True but from Sebbi's posts, I mean you dont exactly NEED all your RAM every frame.

And most games will be 30 FPS next gen again, so you can access 2GB per frame with durango.

I can argue the Orbis is over engineered. It can access over 6GB per frame at 30 FPS, yet it's total RAM is only 3.5GB. Now what? Only thing you can do is go back and hit the hard disk or worse, blu ray disk and load more in. Good luck with that.

192 gb/s might be good on pc, where my game might need to go up to anywhere to 200 fps and my resolution up to 4k, but is it good for a console?

In other words over say 3 frames, Durango might be able to do more. It can use 2GB/2GB/1GB of unique data. Orbis will be like 3.5GB/uh-oh/uh-oh

RAM speed is not a substitute for quantity. Both are important.

It actually sounds to me like the PS4 might be really good at 60 FPS games. I mean literally the majority of games might be 60 on it cause it's got so damn much bandwidth. But, they probably wont look much better than 30 FPS Durango counterparts.

For the article, the main thing to come out of it is Orbis using 8 Jag cores supposedly. It was generally thought it would switch to Jag cores by me, but that it's 8 of them and all..

It just removes one more point of differentiation to Durango. However, vs 4 Steamroller cores, it's likely a downgrade realistically.

Also interesting DF says its an SOC and even has a code name. In that case I guess it's true both should be doing SOC's for cost reasons. I was skeptical of SOC's in either, especially PS4, but it's looking more and more likely.

At the end of the day anyway, you may get most multiplatform games optimized for 1.2 teraflops and 3.5GB RAM. Lowest common denominator.

Bandwidth is often the biggest constrain in every kind of computation! It won't sit there to do nothing, I'm sure that devs will use all of it.

Anyway, Durango and Orbis share CPUs design, maybe they share also some of the "secret sauces". The Compute modules seems a good candidate.

Durango still puzzles me.

 

[(((interference)))]

I don't know where AndyH gets that from, I'm certainly not seeing it from what we know.

He didn't seem to know about the GPU details though, judging from his posts:
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1691527&postcount=17569

He thought it would have a HD7850 (1.76 TF), perhaps he still thinks so and we should take his statements with a grain of salt.

 

[DoctorFouad]

You've already put your theories across in the next gen thread, there's no need to pollute this thread with them as well. If these rumours are true, then PS4 will be sporting around 1/3rd the peak GPU performance of the highest end AMD GPU's at it's launch time. When the 360 launched it was roughly equivilent to the best AMD GPU's (it actually had around 1/3 more FLOPS). So to take these specifications as some kind of proof of a continuation of what happened at the start of last generation (assuming we even accept your dubious interpretation of what that was) is ludicrous at best.

You are not seeing the full picture, do you ?

Console manufacturers always end up finding technical efficient solutions to do things at launch time, only very expensive PCs can do. It has always been like that. True the xbox360 GPU was relatively more powerful in its time compared to the ps4 GPU. But what about :
- CPU - GPU interaction and bandwidth ?
- RAM quantity and Bandwidth ?

We are talking here about a UNIFIED 4 Gb of GDDR5 at 192 Gb/s (remember PC games use nowadays DDR3 RAM, how they could compete with first and second gen ps4 games designed with GDDR5 main RAM bandwidth in mind?), if true thats incredibly monster RAM architecture, far a lot better compared to the PC landscape today than the disappointing 512 Mb at 21.6 Gb/s of the xbox360.

Also having a SOC with CPU+GPU on the same chip allow to overcome any previous bottlenecks of PCs PCI express interaction bandwidth between the CPU and GPU, and xbox360 didnt have that advantage compared to PCs in its time.

Sony clearly learnt a lot from its mistakes with ps3 (basically they learnt the hard way that memory architecture is key to performance, and GPUs are more important than CPUs if you want fancy graphics), and that shows with its Vita design and now even better with its very efficient PS4 design. Of course assuming that those rumors are true...

 

[Hecatoncheires]

Durango still puzzles me.

Same here.

According the rumors we have a ressource hog of an OS, we have lower bandwidth, we have less processing power on the GPU, but there is always some kind of fairy dust that makes Durango a "monster of a console". When the users on GAF started to probe Aegis for his credibility, he came up with polemics and argued how incompetent Sony is. Even in this thread the term was "over-engineered" when speaking about the high bandwidth of the new PlayStation.

I'm getting the impression that the new XBox will be all about some Kinect-kind of stuff that comes at a price, apparently.

 

[Rangers]

Same here.

According the rumors we have a ressource hog of an OS, we have lower bandwidth, we have less processing power on the GPU, but there is always some kind of fairy dust that makes Durango a "monster of a console". When the users on GAF started to probe Aegis for his credibility, he came up with polemics and argued how incompetent Sony is. Even in this thread the term was "over-engineered" when speaking about the high bandwidth of the new PlayStation.

I'm getting the impression that the new XBox will be all about some Kinect-kind of stuff that comes at a price, apparently.

The term "over engineered" came from me, and I just like to play the Durango fanboy defender lol Nothing wrong with it, if the points may have credibility (I'm not sure, but it seems like they might). You do the opposite.

And I also find it funny people love to jump on this idea "oh Kinect 2 in every box, thats why Durango sucks because of Kinect pack in cost!", when we have a GAF thread with a major rumor PS4 is going to have some expensive whiz bang new controller possibly with an LCD in it, and nobody brings up the idea that is going to suck all the power/cost out of PS4...when it's basically the exact same concept.

We also have lherre saying just a couple days ago, that he thinks the consoles end up pretty similar, for what it's worth. I think it could be that Durango special sauce is superior (this is just a theory though obviously), and everybody always wants to ignore that it has more RAM as well.

And as far as Kinect 2, bkilian basically flat out stated months ago that it's pretty much impossible to integrate Kinect into the chassis of an Xbox (it just cant be done, audio reason for one IIRC, and position of the sensor, etc). So, there's pretty much no way to not make it modular imo. It may well be packed in every box due to a business decision initially, but I dont see where it's ever not possible to change their minds and pull it back out and come out with a core SKU later.

lherres quote 1/17/2013 http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=46551080&postcount=274

In my opinion both machines will be very close, with some details in favor for each one, but I think we will have a ps360 situation again with 2 machines very close.

 

[Ruskie]

You are not seeing the full picture, do you ?

Console manufacturers always end up finding technical efficient solutions to do things at launch time, only very expensive PCs can do. It has always been like that. True the xbox360 GPU was relatively more powerful in its time compared to the ps4 GPU. But what about :
- CPU - GPU interaction and bandwidth ?
- RAM quantity and Bandwidth ?

We are talking here about a UNIFIED 4 Gb of GDDR5 at 192 Gb/s (remember PC games use nowadays DDR3 RAM, how they could compete with first and second gen ps4 games designed with GDDR5 main RAM bandwidth in mind?), if true thats incredibly monster RAM architecture, far a lot better compared to the PC landscape today than the disappointing 512 Mb at 21.6 Gb/s of the xbox360.

Also having a SOC with CPU+GPU on the same chip allow to overcome any previous bottlenecks of PCs PCI express interaction bandwidth between the CPU and GPU, and xbox360 didnt have that advantage compared to PCs in its time.

Sony clearly learnt a lot from its mistakes with ps3 (basically they learnt the hard way that memory architecture is key to performance, and GPUs are more important than CPUs if you want fancy graphics), and that shows with its Vita design and now even better with its very efficient PS4 design. Of course assuming that those rumors are true...

There is nothing particularly amazing about Orbis architecture. As I said, this is something 99% of people from B3D would come up with. Its all about needs and restrictions. Obviously, both MS and Sony have same restrictions, but not the same needs and that will reflect on hardware design.

 

[Rangers]

There is nothing particularly amazing about Orbis architecture. As I said, this is something 99% of people from B3D would come up with. Its all about needs and restrictions. Obviously, both MS and Sony have same restrictions, but not the same needs and that will reflect on hardware design.

Yeah it's very basic. If anything Durango is the odd one. Orbis is a video card on a stick (minus whatever this compute stuff is, I suppose).

That doesn't mean it may not be great though. Simple doesn't mean bad. Just as complex was bad for PS3.