Xbox One (Durango) Technical hardware investigation

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why can't microsoft(or sony) just release 2 consoles..

a cheap one with this gpu and a more expensive with a better gpu?
 
a cheap one with this gpu and a more expensive with a better gpu?

They should be able to do that or create a cross compatible upgrade in 1-2 years with these specs since they are essentially standard PC parts which will get upgraded by AMD anyway--the iPad model. The trick is to ensure games are cross compatible. The eDRAM could prove problematic if they don't use it on their next edition. By 2015 we will hopefully see Wide I/O and stacking in manufacturing solutions.

The funny thing about these relatively low gpu specs is that I don't think they are really saving much either. The difference for manufacturing between this and PS3's GPU is probably in the tens of dollars and it will continue to shrink. Seems like a penny wise pound foolish move.

Ah well, the only exclusive games I liked from the Xbox 360 were Forza and Gears for horde mode but other TPS has a horde mode these days. Oh and Lost Odyssey but MS probably won't make JRPGs anymore. The Xbox Live games generally don't need higher end GPU. I much prefer the 360 controller but PC versions largely use this now.
 
Numbers, or it never happened.

Latencies are important but if you re-read my post I point out that based on the leak the actually disclosed specs all pretty much support Durango being a 7770 class GPU.

7770 appears to have gimped memory bandwidth itself, though, since it has 33% less FLOPS, but only 50% of the bandwidth of the 7850. Also consider that Durango's GPU will have read/write access to both pools of memory. It's not strictly limited to 102GB/s or 32MB.

This isn't to say it won't be faster: it is a closed box with a unique design, of course it will be.

This isn't to say it won't produce better looking games than a comparable PC: lower overhead and targeted specs as well as exploiting platform specific features (instead of general API) will go a long way.

And having 102GB/s of bandwidth on-die will be a big win for those able to manage 32MB.

But I think it is well past time, until something substantial is disclosed, to continue grasping at "special sauce this" and "latencies that."

What special sauce? <crickets>

What are the latencies? <crickets>

If you asked my opinion I think Durango's 12 CUs actually could run 7850 quality graphics/performance in the launch window when you factor in targeting a closed platform, thinner API, ESRAM, etc. So I am not knocking Durango's abilities. But in the same breath quoting people like Proelite saying it will mimic a 2.5GFLOPs GPU (yeah, at 720p?) ignores the fact I bet Orbis in the same situation is going to look better than a 7870 when the the hardware inside is less than a 7850 for all the same reasons.

But I don't see people clamoring, "Secret Sauce is going to make Orbis effective FLOPs skyrocket because of unknown ingredient!"

I'm certainly not arguing that there's any hidden power in Durango's hardware that is going to fully make up for the spec difference between it and Orbis. I like what Sony have done with Orbis. Once you get past the initial level of compromise of them not going absolutely crazy on the specs, I think they have delivered a well-balanced design that should be very easy for developers to get great performacnce from. I'm just trying to paint as complete a picture as possible of Durango, because I'm still curious about the multiple different sources indicating that developers regard the two to be "roughly equivalent" or that Orbis is "slightly more powerful" when what we know of the specs indicates nothing of the sort.
 
Are there any quotes from these developers saying its only slightly more powerful? And wouldn't they only be referring to dev kits? As final systems aren't out yet.
 
Are there any quotes from these developers saying its only slightly more powerful? And wouldn't they only be referring to dev kits? As final systems aren't out yet.

It's quite likely that even with dev kits they would have been briefed by either company as to what the final specifications of the console would be. Things like that allow for minor changes in design to the final specs, like what Epic did with the X360. Or, if rumors are to be believed, like what Sony did with upping memory to 4 GB from 2 GB. But you can't change things too drastically or you potentially screw over the developers you are relying on for launch titles.

You wouldn't want a developer over targeting and going along developing something that would be unplayable and then have to redo development when they found out the final specs were drastically different.

Regards,
SB
 
If you asked my opinion I think Durango's 12 CUs actually could run 7850 quality graphics/performance in the launch window when you factor in targeting a closed platform, thinner API, ESRAM, etc. So I am not knocking Durango's abilities. But in the same breath quoting people like Proelite saying it will mimic a 2.5GFLOPs GPU (yeah, at 720p?) ignores the fact I bet Orbis in the same situation is going to look better than a 7870 when the the hardware inside is less than a 7850 for all the same reasons.

If we were talking about two homogeneouse processors for CPU and GPU then I would agree with you. Yet I'm expecting a little more due to the HSA design. Orbis and Durango will have a very huge architectural advantage over classical PC designs, the communication between the single elements of the APU will be much faster. A HSA processor working to capacity is certainly another big unknow of the equation.
 
If we were talking about two homogeneouse processors for CPU and GPU then I would agree with you. Yet I'm expecting a little more due to the HSA design. Orbis and Durango will have a very huge architectural advantage over classical PC designs, the communication between the single elements of the APU will be much faster. A HSA processor working to capacity is certainly another big unknow of the equation.

Nothing in Durango or Orbis still points to HSA, only Fusion 1.0 at the moment...
 
Jaguar+GCN alone implies additional HSA features like unified memory.
 
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Once you get past the initial level of compromise of them not going absolutely crazy on the specs, I think they have delivered a well-balanced design that should be very easy for developers to get great performacnce from. I'm just trying to paint as complete a picture as possible of Durango


So it's either an outdated GPU or "going absolutely crazy " ?
Nothing in the middle ?
 
Nothing in Durango or Orbis still points to HSA, only Fusion 1.0 at the moment...

HSA and Fusion is the same thing: AMD renamed the Fusion System Architecture (FSA) to Heterogeneous System Architeture (HSA). Sony officially joined the HSA Foundation a couple of days ago.

The first HSA platform was 40nm Llano (both mobile and desktop). The second gen HSA was the 32nm Trinity platform (again both mobile and desktop). Third gen HSA is 28nm Kaveri for desktop (Steamroller + GCN) and Kabini for mobile (Jaguar + GCN). Orbis is 28nm Jaguar + 28nm GCN which points directly to third gen HSA, introducing unified adress space for CPU and GPU, pageable memory for GPU with CPU pointers and fully coherent memory between CPU and GPU. These are the features that you need to get rid of the aforementioned copy overhead. The 28nm Temash SoC (edit: Temash = ultra low power) managed to render the current gen game Dirt: Showdown in 1920x1080 fluently with a thermal design power of only 5W. I guess that speaks for itself.

To cut a long story short, everything points to HSA, at least for Orbis.
 
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So it's either an outdated GPU or "going absolutely crazy " ?
Nothing in the middle ?

The GPU is not outdated. The architecture is the best architecture available on the market today. The design philosphy behind Durango it's not being "cheap": it's about being low-power. From a technological point of view, Durango will be advanced. It's a SoC with 8 customized Jaguar-core (a next-gen architecture which is not even on the market yet), what it could be a powerful audio processor, a mid-range current generation GPU and some other fixed function part we don't yet know.
Even if Durango is considerably less powerful than what most of us was expecting, I don't think they invested little in it's development.
 
The GPU is not outdated. The architecture is the best architecture available on the market today. The design philosphy behind Durango it's not being "cheap": it's about being low-power. From a technological point of view, Durango will be advanced. It's a SoC with 8 customized Jaguar-core (a next-gen architecture which is not even on the market yet), what it could be a powerful audio processor, a mid-range current generation GPU and some other fixed function part we don't yet know.
Even if Durango is considerably less powerful than what most of us was expecting, I don't think they invested little in it's development.

These are the kind of specs i would expect for a console released early 2012 ... for a machine out in late 2013 / early 2014 , it's quite shocking .
 
If we were talking about two homogeneouse processors for CPU and GPU then I would agree with you. Yet I'm expecting a little more due to the HSA design. Orbis and Durango will have a very huge architectural advantage over classical PC designs, the communication between the single elements of the APU will be much faster. A HSA processor working to capacity is certainly another big unknow of the equation.

Lol almost every single one of your posts is some kind of variation on this one. You should start a HSA fan club!

For the record though, while HSA - if these consoles truly are fully HSA - will allow gameplay effecting GPGPU algorithms to be incorporated into games, it's not going to make much difference to the actual graphics of the game which is what most people seem to be focussed on when comparing the relative power of the GPU's. So it's not really correct to say the GPU in PS4 will be more powerful than the equivalent GPU in a PC because of HSA. The proper comparison would be between the CPU's. i.e. thanks to the fusion like design, the Jaguar based CPU's in some respects have performance far beyond a PC CPU sporting ~100 GLFOPS. Assuming that PC CPU doesn't also have access to HSA features.

The 28nm Temash SoC (edit: Temash = ultra low power) managed to render the current gen game Dirt: Showdown in 1920x1080 fluently with a thermal design power of only 5W. I guess that speaks for itself.

You say that as if being able to play that game somehow has something to do with Temash being HSA ready. It has nothing to do with that. Dirt runs on that APU because it has an incredibly powerful (by tablet standards) GCN based GPU along with a decent x86 CPU. Dirt likely makes no use of HSA whatsoever.

HSA and Fusion is the same thing: AMD renamed the Fusion System Architecture (FSA) to Heterogeneous System Architeture (HSA). Sony officially joined the HSA Foundation a couple of days ago.

I'm not saying you're wrong about this, but do you have a link supporting it? Its just that all the recent AMD slides I've seen single out the Kaveri generation as being HSA while ignoring Trinity and earlier (Fusion based APU's).
 
Is this related to HSA?

Virtual Addressing

All GPU memory accesses on Durango use virtual addresses, and therefore pass through a translation table before being resolved to physical addresses. This layer of indirection solves the problem of resource memory fragmentation in hardware—a single resource can now occupy several noncontiguous pages of physical memory without penalty.


Virtual addresses can target pages in main RAM or ESRAM, or can be unmapped. Shader reads and writes to unmapped pages return well-defined results, including optional error codes, rather than crashing the GPU. This facility is important for support of tiled resources, which are only partially resident in physical memory
 
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