Xbox One (Durango) Technical hardware investigation

[Proelite]

Interesting, but I would be highly surprised if this were true. I would love it to be true, and it would be a lot easier to redesign the main board to accommodate a dual APU system than to redesign the APU, but you would still run into lots of issues like having two independent memory controllers, and a split ESRAM pool. It just seems unlikely.

Maybe that's why they have been hiring a who slew of ex IBM and AMD hardware engineers.

 

[Kb-Smoker]

Would be nice if the mods would do something about posters with very low post count acting like insiders. Maybe confirm with mods or get banned. Seem we keep getting new posters that muddy the discussion with claims of being an insider.

Dual apu system would be an nightmare to design in a console and also to code for....not buying that at all.

 

[BClifford]

BClifford?

Cliffy B?

would be most epic leak ever lol.

going to say fake.

I'm not Cliffy B, just concealing myself.

 

[Reiko]

This is the kind of next gen crazy I like reading.

 

[Betanumerical]

I am not obliged to conceal my identity but will do so, I would like to guarantee that this information is sound as of the last 2 months but cannot; the silicon should be near final from what I am told.
What I will say will not necessarily be well received nor believed, my sole reason for this is the inability for the intelligent to actually see beyond the stem of misinformation based as accuracy. Further to mention that I am actually a fan of MSFT products and felt this should be said.
The leaks you have are accurate regarding the Durango v2.2 development kits but what has gone over the heads of many is that MSFT has incorporated a dual mainboard, dual APU system. Essentially MSFT will reveal a system with 2 times what VGL has leaked in one housing.
AMD have said the PS4 has the most powerful APU ever made right now, this is true, instead MSFT decided to go with a dual setup whilst Sony have overclocked to near 2.012GHz.
You shall hear more come March 6.

Taking such a claim on the face of it is very hard to believe. It would be much easier if you actually provided some sort of evidence like vgleaks have.

 

[Reiko]

Taking such a claim on the face of it is very hard to believe. It would be much easier if you actually provided some sort of evidence like vgleaks have.

If this is real... I believe MS ninjas would give him something awful if it traced back to him.

 

[Betanumerical]

If this is real... I believe MS ninjas would give him something awful if it traced back to him.

He can still easily provide evidence, just do the same thing that vgleaks has.

Also, I would like to know BClifford when did such change take place?.

 

[itsmydamnation]

Interesting, but I would be highly surprised if this were true. I would love it to be true, and it would be a lot easier to redesign the main board to accommodate a dual APU system than to redesign the APU,

except for the extremely complex coherency protocols/probes + NUMA and NUMA for a damn GPU. people need to put down the peace pipe, how massive would the interconnect have to be, my guess would be 170gb/s each direction to handle absolute worst case.


occam's razor. There is no spoon!

 

[ultragpu]

Assuming this is true, then we have two APUs that are bundled with Kinect 2.0, will we be looking at a $699 price point? Doesn't seem likely for MS to go that route.

 

[Betanumerical]

Assuming this is true, then we have two APUs that are bundled with Kinect 2.0, will we be looking at a $699 price point? Doesn't seem likely for MS to go that route.

if they really wanted the extra power so badly why go with the convoluted dual APU setup when there where much more power GPU and CPU's available? it doesn't seem to make any sense. What point is there in using 2x Weaker GPU's / CPU's when you can easily just slot in a faster GPU (24 CU's?) and clocker the CPU higher / use a different architecture. A single GPU with more CU's us going to be more efficient that some hob knob crossfire setup, and less cores but faster cores is easier to take advantage of.

From what I can tell theres only ever been 3 dev kits. Alpha Beta (heh) and Final , I have never seen nor heard mention of a v 2.22 dev kit.

 

[ultragpu]

if they really wanted the extra power so badly why go with the convoluted dual APU setup when there where much more power GPU and CPU's available? it doesn't seem to make any sense. What point is there in using 2x Weaker GPU's / CPU's when you can easily just slot in a faster GPU (24 CU's?) and clocker the CPU higher / use a different architecture.

I'm guessing the two weaker APUs would be somehow within the proposed TDP limit whereas the much more powerful APU couldn't. It is very confusing.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Dual apu system would be an nightmare to design in a console and also to code for....not buying that at all.

First let me say I think it's highly unlikely for something like this, but...

It wouldn't necessarily be a nightmare. Basically you just end up with a dual socket system (something you can currently do with Windows OS and off the shelf Motherboards). There will be a loss of efficiency by having to travel over whatever bus is required for the two sockets to communicate, but other than that, there isn't much to adjust. It'll appear like a 16 core (?!?!) system to the OS and developers. I'd guess the GPUs would operate via CrossfireX or somesuch.

Again, I highly doubt this is something MS would pursue, but it'd by no means be a nightmare to code for. At least not anymore of a nightmare than filling 6-7 CPU threads. Although are there enough things that can be done in parallel to make use of 16 CPU threads (well 14 if you assume the rumors of Durango reserving 2 cores for the OS and peripherals).

But I can't stress enough how unlikely I think this would be.

Regards,
SB

 

[Reiko]

I'm guessing the two weaker APUs would be somehow within the proposed TDP limit whereas the much more powerful APU couldn't. It is very confusing.

Seems very sneaky if true.

 

[Exophase]

if they really wanted the extra power so badly why go with the convoluted dual APU setup when there where much more power GPU and CPU's available? it doesn't seem to make any sense. What point is there in using 2x Weaker GPU's / CPU's when you can easily just slot in a faster GPU (24 CU's?) and clocker the CPU higher / use a different architecture. A single GPU with more CU's us going to be more efficient that some hob knob crossfire setup, and less cores but faster cores is easier to take advantage of.

From what I can tell theres only ever been 3 dev kits. Alpha Beta (heh) and Final , I have never seen nor heard mention of a v 2.22 dev kit.

Using that logic you'd may as well ask why virtually every console at launch used separate chips for CPU and GPU instead of just using one big chip.

There are at least two reasons why this could make sense:

1) Cost is not linearly proportional to die size, so a die twice as large can cost a lot more than twice as much. This is more true the larger the die becomes, for a variety of reasons, and is especially true the less mature a design and process is.
2) MS could have plans to sell a single die version for something else, and designing two separate chips is a lot more expensive and time consuming than designing one chip and putting more than one of it on an MCM.

If MS really is doing this they're probably planning on doing an integrated chip on a newer process at some point down the road.

 

[MBDF]

Could this be what the Display planes are for? Because it's odd that it would have two planes for the game, unless it's merging two feeds.

 

[Exophase]

Could this be what the Display planes are for? Because it's odd that it would have two planes for the game, unless it's merging two feeds.

No, it's for exactly what people have said it's for, and it's three planes, not two. Probably the number one motivation MS had was to use it to put OS displays on top of a currently active game without disturbing it or fear of being disturbed itself.

Using it to merge streams from separate GPUs doesn't really make sense.. there's no reason why you'd want them to overlap in any way, as opposed to the typical partitioning used in multi-GPU/multi-core setups.

 

[dobwal]

A few odd questions.

Is it a coincidence that Durango's DMAs read and write at the same bandwidth as the DMAs associated with the SPEs of Cell?

Is the aggregate bandwidth of the DMAs dictated by the bandwidth of the eESRAM (25.6 X 4 = 102), the other way around or not at all?

Can the gpu only write to eSRAM and/or only using the DMAs as it write bandwidth is the same as the write bandwidth of eSRAM and the aggregate write bandwidth of the DMAs?

 

[HollovVpo1nt]

Using that logic you'd may as well ask why virtually every console at launch used separate chips for CPU and GPU instead of just using one big chip.

There are at least two reasons why this could make sense:

1) Cost is not linearly proportional to die size, so a die twice as large can cost a lot more than twice as much. This is more true the larger the die becomes, for a variety of reasons, and is especially true the less mature a design and process is.
2) MS could have plans to sell a single die version for something else, and designing two separate chips is a lot more expensive and time consuming than designing one chip and putting more than one of it on an MCM.

If MS really is doing this they're probably planning on doing an integrated chip on a newer process at some point down the road.

Well, the current Xbox 360 soc redesign was speculated of in 2007, with codename Valhalle, so I could see that happening.

I love pre announcement speculation. You want it to be true but you simply can't imagine it.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

p.s. lots of naughty boys in the forum as of late, I wonder what happened!

People going off topic with platform comparisons.
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=63195

 

[Deleted member 7537]

Devkits have not changed, Iherre was very clear about this. And we know Durango leaks to be true, confirmed from different sources, despite the fact of being old.